AAAI 2000 Spring Symposium Series "Smart Graphics" March 20th-22nd 2000, Stanford, CA, USA [Motivation] [Scope] [Format] [Committee]  [Deadlines] [Schedule] [Advertising] [Registration]

in cooperation with Eurographics & SIGGRAPH

NEW!!! For the 2001 Symposium see www.smartgraphics.org

Motivation

Both graphics and intelligent behavior are core ingredients of future user interfaces. Within the AI community there is a vision of an intelligent interface, with advanced communication capabilities, that is flexible and expressive enough to accommodate a broad variety of different users with varying needs and preferences. Advances and breakthroughs in the area of Computer Graphics have made visual media a major ingredient of the modern interface, and it is likely that graphics will play a dominant role in the way people communicate and interact with computers in the future.

Until recently there has been very little overlap between the Computer Graphics and AI communities. However, recent advances in Computer Graphics have allowed AI researchers to integrate graphics in their systems (without being burdened by low-level issues such as image rendering) and graphics acceleration hardware has become affordable and is now available for a broad range of platforms. On the other hand, many AI techniques have matured to the point of being usable by non specialists. Furthermore, these very techniques are likely to be the vehicle by which both graphic design knowledge, and the results of research into cognitive aspects of visual representations, will be integrated in next generation graphical interfaces.

Symposium Scope

Smart Graphics is the interdisciplinary approach to the generation, presentation and interaction with 2D and 3D graphical interfaces in a manner that is sensitive to technological, computational and cognitive constraints. Such interfaces aim to move beyond the current requirement that designers anticipate every data, task and technological scenario, and instead allow the dynamic generation and presentation of content in such a manner that: (1) engages the user and is aesthetically satisfying; (2) takes account of cognitive insights as to the use of external representations thereby minimizing potential for imprecision and ambiguity; (3) is sensitive to the real-time demands of the task in the context of the available computational resources; and (4) adapts the form of the output according to constraints placed on the presentation by the nature of the target media and available interaction devices.

Smart Graphics research can be loosely divided into principles, methods and systems based research, and the symposium will encourage submissions in all these areas, based on the following characterization:

• Principles: characterizing and coping with constraints on technological, computational and cognitive resources; theories of the graphic design and visual aesthetics, cognitive theories of graphical representations; conceptualizations of graphics; representation and reasoning requirements for Smart Graphics; interaction between resource restrictions; design, requirements capture and evaluation methodologies.

• Methods: smart generation and presentation methods; acquisition and representation of design knowledge for Smart Graphics generation; empirical methods in the characterization of cognitive restrictions; dealing with heterogeneous target media; application of planning, decision theory, optimization, constraint satisfaction, machine learning and other AI techniques to Smart Graphics; evaluation methods.

• Systems: the application of Smart Graphics to visualization, virtual reality, augmented reality, mobile communications, wearable computing, graphical hypermedia, novel interaction techniques (e.g. haptic and natural language interaction), and advisory & tutoring systems.

Symposium Format

• Standard presentation sessions: these sessions will comprise three presentations, each composed of a 15 minute talk and a 15 minute discussion. Since participants will have received a copy of the symposium notes in early March, speakers will assume that the other participants have already read their paper. The presentation will therefore be a pointed attempt to communicate the essential message of the research.  The question and answer slot following each talk will commence with a brief (3 minute) critique by a commentator whose task is to raise the general level of the debate.

• Short presentations and break-out sessions: these are made up of  a number of clustered short presentations followed by break-out group discussions. Each presentation is allocated 15 minutes (10 minutes for the talk and a maximum of 5 minutes for questions). The break-out groups will aim to respond to the short presentations and any questions raised in earlier sessions, and a set of discussion questions posed by the session chair. Each break-out group will make a brief report back to the symposium at the end of the session.

• Software demonstrations: a number of  participants have already proposed to demonstrate systems under development. This session will take place in the slot immediately following lunch on the second day.

• Pre-symposium information: full papers, e-mail and web addresses of contributors and participants will be made available on this site prior to the event.

Demo Session Schedule

The demo session will be held on Tuesday, March 21 from 14:00-15:30 after the lunch break. The room will be most probably GATES 104 or the Symposium's room TCSEQ 103. As you can see four demos are held in parallel. Each presenation will be given 20 minutes.

Time	Track A	Track B	Track C	Track D
14:00-15:30	Nick Halper: CamPlan: A Camera Planning Agent	Tamara Munzner:Interactive Visualization of Large Graphs and Networks	Bay-Wei Chang: Fluidly Revealing Information in Fluid Documents	Michael Anderson: Inter-Diagrammatic Reasoning
	Stefan Kerpedijev: Functional Unification Approach to Automated Visualization Design	William Bares: A Model for Constraint-Based Camera Planning	Julie Bauer Morrison: (slides) Animation: Does it facilitate learning?	Bettina Berendt: (slides) Navigation patterns and site semantics - what constitutes a smart graphic in web usage analysis?
	Stefan Schlechtweg: Generating Scientific Illustrations in Digital Books	Joanna Leng:A Case Study Of 3D Visualization For Computational Simulation Data In A Spherical Coordinate System	Tamsen Taylor: (slides) Reference Frame and Reference Object Selection	Greg Badros: SCWM: An Intelligent Constraint-Enabled Window Manager
	Ralf Helbing: Quick Camera Path Planning for Interactive 3D Environments	Olaf Preissner:Driver information system with a digital instrument panel	Tim Marsh:Cinematography Conventions to Inform Guidelines For the Design and Evaluation of Virtual Off-Screen Space	Brian Fisher Application of Theories of indexical cognition to a Web-based Workspace

Committee

• Symposium Chairs:

• Andreas Butz <butz@cs.uni-sb.de>

Universität des Saarlandes (Germany)
• Antonio Krueger <krueger@dfki.uni-sb.de>

Universität des Saarlandes (Germany)
• Patrick Olivier <patrick@cs.york.ac.uk>

University of York (UK)

• Program Committee:

• Artificial Intelligence:
• Barbara Hayes-Roth (Stanford, USA)
• James Lester (NCSU, USA)
• Cognitive Science:
• Barbara Tversky (Stanford, USA)
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mike Scaife (Sussex, UK)
• Graphic Design:
• John Maeda (MIT, USA)
• W. Bradford Paley (Digital Image Design, USA)
• Graphics:
• Steve Feiner (Columbia, USA)
• Joe Marks (MERL, USA)

Registration

Registration forms (including travel and local information) can be obtained from the AAAI website (PDF format version of registration brochure). Note the the deadline for invited participants is February 11 and the open registration deadline is February 25.

Advertising Materials

You can download and print flyers and posters for the symposium, if you want to tell people about it. The files are here: Symposium flyer, double sided, folds in the middle: A4 Postscript, A4 PDF, Letter Postscript, Letter PDF. Symposium poster, landscape format: A4 Postscript, A4 PDF, Letter Postscript, Letter PDF.

The URL of this document is http://w5.cs.uni-sb.de/~butz/AAAI-SSS2000/. A UK mirror is at http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~patrick/SG2000/. Further questions, suggestions and comments about this document should be directed to Andreas Butz (butz@cs.uni-sb.de).