The annual ACM SIGGRAPH conference attracts thousands of people from all over the world who are involved with or wish to get involved with computer graphics and interactive techniques. Next year will mark the beginning of a new annual conference, ACM SIGGRAPH Asia, which is meant to compliment the existing ACM SIGGRAPH conference. ACM SIGGRAPH's goal is to bring the SIGGRAPH conference experience to the people; the hope is that SIGGRAPH Asia will fill a growing unmet need.

The SIGGRAPH Asia conference, as the name suggests, will be held in Asia starting in Singapore next year and moving to cities located in East Asia, South East Asia, Australia and New Zealand thereafter. Similar to the SIGGRAPH conference, there will be an open call for participation. This means that contributors and participants will be coming from all over the globe to share and discuss the latest in computer graphics and interactive techniques.

Professor Yong Tsui Lee, who many at the SIGGRAPH International Center know affectionately as YT, is SIGGRAPH Asia 2008's Conference Chair. He was a founding member of the SIGGRAPH Singapore Chapter which started in 1998. Through out his career, Lee has been a member of ACM SIGGRAPH and attended his first SIGGRAPH conference in 1998. Since 1998, he has been a regular volunteer at SIGGRAPH's International Center as well as the SIGGRAPH Chapter's booth.

I asked Lee what his fondest experience is at SIGGRAPH and he replied that it's the people.  The people that make up the graphics community make the experience at SIGGRAPH enjoyable and the friendships he has developed over the years have fostered research collaboration. Lee continued to say that having the ability to put faces to names and names to faces was a very important part of his SIGGRAPH experience. He believes that by taking SIGGRAPH to the people, SIGGRAPH Asia will provide an invaluable opportunity for an often under represented group of people.

Lee's goals for the conference are by his own admission modest but he believes that he and his committee will build a solid foundation for future SIGGRAPH Asia conferences. He is planning on having approximately 1,000 full conference attendees and approximately 7,000 exhibition attendees. This is roughly a fifth of the size of the current SIGGRAPH conference.

The plan is to have similar programs as the current SIGGRAPH conference. This would mean that there will be a Papers Program, Art Gallery, Emerging Technologies, Guerilla Studio, Sketches, Panels, and Courses element. Lee tempered this in adding that the program will depend on the resources available. The core of the volunteer staff that will be organizing this conference will be coming from two regional organizations SEAGRAPH and ANZGRAPH who have co-organized the GRAPHITE conference series.

When asked about GRAPHITE and its future, Lee said that SIGGRAPH Asia does not spell the end for GRAPHITE. GRAPHITE is a much smaller conference with attendance at approximately 100 people, focused more on the technical aspects of computer graphics and interactive techniques. GRAPHITE 2007 will be held from December 1st through December 4th in Perth, Australia. The resource draw of SIGGRAPH Asia will have an impact on how often GRAPHITE is held but Lee made it clear that SIGGRAPH Asia does not intend to subsume GRAPHITE.

SIGGRAPH Asia is also meant to be an international conference. Lee went on to say that he is planning an interesting and exciting program for SIGGRAPH Asia. He hopes that having the conference located in beautiful Singapore with a community of researchers and practitioners who often can not make it out to SIGGRAPH will make it attractive for those with the financial means to come to SIGGRAPH Asia from North America and Europe.