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GMOD: Creation, processing, animation, visualization, and dissemination of GRAPHICAL MODELS
Graphical Models 72 (2010) iii–v
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Graphical Models journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/gmod
Editorial
GMOD: Creation, processing, animation, visualization, and dissemination of GRAPHICAL MODELS I am honored to have been selected as the new Editorin-Chief of Graphical Models. GMOD was created in 1991 as CVGIP: Graphical Models and Image Processing. The previous editors, Norm Badler and Ingrid Carlbom, and the outstanding team of leading experts they have assembled in the Editorial Board, have focused GMOD on the synergy between computer graphics, computer vision, and image processing in the areas of model acquisition, modeling methods, visual and audio simulation, animation, interaction techniques, and applications. They have maintained strict standards for its publications. As a result, GMOD is a highly ranked and internationally recognized top-tier journal. I accepted a job with such a heavy workload because I saw it as the opportunity to create a journal that fits perfectly my scientific interests and also to shorten the review and publication process without compromising its rigor and effectiveness. I hope that a journal focused on geometry and animation processing that offers a short review cycle will appeal to a large fragment of the community of researchers, students, and practitioners in the broad field of Geometric and Visual Computing. Below, I outline my strategy, but also discuss anticipated challenges. I am counting on your support and invite you to e-mail me comments or suggestions. As any other journal, GMOD has two types of customers: authors and readers. Of course, most authors are also readers, but I like to think of them as wearing one or the other of these two different hats when they interact with the journal. Hence, I attempt below to describe my perception of the needs for each customer type and to outline my plans for addressing these needs. What is important for an author? When I submit a manuscript, I look at journals that publish papers that match its focus, style, and quality. But a major factor for selecting the right journal is my perception of its review process. Of course, I want my paper to be reviewed by experts who are able to—and take the time to—understand and appreciate my work, who provide a fair evaluation, and who help me improve it if needed. But I really want to get their feedback quickly. Long delays between submission and publication are hurting our community. They pre1524-0703/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.gmod.2010.01.002
vent a graduating PhD student from listing in her job application papers that describe her recent results. They limit the impact of recent work on academic tenure and promotion cases. They limit the rate at which citation counts grow. They slow down the flow of ideas. They may even limit the pace at which our field evolves. Hence, as Editor-in-Chief of GMOD, I want to reduce the average reviewing and processing time for the submitted manuscripts. My goal is to bring it below two months. This is not a promise! Not yet. But I will try. And I will need your help, both as an author in providing information that will help us expedite the review process and as a reviewer in accepting to play within the rules of the Rapid Response Review process that I will put in place for GMOD. What exactly is GMOD’s Rapid Response Review process? To start, we ask you, the author, to provide a clear description of the problem addressed, of the claimed novel contributions, and of the technical expertise needed to understand and evaluate your contributions. These of course will be used to help us match your manuscript with the most qualified reviewers. We also ask you to identify a few experts, both on the GMOD editorial board and outside, who, in your opinion are qualified to review your paper and have no conflict in doing so. This input is not offered as an option for you to suggest sympathetic reviewers. It is actually needed for positioning your work in the context of prior art. Based on your input and on our own consideration, we select reviewers and ask them to review the paper within 2 weeks or to inform us immediately that they cannot do it or that they need a bit more time. Are two weeks sufficient to produce a deep and fair review? I certainly think so. I personally never spread the review of one paper over more than a week. In fact, I like to read and mark the paper one evening, then sleep on it, and the next day, check prior art, check the paper again, and enter my review. The next question is then: will the contacted reviewers be available to do the review on such a short notice? Indeed, they may be running against important deadlines for funding or conference submission. The strategy of many editors and conference organizers has been to ask the reviewers to commit to deliver a review in a relatively distant future. The time distance diminishes the apparent
iv
Editorial / Graphical Models 72 (2010) iii–v
