Bob Ellis

Progress made at SIGGRAPH 2002 provides direction for 2003

Overview For the second year in a row, the SIGGRAPH Public Policy Program was well represented at the annual conference. We presented two courses and a Birds of a Feather (BOF) session that were all well attended by a small (by ACM SIGGRAPH standards) but enthusiastic and passionate number of people. In addition we held our annual committee meeting and participated in the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee meeting. Noteworthy this year was an impressive publicity piece put together by Laurie Reinhart and Mark Banas. This piece contained descriptions of the courses and BOF as well as an article (reprinted with permission, h t t p : / / s i g g r a p h . o r g / p u b policy/pdf/ZDNETART.pdf from CNET about SIGGRAPH course speaker Barbara Simons’ Stanford technology policy course.

Stay informed: participate in public policy discussion

In our last column we introduced the course and panel proposals we submitted to SIGGRAPH 2002. The Introductory and Intellectual Property/Digital Rights Management courses have been accepted and an update is included here. At the SIGGRAPH 200f Public Policy BOF meeting, Mark Banas volunteered to set up an email list. This has been done and is available; instructions on how to get onto it are in this column. We are looking for a volunteer to implement a mechanism for making available pointers to articles on policy of interest to computer graphics professionals. We are also looking for a graphic arts volunteer.

SIGGRAPH public policy committee activity detailed

We start this column with the results of our third on-line opinion survey on public policy issues affecting computer graphics. Next we provide an introduction to and a copy of the definition paper for a prospective study of computer graphics research to be conducted by the National Research Council with partial funding from SIGGRAPH. This is followed by an update on our activities in proposing a course on public policy and a panel on digital rights management of intellectual property for SIGGRAPH 2001. Myles Losch provides an update on the issues related to the slow pace of adoption of Digital TV. Finally, we close with another set of comments from a reader.

Public policy: SIGGRAPH 2001 spurs activity

The notes from the SIGGRAPH 2001 tutoria# course held on Sunday include information covered in the course, These notes also contain an extensive section of reference URIJ. The complete notes are available on the public policy program website at http:l/www.siggraph.org/pu b-policy/. These books were recommended during the panel (and the Litman book sold out in the book store immediately after the panel):

An open discussion on public policy

As usual, the column is multi-topic. It starts with a brief review of the SIGGRAPH Public Policy Program. This is followed with some comments (and my responses) on the program raised by an interested SIGGRAPH member. Once again, Myles Losch presents recent information on digital copy protection, including its potential application to free terrestrial broadcast digital TV. We provide a review of the 2000 edition of one of the most important conferences at the intersection of competing and public policy, the ACM sponsored Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference (CFP). And finally, we describe the availability of our third on-line survey.

SIGGRAPH 98 activities and ACM/Policy 98 wrap-up

This column provides a summary of our public policy activities at the SIGGRAPH 98 conference as well as a wrap-up of the ACM/Policy 98 Conference. See also http://www.siggraph.org/othercom/pubpolicy.html.

White paper published; ACM activity update

This column covers several items: a synopsis of SIGGRAPHs first policy white paper, ACM public policy activities and the ACM Policy98 Conference.

Public policy issues featured at numerous conferences

This column again covers several items: a final update on ACMs Policy 98 conference and presentations I made at a Visualization 97 workshop and a Computers, Freedom and Privacy 98 birds-of-a-feather (BOF) meeting.