Elements 2011 enthralls Bangalore

Elements 2011, the first Bangalore ACM SIGGRAPH Conference for Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques was held over a period of two days on the 25^th and 26^th of March, 2011 at Taj Vivanta, Bangalore, India. The annual conference of ACM Bangalore was also a part of Elements 2011 this year.

The theme for elements 2011 is beyond today, tomorrow The focus of this conference is three fold: Bring the best of research and development happening today that will form the defining moment tomorrow, not only for Computer Graphics but Computing in general, and hence the theme, ‘BEYOND TODAY, TOMORROW’. “About 255 people attended the event which included students, experts and members from the industry”, said Mr. Akshay Darbari, Chairman, ACM Bangalore, and SIGGRAPH Asia  committee steering member.

Talking about computer graphics and its scope, Akshay Darbari said, “Computer graphics is not only about animation in film or its application in the gaming industry. It is also being implemented in various fields like 3D medical visualization, Heritage Imagineering and many such sectors. The whole aim of this conference is to educate the same.”

The session started off with a talk by Manish Gupta of IBM Research on challenges and opportunities for innovations in IT based services. Then it continued with “Focus on innovation to focused innovation” by Simon Towers from Infosys Technologies Ltd, “Digital workflow for comic, television and game pre-production by P.C. Vikram of Technicolor, “Building knowledge bases from the web” by Srinivasan Sengamedu and Steven Lurie from Zynga spoke on “Making games for tomorrow.” Rajesh Balakrishnan and Bintu Vasudevan from Infosys spoke on Techniques of text analytics.

The talks were succeeded by a workshop on Art and Science of Design by Hemant Sharma from Adobe systems.

Day two started off with Don Gotterbarn from East Tennessee State University on “Software Engineering Issues beyond Programming”, “Recent Innovations in image and Video Manipulation” by Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan from Adobe Systems, “Trends and future directions in 3D medical visualization” by Shyam Rajan of GE Health Care, “Heritage Imagineering” by Ramachandra Budihal of India Innovation Labs. Vijay Natarajan of IISc spoke on “Analyzing topography for graphics and visualization applications” and continued with a workshop on visual scripting.

Ramachandra Budihal, an architect at India Innovation Labs and also the co-founder of Mahabharata Samshodhana Pratishthanam spoke on Heritage Imagineering, which was a hit among the crowd for his video at TED talks and his project “Digital Humpi”. His virtual visualization swayed away the crowd.

A lot of students expressed that the workshop was very helpful as the usage of basic concepts for creating applications seemed very interesting and the HTML tutorial lecture conducted by Wipro employees, Allahbaksh and Krishna Chaitanya was appreciated by the crowd.

SIGGRAPH is the leading international annual conference of Computer Graphics in the world. ACM, the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, delivers resources that advance computing as a science and a profession. ACM provides the computing field's premier Digital Library and serves its members and the computing profession with leading-edge publications, conferences, and career resources. Chapters of ACM SIGGRAPH exist in 50 cities in 20 countries around the world. They form an international multi-cultural network of people who develop, share, continue, and extend the work and achievement and present them at the annual conference.