Editorial

Abstract

I'm very pleased to have the opportunity to take over as editor-in-chief after Holly Rushmeier's strong leadership of the past three years. ACM has made a big effort to get TOG back on schedule after the delays caused by changing to a new publication system. With this issue, we are almost on schedule again and the backlog of accepted papers is significantly reduced. I hope to further shorten the time the return reviews to authors and to get accepted paper to readers. As part of that effort, I have asked Steve Fortune for Bell Labs, John Hart from Washington State, Joe Marks from MERL, and Jorg Peters from the University of Florida to be new members of the editorial board to replace those who retired with the end of Holly's term. I expect that we'll see significant changes in the role of journals during my three-year term. Right now, journals utilize peer reviews and a revision cycle to provide accreditation to research, but this process is tied to a particular distribution medium and requires financial support in the form of subscription fees. With the increasing use of web-baed publishing, I expect that the accreditation and distribution functions will begin to separate. Accreditation will continue to play an important role in scientific reputations and academic careers, while the publication media will become far more diverse. This diversification is particularly important for graphics because many of its important results are not represented well on paper. TOG has moved in this direction with a web page that is expertly maintained by Eric Haines and contains occasional supplemental material (http://www.acm.org./tog/). If TOG is to represent the true breadth of graphics, however, we will have to make much more of an effort in this direction. During the next three years, we will almost certainly see significant changes in graphics as well. Clearly, the field is expanding beyond the creation of beautiful and useful images and image sequences. New emphases include increasingly realistic physical modeling, interactive worlds, and nonvisual modalities. Graphics is a fascinating field, in part because researchers are able to adopt and adapt new ideas from so many other fields: art, vision, physics, materials science, control, optimization and biomechanics. I look forward to the innovative and creative work that the community will submit to TOG during the next three years.