Advances and breakthroughs in the area of Computer Graphics have made
visual media a major ingredient of the modern user interface, and it
is likely that graphics will play a dominant role in the way people
communicate and interact with computers in the future. Especially the
evolution of computing towards more and more pervasive and distributed
devices pose new and challenging problems for the effective use of
graphics. We believe that intelligent behavior and graphics will
provide the technical core of next generation interfaces. But in order
to make those interfaces successful, principles and findings from
Cognitive Psychology and Graphics Design are equally important to
reflect the user's needs and abilities.
Until recently there has been very little overlap between the
Cognitive Psychology, Computer Graphics, AI and Graphics Design
communities. The Smart Graphics Symposium intends to close these
gaps. 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 principles from
Graphics Design and the results of research in cognitive aspects of
visual representations, will be integrated in next generation
graphical interfaces.