Colleagues and friends, [My apologies if you receive this more than once -- my initial attempt to send it last week seems to have failed.]
As some of you may have heard, the Access Grid is part of the Emerging Technologies venue at SIGGRAPH 2005 (http://www.siggraph.org/s2005/). This is a very exciting development -- SIGGRAPH is a major conference, and will be the first introduction to the AG for many SIGGRAPH participants. Jeff Carpenter of NCSA and I are co-chairing the SIGGRAPH sub-committee which is organizing this event; it is being curated by Donna Cox of NCSA, the SIGGRAPH E-Tech Chair. This year SIGGRAPH will house one AG node, on an experimental basis. Some of the events that will take place at this AG node will be broadcast to remote audience sites; some will involve remote presenters but not be designed for the participation of remote audiences (this is for both bandwidth conservation and production reasons). If the event is a success, as we expect it to be, SIGGRAPH will more than likely expand its AG involvement in the years to come. For those who don't know SIGGRAPH, it is an international graphics conference which attracts major keynote speakers and presenters. This year's keynote is by George Lucas; past keynote speakers have included Ray Kurzweil, William Gibson, and Steve Jobs. In 2005 the keynote won't be on the AG, but in the future this sort of content may be pushed out to remote sites. Several panels and performances have been confirmed for this event; a few are still being finalized. The schedule can be seen at: http://www.siggraph.org/s2005/main.php?f=conference&p=etech&s=access There are a few ways in which we are currently looking for people to be involved: * Networking Specialist: We are looking for an AG-savvy networking expert to liase between the SIGGRAPH AG sub-committee and GraphicsNet (the SIGGRAPH networking team). As we will be limited to a DS3 connection, we need excellent attention to detail in planning our bandwidth usage. * Remote Sites: We are looking for a small number of sites to participate as remote audiences. A subset of the SIGGRAPH AG program will be available to these sites. These sites must already have well-established AG nodes; we also have a strong preference for sites which anticipate that they can attract an audience. * Remote Sites Manager: We are looking for an experienced AG user to organize the participation of remote audience sites. If you are interested in these possibilities, please drop me a note or speak with me at the AG Retreat. Cheers, Jennifer Teig von Hoffman Co-chair, SIGGRAPH AG Sub-committee Boston University On behalf of the SIGGRAPH AG Sub-committee: Jeff Carpenter, NCSA, Co-chair Jim Miller, inSORS Integrated Communications James Oliverio, Digital Worlds Institute Andy Quay, Digital Worlds Institute Jonathan Tyman, Internet2 Commons Joella Walz, Digital Worlds Institute
