I found this slide on the forum. Thx for the guy that wrote most of the content down for us to review. Hope everyone can learn and think a lot from it!

2. How to write a SIGGRAPH paper
Reconstructed from SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 Course

3. Writing a paper is like
an interview
Expose
it right
Pick the
right
problem
Write a
Execute
paper
it right
well

4. SIGGRAPH
• What SIGGRAPH wants • What we have
• Right problem • Do what you love
• Novel idea • Do the best
• Solid algorithms • Randomness
• Good apps & results • Objectivity
• Clear writing • Discipline
• Engaging talk • Practice

5. What SIGGRAPH wants
• Right problem
• What people care right now
• Novel ideas
• Do not do incremental stuff
• Think big, be creative (not easy)
• Solid algorithms
• aka technical contribution
• Knowledge is power; study hard, be evil

6. • Good applications
• Give people what they need
• Good results/effects
• Work hard (in demos)
• Good writing
• You can’t sell what you can’t tell
• It is all about bullshit

7. Right problem
• Do what people care
• Do what people don’t hate
• Many interesting/cute problems in graphics
• Pick what you love
• Don’t be afraid of difficult problems
• Less competition
• Be brave

8. Novel ideas
• Don’t do incremental stuff
• You are wasting your time
• Aim for the best
• Read as many as possible(SIGGRAPH, geometry,
texture, rendering…)
• Results/demos are important! Technically awesome.
• Something the state-of-the-art cannot do
• Comparison are often unavoidable

9. Solid algorithms
• Practice
• Most algorithms are modified from others
• Read a lot of papers
• Uncertainty
• Don’t expect to get everything right on 1st try
• Expect failures

10. Good applications
• Be broad
• Do what you love

11. Clear writing
• Practice
• Blog, love letters, etc
• Discipline
• Good writing takes time; don’t wait until the end
• Objectivity
• Have others read your drafts
• It is hard to see what you know while others
don’t

12. Mentality
• Mentality more important than talent
• Do what you love
• Aim for the best
• Train your mentality
• Practice
• Have fun

13. Refine the problem
& converge
Problem
Refine
Last Month
Time
Refine

14. Research Front
• Age to Contribute.
• Outsiders are more likely to come up with new
ideas.
• Naï students help!
ve

15. MENUS FOR SIGGRAPH PAPER

16. SHIFT
• From areas you know into other areas you don’t know.
• Examples:
• Detailed deformation  Image warping
• Captcha  Image emerging

17. Adapt
• Adopt from other field into your expertise
• Examples:
• L1 median  Image enhancing, filtering and surface
reconstruction
• Machine learning  3D analysis
• Mean-value coordinate  Image editing, cloning

18. Expand
• Expansion of an existing area
• Examples:
• Seam carving for image  For video
• 2D vector texture  3D vector volume texture

19. Trends, opportunities
• Identify new phenomena recently appeared, and employ
them.
• Examples:
• Photo explosion on web  Scene completing using
web searching, ``Sketch2photo”, photo tourism
• Popularity of Wii  Kinect

20. Identify successful
techniques and apply
• Internet  Image completion  Surface completion
• Computational photography  Kinect
• High-performance Computing  Mechanical Turk

22. Identify
/ Problems
• Ray Tracing
• Radiosity
• Image Retargeting
• Mesh Compression
• Etc…

23. Retro
• Pick a problem that was only hot 20 years ago and revisit it.
• Example:
• Occlusion Culling  City Visualization

24. Invent a New Problem

25. Reverse
a Known Problem
• Synthesis large texture from small texture  Abstract from
large texture to small texture (Inversed texture synthesis!)
• Detect an object in the image  Hide classified information
in the image
• Image Colorization  Image Grayization

26. Find an Unexplored
Problem
• Depixelizing Pixel Art
• Face Beautification

28. And Expose it Right!
• Make it sound interesting
• Surprise!!!
• A general message

29. Terminology
is important
• Final words
• Make your readers’ life as easy as you can
• Main thing: aim at innovative, impactful research work
• Don’t despair!