magnitude of the burden, making it insignificant when compared to the instant gratification of doing a good thing for your community. Then, a couple of weeks before the due date, a gentle reminder places a bit of guilt in the reviewer’s mind for having forgotten about this promise. This guilt-based strategy increases the chances of obtaining a review by the requested date, but adds an idle, 10week, guilt-building phase, which I want to avoid. If the contacted reviewer is too busy and informs us right away, we will simply invite another. What if the imminent 2-week deadline makes reviewers realize that they actually are committing to do some work soon and incites them to decline? I hope to address this problem using two complementary strategies. Firstly, we should try and change the culture and convince the reviewers that providing this service is their duty, not an option. Secondly, we should try and reduce the amount of effort and time involved in doing a review. To understand why reviewing is a duty, the reviewers should consider the following statistics, which although made-up for sake of argument, are sufficiently conservative to carry my point. We want our papers to be reviewed by experts in the relevant areas. Assume that an expert is someone who is recognized by the community as having a deep understanding of the technical matters and of the prior art in the area and who publishes an average of three papers per year in that field. Assume that 50% of the published papers are not authored by experts, that only a third of the submissions are accepted, and that we need 3 reviews per paper. The simple math leads to a surprising conclusion: Each expert should review on average more than one paper per week! Experts are not paid for this job and have very little time that they can allocate to reviewing activities. We cannot expect for them to spend a day per week, or even half a day per week (10 percent of their time), reviewing papers. So, we must change the review process to reduce the time needed to perform a review and to ensure that the expert’s skills are applied where there are truly needed. For example, an expert should not be bothered with pointing out long list of typos and English mistakes. Personally, I find that some manuscripts are easy and fun to review, while others are difficult and tedious. In fact, I often review the former as soon as I have a moment, while I defer reviewing the latter until guilt forces me to. The difference appears to hinge on the clarity with which the claimed contributions and their derivation or justification are explained. So, instead of asking the expert reviewer to spend hours trying to make sense of a poorly explained material in order to be in a position to evaluate its novelty or correctness, we should simply ask the authors to revise their manuscript and provide the necessary clarity. Therefore, we restrict the outcomes of the initial review process to three possible results: a provisional accept (pending until the authors provide a revised version where major concerns listed by the reviewers have been addressed or convincingly disputed), an invitation to resubmit (not judging the paper, but asking the authors to provide omitted details, additional tests and validation, or discussion of missing prior art, that will enable reviewers to properly evaluate the correctness and novelty of the contribution), or a rejection
(because your paper does not match the scope or quality standard of GMOD or because reviewers question the novelty, maturity, or rigor of the proposed contributions). This approach will reduce the time required to perform a review, because papers that would have taken a long time to review because they are difficult to understand will be sent back to the authors with specific indications of which parts need to be expanded or clarified. What is important for a reader? As many of you, I have relatively broad research interests and have published papers in various aspects of solid modeling, animation, graphics, visualization, compression, shape processing, and user-shape interaction. Yet, on average, I usually chose to read only a few articles out of any issue of a journal that discusses some combination of these topics. I usually lean towards articles that build upon concepts that I understand, unless the quality and potential of the reported results convince me to try and learn the new concepts necessary to understand the proposed solution. Furthermore, some of the papers that I decide to read prove actually disappointing. They may report novel ideas or describe highly complex and impressive accomplishments, but fail to teach me anything that I want to remember and use in my research or my lectures. Others may report sophisticated derivations or thorough experiments, but lack clarity and elegance. Such results may be important and hence should be published, but the majority of papers published in an issue should be a pleasure to read. Hence, as Editor-in-Chief of GMOD, I will try to attract and select manuscripts that clearly expose elegant and correct results of direct value for the reader. To achieve this ambitious goal, I am not only counting on the help of an Editorial Board of carefully selected, internationally respected experts, but also on your feedback and help. Please e-mail me your ideas on how to strengthen the focus and style of the journal and on how to evolve its focus. Initially, I would like to focus GMOD on the creation, geometric processing, animation, and visualization of graphical models and on their applications in engineering, science, culture, and entertainment. The term ‘‘graphical model” refers to a representation scheme for the geometry and appearance of shapes and for their evolution over time. Popular shape representation schemes include point clouds, analytic equations, constructive solid models, triangle meshes, subdivision surfaces, parametric patches, curve- and surface-skeletons, voxels, cross-sections, images, implicit surfaces, features, patterns, and procedural models. Popular animation representation schemes include affine motions, space- or surface-warps, morphs and key-frame interpolations, data-driven animation sequences, rigged models adjusted by artists, physically-based simulations, smart controllers, and constrained optimization. We invite papers that discuss improvements and combinations of these representations, that propose novel representations, and that describe efficient data structures and algorithms for constructing, processing, and rendering these models and for converting between representations. Creation techniques include human-shape paradigms and input modalities for the interactive design of shapes and animations and also automatic model construction from scans, images, and vid-
Editorial / Graphical Models 72 (2010) iii–v
eos. Processing includes model segmentation, repair, smoothing, rounding, sharpening, simplification, compression, streaming and feature recognition, but also operations that register, compare, or combine shapes. It also includes numeric accuracy, multi-resolution, and acceleration techniques for dealing with complex and detailed models. Visualization includes a plethora of algorithmic and hardware-accelerated techniques for producing clear images and animations of these graphical models and for allowing designers, artists, engineers, scientists, and players to control them in realtime. We invite papers in five categories: research (contributions describing novel theoretical or practical approaches or solutions), survey (opinionated views of the stateof-the-art and challenges in a specific topic), system (inspiring descriptions of the architecture and implemen-
v
tation details of an innovative architecture for a complete system that supports model/animation design, acquisition, analysis, visualization, . . .), application (description of a novel application of know techniques and evaluation of its impact), or lecture (an elegant presentation or interpretation of known results that clarifies them and teaches them in a new way). So, if you are interested in reading or publishing in this area, please consider GMOD as your primary journal, read it regularly, submit your best papers, send me comments or suggestions, volunteer to serve as a reviewer or to guest-edit a special issue, and invite your colleagues and students to do the same. Editor-in-Chief Jarek Rossignac
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Graphical Models journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/gmod
Editorial
GMOD: Creation, processing, animation, visualization, and dissemination of GRAPHICAL MODELS I am honored to have been selected as the new Editorin-Chief of Graphical Models. GMOD was created in 1991 as CVGIP: Graphical Models and Image Processing. The previous editors, Norm Badler and Ingrid Carlbom, and the outstanding team of leading experts they have assembled in the Editorial Board, have focused GMOD on the synergy between computer graphics, computer vision, and image processing in the areas of model acquisition, modeling methods, visual and audio simulation, animation, interaction techniques, and applications. They have maintained strict standards for its publications. As a result, GMOD is a highly ranked and internationally recognized top-tier journal. I accepted a job with such a heavy workload because I saw it as the opportunity to create a journal that fits perfectly my scientific interests and also to shorten the review and publication process without compromising its rigor and effectiveness. I hope that a journal focused on geometry and animation processing that offers a short review cycle will appeal to a large fragment of the community of researchers, students, and practitioners in the broad field of Geometric and Visual Computing. Below, I outline my strategy, but also discuss anticipated challenges. I am counting on your support and invite you to e-mail me comments or suggestions. As any other journal, GMOD has two types of customers: authors and readers. Of course, most authors are also readers, but I like to think of them as wearing one or the other of these two different hats when they interact with the journal. Hence, I attempt below to describe my perception of the needs for each customer type and to outline my plans for addressing these needs. What is important for an author? When I submit a manuscript, I look at journals that publish papers that match its focus, style, and quality. But a major factor for selecting the right journal is my perception of its review process. Of course, I want my paper to be reviewed by experts who are able to—and take the time to—understand and appreciate my work, who provide a fair evaluation, and who help me improve it if needed. But I really want to get their feedback quickly. Long delays between submission and publication are hurting our community. They pre1524-0703/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.gmod.2010.01.002
