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SGP 2021 Virtual Field Trip Report

SGP teaser image

I attended this year’s Symposium on Geometry Processing (SGP), one of the premier conferences for publishing cutting-edge research in geometry processing. Here is my brief resume.

The conference was scheduled to take place in Toronto, Canada. However, due to current circumstances, the conference was virtual only. In any case, the organizers did an awesome job organizing a top notch conference and making it a highly worthwhile experience.

Positive side-effect of the virtual conference: All the graduate school lectures, technical papers, and keynotes are available online. Check out the program, there’s a whole bunch of interesting lectures and presentations. The graduate school lectures from previous years are archived online as well.

Graduate School Highlights

The graduate school is one of the most valuable aspects of SGP. It enables practitioners to stay up to date with the state of the art and to expand their knowledge in concentrated manner.

I particularly enjoyed the following lectures:

Paper Highlights

The main part of the conference were three packed days of technical paper presentations. Quite a marathon! Zoom fatigue kicked in from time to time, but I kept on watching (almost) all presentations.

Best Paper Awards

There were plenty of interesting papers, most notably those winning this year’s best paper awards:

  1. Surface Map Homology Inference
  2. Geodesic Distance Computation via Virtual Source Propagation
  3. Simulated Jet Engine Bracket Dataset

Papers of Interest

Beyond the above, there were a couple of papers I found very interesting. Without particular order:

Test of Time Award

This is a new type of award to recognize papers that have stood the test of time, i.e., papers which are widely recognized throughout the community even after more than ten years. Great idea to highlight research that really sticks and has a long-lasting impact.

This first iteration of the award went to Poisson Surface Reconstruction. That’s certainly a well deserved recognition. The method and the corresponding software has become the de-facto standard for surface reconstruction.

Keynotes

We had three keynote speakers, each offering their unique insights:

See the full descriptions for details.

Enjoy the show!