30. Avoid the “delta”
impression
• Chrystal clear expression
• Intuition is always helpful
• Try to find the simplest understandable explanation for your
math

31. Practical Tips for
Math haircut
• Clear and neat notation
• Always define all symbols
• Give equation numbers
• Assume nothing, explain everything

32. How to get away
with it?
• Make sure you speak the language of the community
• Do your homework-learn previous work
• Use common terminology

33. Writing: get help
and learn from experienced people
• Contribution/page radio
• Single idea: 4 pages
• 1.5 ideas: 6 pages
• 2 ideas: >8 pages
• Schedule your projects as early as possible
• The best of luck && Take care of your health~~

38. If you are not highly experienced, you’d group with other 2~6
people.

39. The multi-touch screen in your hands was invented in 70’s, as a
failed product.

41. Live as Baining
Baining Guo:
• 1986: firstly heard CG
• 1988: live with Eric Haines
• 1989: met Dani Lischinski
• 1990: attended D.Greenberg’s Graphics course
• 1996: firstly attend SIGGRAPH conference
• 1998: first SIGGRAPH paper
• 1999 ~ now: more SIGGRAPH papers,
• And much more rejected ones.

42. Our mission
• Advance in each field we do research
• Transfer new technologies into products
• Ensure your lab a future!

43. Faster, higher,
stronger!
You only live once,
so have some serious fun.

44. Kill, Kill,KILL!!!
KILL,
Kill!!!
• Good ideas grow from killing bad ideas
• Kill false or mediocre projects
• Be ruthless
• Focus on one high-quality work
• Walk the fine line of greatness and stupidity
• “Fail fast” you should!
• If you feel trapped in your idea, usually it would be a
bad idea.

45. You’d always: Collaborate and
contact with Product Developers
and Users

46. WRITING IT UP

47. As you start
• Break writer’s block, start with the body
• From text to structures:
• Relentlessly focus on what you’ve done and never try
to impress everyone
• Structure, structure, structure…
• Be concise: “Appendix test”!
• One section for one person if you are working as a
group (hope you’re not writing alone!)

48. Perfectionism
Question yourself:
• Have you provided references or justification for
whatever you stated?
• For things difficult to evaluate mathematically, have
you provided a user study?
• Does your method have a lot of practical
applications? Are they surprisingly fresh or just
stereotyped ones?
• Can’t your results be more pleasing?

49. “Introduction”
• Where passion met facts
• So be passionate!

50. “Result”
• Keep your promise!!!

51. Other RULES
• Don’t copy conclusion from abstract.
• Here you’d have some more deeper view!
• Never praise your own work!
• Not “we present an elegant algorithm…”
• Don’t (intentionally or unintentionally) hide problems!
• Realize the problem and try to fix that (either in your
paper or in your future work), not elude from that.

54. What if Rejected?
• Never forget the long term review
• Building a career is a long process.
• Your physical and mental health come first.
• Sustained good performance comes next.
• Always act professionally.
• Drastic local events are not big deals in long term.

55. What if Rejected?
• So have a good rest!
• Don’t bet your career on a SIGGRAPH paper!
• Inspired by the reviews?
• Resubmit.
• Mature work?
• Find your champions and get the work out ASAP.
• Again anchor your decision on analysis of your work

56. Live with rejections
• Do what you love, so that you won’t mind
reject
• Treat rejections as normal and routine
• Life is not as fun without failures (I mean it)

57. Learn from your
rejections
• You CAN learn from rejections
• Learn to listen to your reviews, and filter out their outliers.
• Learn to listen to your friends.

58. The review Form
• Did the reviewer understand what the paper is about?
• Contribution scope: How important is your work? Is widely applicable?
Is there abundant analysis?
• Contribution magnitude: amount of novelty, originality.
• If the paper is poorly written, it always get rejection no matter how
good the idea is.
• It’s your responsibility to ensure the reviewers understand your paper,
make their job easier!
• Be kind/fair, avoid insulting previous methods!
• Completeness, mention important implementation details, constant
values.
• Make sure you demonstrate/discuss any drawbacks or limitations

59. The importance of
the Introduction cannot be more estimated
• “Uneducated guess”: in over 90% the reviewers will have
made up his mind while reading Introduction.
• Goals:
• What the paper is about?
• What problems does it address?
• Why should the reader care?

60. Convince
• Your problem should be important. It has not been solved
enough.
• Apparently you have a novel solution.

61. Tips I
• Demonstrate the problem solving
• Show the shortcomings of existing methods
• Visual aids to help explain
• Demonstrate the quality
• The reviewers should understand just from figures &
captions.

62. Tips II
• Always keeping promises
• Never over/understate
• Make a balance between your and previous work
• Be through, be fair, and support your claim about
their shortcomings, never write a laundry list for
them
• In your results, you’d point out benefit. Don’t assume the
reviewers understand
• In your conclusions, re-iterate limitations for future work
and summarize what you’ve achieved.

