Courses

SIGGRAPH 2023 will gather in person in Los Angeles. We look forward to celebrating 50 years of advancements in computer graphics and interactive techniques and are excited to see your submissions.

The Courses Chair will happily discuss individual Course proposals with submitters. This will not guarantee acceptance, but helps submitters understand the submission and review process. Please email [courses-s2023@siggraph.org] to kick off a conversation, keeping in mind the chair has limited time, especially as the deadline approaches.

Log into the submission portal, select the “Make a New Submission” tab, select ”General Submissions,” and then select “Courses” under “Presentation Formats.” To see the information you need to submit, view the sample submission form.

In particular, please be aware of these fields:

• Title. To help participants attend the right course, please accurately title your submission. Attendees and jurors should understand the basic takeaways from the title alone.
• A presentation format. Please select “Course” as your presentation format. This activates Courses-specific questions in the form. If proposing a course in both short (1.5 hours) and long (3 hours) formats, please clarify the differences to help jurors select between them.
• One “representative image” suitable for use on the conference website and in promotional materials. Follow the Representative Image Guidelines. [link to General Submissions FAQ]
• Information on the intended audience, prerequisites, and level of difficulty. Please choose the level of difficulty appropriately by indicating whether your content is introductory, intermediate, or advanced. We accept Courses at all levels, but highlight a Courses’ target audience to help attendees identify content relevant to them.
• Short biographies (100 words) for each of your instructors. Typical Courses consist of one to four instructors. We recommend one instructor for a Short Course (1.5 hours) and two instructors for a Long Course (3 hours).
• Sample of course notes. Submit a 5-10 page sample of course notes to help reviewers understand the style and quality of your proposed content. Notes should be clear and concise. As a guide, here are a few examples of past course notes:
  • Course Notes Example 1
  • Course Notes Example 2

When preparing your course notes, you may wish to consult SIGGRAPH’s Publication Instructions.

• A list of potential submission categories and keywords is provided to ensure your submission is reviewed and juried appropriately. Please select the categories and keywords carefully.

Optional: You also may provide examples of other materials, demonstrations, or exercises that support the Courses topics. Please be clear how this additional content supports your submission; due to limited time by our volunteer jurors, more supplementary material is not necessarily better.

For additional submission information or information about uploading files, see Submissions FAQ.

Courses can fulfill many educational roles, such as:

• Introducing a core graphics subject, targeting someone with little background in that area. Such a course can cover various topics, ranging in level from introductory to advanced. The jury looks for such courses that guide attendees through the material in a coherent and comprehensible way.
• Introducing a topic related to graphics but not considered “core.” The jury evaluates these proposals based on the expected benefit to a typical SIGGRAPH participant and the expected breadth of interest.
• Consolidating a new and emerging research trend. The jury evaluates these proposals based on their potential to spur practical applications and bring new researchers up to speed. The jury also seeks courses distilling recent research into a coherent narrative, as opposed to merely replaying a sequence of prior research talks.

Well-attended, strong courses from prior years may be re-submitted. Recently taught courses must justify why the course should be repeated. If refreshing an older course, please explain why revisiting the material now is timely and what new content will be added. Introductory courses can potentially be repeated more frequently than advanced ones, as the potential audience is larger.

The success of a course proposal is not directly tied to its declared level of difficulty. The conference seeks to offer a broad spectrum of courses at all levels, including well-designed introductory courses. Please choose the most appropriate difficulty level for a course based on the complexity of the ideas presented and the depth of its prerequisites.

If you have multiple speakers, please consider whether your proposal best fits as a SIGGRAPH Course or Panel. It’s your choice, but if you plan to present different perspectives about a topic without a cohesive structure and clear learning objectives, a SIGGRAPH Panel may be a better fit.

Some reasons courses are rejected:

• Sample course notes fail to communicate key ideas clearly and informatively.
• The submission fails to make the course theme sufficiently clear, detail what specific topics will be presented, or explain how the allotted time will be used.
• Content is too narrowly focused or advances an agenda. A course should comprehensively cover a topic and not just focus, for instance, on the presenter’s own techniques or methods used in one company. (Consider a co-presenter from a competing academic lab or company.)
• Previous courses have sufficiently covered the area, or the jury feels the topic is too narrow to attract sufficient attendance at SIGGRAPH.
• Too many high-quality courses were submitted, and the jury could only select a subset.