vent a graduating PhD student from listing in her job application papers that describe her recent results. They limit the impact of recent work on academic tenure and promotion cases. They limit the rate at which citation counts grow. They slow down the flow of ideas. They may even limit the pace at which our field evolves. Hence, as Editor-in-Chief of GMOD, I want to reduce the average reviewing and processing time for the submitted manuscripts. My goal is to bring it below two months. This is not a promise! Not yet. But I will try. And I will need your help, both as an author in providing information that will help us expedite the review process and as a reviewer in accepting to play within the rules of the Rapid Response Review process that I will put in place for GMOD. What exactly is GMOD’s Rapid Response Review process? To start, we ask you, the author, to provide a clear description of the problem addressed, of the claimed novel contributions, and of the technical expertise needed to understand and evaluate your contributions. These of course will be used to help us match your manuscript with the most qualified reviewers. We also ask you to identify a few experts, both on the GMOD editorial board and outside, who, in your opinion are qualified to review your paper and have no conflict in doing so. This input is not offered as an option for you to suggest sympathetic reviewers. It is actually needed for positioning your work in the context of prior art. Based on your input and on our own consideration, we select reviewers and ask them to review the paper within 2 weeks or to inform us immediately that they cannot do it or that they need a bit more time. Are two weeks sufficient to produce a deep and fair review? I certainly think so. I personally never spread the review of one paper over more than a week. In fact, I like to read and mark the paper one evening, then sleep on it, and the next day, check prior art, check the paper again, and enter my review. The next question is then: will the contacted reviewers be available to do the review on such a short notice? Indeed, they may be running against important deadlines for funding or conference submission. The strategy of many editors and conference organizers has been to ask the reviewers to commit to deliver a review in a relatively distant future. The time distance diminishes the apparent
iv
Editorial / Graphical Models 72 (2010) iii–v
magnitude of the burden, making it insignificant when compared to the instant gratification of doing a good thing for your community. Then, a couple of weeks before the due date, a gentle reminder places a bit of guilt in the reviewer’s mind for having forgotten about this promise. This guilt-based strategy increases the chances of obtaining a review by the requested date, but adds an idle, 10week, guilt-building phase, which I want to avoid. If the contacted reviewer is too busy and informs us right away, we will simply invite another. What if the imminent 2-week deadline makes reviewers realize that they actually are committing to do some work soon and incites them to decline? I hope to address this problem using two complementary strategies. Firstly, we should try and change the culture and convince the reviewers that providing this service is their duty, not an option. Secondly, we should try and reduce the amount of effort and time involved in doing a review. To understand why reviewing is a duty, the reviewers should consider the following statistics, which although made-up for sake of argument, are sufficiently conservative to carry my point. We want our papers to be reviewed by experts in the relevant areas. Assume that an expert is someone who is recognized by the community as having a deep understanding of the technical matters and of the prior art in the area and who publishes an average of three papers per year in that field. Assume that 50% of the published papers are not authored by experts, that only a third of the submissions are accepted, and that we need 3 reviews per paper. The simple math leads to a surprising conclusion: Each expert should review on average more than one paper per week! Experts are not paid for this job and have very little time that they can allocate to reviewing activities. We cannot expect for them to spend a day per week, or even half a day per week (10 percent of their time), reviewing papers. So, we must change the review process to reduce the time needed to perform a review and to ensure that the expert’s skills are applied where there are truly needed. For example, an expert should not be bothered with pointing out long list of typos and English mistakes. Personally, I find that some manuscripts are easy and fun to review, while others are difficult and tedious. In fact, I often review the former as soon as I have a moment, while I defer reviewing the latter until guilt forces me to. The difference appears to hinge on the clarity with which the claimed contributions and their derivation or justification are explained. So, instead of asking the expert reviewer to spend hours trying to make sense of a poorly explained material in order to be in a position to evaluate its novelty or correctness, we should simply ask the authors to revise their manuscript and provide the necessary clarity. Therefore, we restrict the outcomes of the initial review process to three possible results: a provisional accept (pending until the authors provide a revised version where major concerns listed by the reviewers have been addressed or convincingly disputed), an invitation to resubmit (not judging the paper, but asking the authors to provide omitted details, additional tests and validation, or discussion of missing prior art, that will enable reviewers to properly evaluate the correctness and novelty of the contribution), or a rejection