63. Start trying when you are 22-25 years old
Failure with first couple of tries
Your first  happiest day of your life!
Afterwards, life settling into a routine …
ROAD TO 1ST SIG PAPER

64. Like your first love
• Idealistic: beautiful, even sexy, pretty name …
• The hardest to get  few “love at first sight”
• Devote your passion and patience

65. Do not sue me …
• Be a little bit careful if you are married 
• It helps to be single …
• or Chinese: new year always after deadline!

66. Making the first …
• The right people
• The right mindset
• The right problem

67. People: mentor
• Learn from and work with the experts
• They know
• What is a SIGGRAPH-able idea
• How to make a SIGGRAPH paper
• How to do that in an industrial lab
• How to write a SIGGRAPH paper
• …

68. People: student
• One who can finish
• Smart and hard-working
• No genius  needs execution
• One who can pay attention to details
• One who has the sense of aesthetics
• One One who write,notleast the technical week!
who can does at wait until the last parts

69. People: colleague
• Not an exact match with your expertise
• Those who complement you
• Machine learning, statistics, optimization
• Differential geometry
• Those who brings you surprising problems
• Architects, artists, designers …
• Engineers or manufacturers from all industries …

70. Mindset: love it!
• Enjoy the thrill of getting a SIGGRAPH paper
• Even a bit of an addition
• Show joy, not bitterness
• Be optimistic

71. Mindset: patience
• Which is harder?
• Beautiful and polished images/results/videos
• Brilliant presentation
• A cool and new idea
• Comprehensive evaluation
• Luck can lead you to an idea, but not the others!
• For those, you need A LOT of patience

72. Mindset: have fun
• “Fun with shapes”
• Have your family enjoy it
• Buy more time on your submission

73. TIPS III
• Make SIGGRAPH papers your love
• Find the right people, mindset, and problem
• Keep exploring the more unknown
• Shape understanding
• Creative modeling and design
• When writing, try really hard to make your point

74. But really …
• There is no single recipe
To think there is a single type of problem that will
make SIGGRAPH is like thinking there is one type of
people who is going to be the love of your life!
 my quote imitated from Edgar Dijkstra
• It is about you …
Do only what only you can do!  Edgar Dijkstra

75. Do what you love
• All other factors are ephemeral
• Trend, popularity, hotness, …
• More likely to be productive and successful
• You will spend a lot of time on your stuff
• Less likely regret in the worst case (e.g. reject)
• At least you have fun
• Start your own stuff
• It is like investing; followers are already late
• Life is too short

76. Do the best
• Graphics → SIGGRAPH
• Vision → CVPR, ICCV
• …
• Hard work anyway; so go for the jugular
• Happier if succeed, less sad if fail
• Life is too short

77. Randomness
• Humans prefer certainty
• Life is random
end
end
start start
fiction reality

78. Randomness in accept/reject
clear accept
accept
borderline
deterministic quality bar stochastic quality zone
reject
clear reject
fiction reality

79. Monte Carlo Sampling
• Life long intrinsic acceptance rate r = x%
• r seems 0 if the first paper got rejected
• r seems 1 if the first paper got accepted
• Need more samples!
• (be patient, and try more.)

80. Objectivity
• Humans are biased Score by others
Score by you
• Optimistic → self
• Pessimistic → others
• Get feedbacks
• Early & frequent
• Self criticism Paper by you Paper by others

81. Don’t get mad
• (a few) nasty reviewers might exist
• Useless to get upset
• Get even!
• Assume reviewers are going to kill your paper

82. Discipline
• Humans like to procrastinate
• Start early
• Manage projects by
• Paper draft
• Schedule

83. Practice
• Humans are lazy
• Research is a craft; learn through practice
code talk
read
write experi- create
ment

84. Practice what?
• A chain is only as strong as its weakest link
• Practice the weakest link
Cause of rejection

85. Be happy
• Long term productivity depends on happiness
• Live healthy and happy
• Sleep, exercise, eat, social life, …
• Creativity depends on happiness
• I got all my ideas outside office
• Be nice and positive to others

• Especially in conferences & reviews

86. WELCOME TO SIGGRAPH 2013
You won’t be in time if you haven’t written your paper for
Danny Cohen-Or SIGGRAPH/Asia 2012…
Baining Guo Liyi Wei Olga Sorkine Kun Zhou Hao Zhang