Jurors are asked to evaluate your submission using four criteria: concept, novelty, interest, and quality. The final submission score is based on a combination of these factors.

• Concept
  How exceptional are the ideas, problems, solutions, aesthetics, etc., in this submission? How coherently does the submission convey its learning objectives? Is the course similar to existing ones, or does it stand out? This criterion is particularly applicable when combining existing technologies into a single course proposal (for example: papers, demos, animations, or art pieces); submissions of this type are often rejected if they duplicate other content without demonstrating how the proposed course will improve attendee mastery of the content.
• Novelty
  How new and fresh is the submission? Is it a new, groundbreaking approach to teach an old problem, or is it an existing approach with a slightly new twist? A course offering a novel approach to teach a topic may be more positively regarded by the jury.
• Interest
  Will conference participants want to attend this course? Will it inspire them? Does it appeal to a broad audience? This measures both the breadth of the potential audience and overall proposal clarity and novelty. If proposing a repeat of a past course, evidence of past interest can be useful in evaluation.
• Quality, Craft, and Completeness
  This is a measure of the course’s quality of expression, clarity of thinking, and the completeness and lucidity of the course syllabus, content, and goals. The submission information, sample course notes, and slides must provide a clear sense that the final course materials will be well-written, well-designed, and well-presented.

Non-Disclosure Agreements
SIGGRAPH reviewers cannot sign non-disclosure agreements for submissions. For information on patents and confidentiality, see the Submissions FAQ.

You will be notified of acceptance or rejection around early May 2023.

After acceptance, the submission portal will allow you to update basic information about your work and upload any final materials for inclusion in the conference program and website. This information needs to be finalized two weeks after acceptance. Final materials can include source code, notes and slides, hardware instructions and requirements, and other material that will help participants apply their new knowledge.

ACM Rights Management Form
If your course is accepted for presentation at SIGGRAPH 2023, each of the course participants must complete the ACM Rights Form. This form will be sent to all course participants, and each participant completes their own form.

ORCID Mandate
ACM requires that all accepted contributors register and provide ACM with valid ORCID identifiers. This information is collected during the completion of the ACM Rights Form.

You and your co-contributors can create and register your ORCID identifiers at https://orcid.org/register. ACM only requires you to complete the initial ORCID registration process. However, ACM encourages you to take the additional step to claim ownership of all of your published works via the ORCID site.

In-Person Presentations
If your course is accepted for presentation at SIGGRAPH, the Courses contributor must:

• Update your submission information, including the final contributors names, affiliation, and emails (unique emails per contributor are required).
• Replace your sample course notes with your final complete notes using the submission portal by 5 June 2023. Course notes are a requirement in order to present during SIGGRAPH 2023.
• Submit final course slides using the submission portal by 11 August 2023 for inclusion in the ACM Digital Library.
• Prepare a Short Course (1.5 hours) or Long Course (3 hours) based on your acceptance.
• Coordinate details with your Courses contributors.
• Attend and present your work on-site at SIGGRAPH 2023 in Los Angeles.
• Contributors should plan to present from their own personal laptops. SIGGRAPH will provide adapters needed to connect personal computers to the session projector.

Presenter Recognition
To present your course at SIGGRAPH 2023, contributors must register at the appropriate registration level for Courses.

You can find a link to the contributor recognition policy here.

22 February 2023, 22:00 UTC/GMT
Submission deadline

Early May 2023
Acceptance or rejection notices are sent to all submitters.

8 May 2023
Deadline to make any changes to materials (i.e., approved title changes, contributors names, descriptions) for publication on the website.

5 June 2023
Course notes are due.

Please note: Course notes are a requirement in order for you to present during SIGGRAPH 2023. Do not submit a proposal if you cannot commit to providing complete, high-quality course notes by this date.

4 August 2023
Official publication date for the ACM Digital Library.

⚠Please Note: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of your conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. (For those rare conferences whose proceedings are published in the ACM Digital Library after the conference is over, the official publication date remains the first day of the conference.)

6–10 August 2023
SIGGRAPH 2023