(because your paper does not match the scope or quality standard of GMOD or because reviewers question the novelty, maturity, or rigor of the proposed contributions). This approach will reduce the time required to perform a review, because papers that would have taken a long time to review because they are difficult to understand will be sent back to the authors with specific indications of which parts need to be expanded or clarified. What is important for a reader? As many of you, I have relatively broad research interests and have published papers in various aspects of solid modeling, animation, graphics, visualization, compression, shape processing, and user-shape interaction. Yet, on average, I usually chose to read only a few articles out of any issue of a journal that discusses some combination of these topics. I usually lean towards articles that build upon concepts that I understand, unless the quality and potential of the reported results convince me to try and learn the new concepts necessary to understand the proposed solution. Furthermore, some of the papers that I decide to read prove actually disappointing. They may report novel ideas or describe highly complex and impressive accomplishments, but fail to teach me anything that I want to remember and use in my research or my lectures. Others may report sophisticated derivations or thorough experiments, but lack clarity and elegance. Such results may be important and hence should be published, but the majority of papers published in an issue should be a pleasure to read. Hence, as Editor-in-Chief of GMOD, I will try to attract and select manuscripts that clearly expose elegant and correct results of direct value for the reader. To achieve this ambitious goal, I am not only counting on the help of an Editorial Board of carefully selected, internationally respected experts, but also on your feedback and help. Please e-mail me your ideas on how to strengthen the focus and style of the journal and on how to evolve its focus. Initially, I would like to focus GMOD on the creation, geometric processing, animation, and visualization of graphical models and on their applications in engineering, science, culture, and entertainment. The term ‘‘graphical model” refers to a representation scheme for the geometry and appearance of shapes and for their evolution over time. Popular shape representation schemes include point clouds, analytic equations, constructive solid models, triangle meshes, subdivision surfaces, parametric patches, curve- and surface-skeletons, voxels, cross-sections, images, implicit surfaces, features, patterns, and procedural models. Popular animation representation schemes include affine motions, space- or surface-warps, morphs and key-frame interpolations, data-driven animation sequences, rigged models adjusted by artists, physically-based simulations, smart controllers, and constrained optimization. We invite papers that discuss improvements and combinations of these representations, that propose novel representations, and that describe efficient data structures and algorithms for constructing, processing, and rendering these models and for converting between representations. Creation techniques include human-shape paradigms and input modalities for the interactive design of shapes and animations and also automatic model construction from scans, images, and vid-
Editorial / Graphical Models 72 (2010) iii–v
eos. Processing includes model segmentation, repair, smoothing, rounding, sharpening, simplification, compression, streaming and feature recognition, but also operations that register, compare, or combine shapes. It also includes numeric accuracy, multi-resolution, and acceleration techniques for dealing with complex and detailed models. Visualization includes a plethora of algorithmic and hardware-accelerated techniques for producing clear images and animations of these graphical models and for allowing designers, artists, engineers, scientists, and players to control them in realtime. We invite papers in five categories: research (contributions describing novel theoretical or practical approaches or solutions), survey (opinionated views of the stateof-the-art and challenges in a specific topic), system (inspiring descriptions of the architecture and implemen-
v
tation details of an innovative architecture for a complete system that supports model/animation design, acquisition, analysis, visualization, . . .), application (description of a novel application of know techniques and evaluation of its impact), or lecture (an elegant presentation or interpretation of known results that clarifies them and teaches them in a new way). So, if you are interested in reading or publishing in this area, please consider GMOD as your primary journal, read it regularly, submit your best papers, send me comments or suggestions, volunteer to serve as a reviewer or to guest-edit a special issue, and invite your colleagues and students to do the same. Editor-in-Chief Jarek Rossignac