Academics help organise Computer Graphics and Visual Computing (CGVC) 2020 conference

Academics from the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering helped to organise Computer Graphics and Visual Computing (CGVC) 2020 conference, which took place on Thursday 10th and 11th September 2020 via Zoom. The conference was hosted by Rita Borgo and Alfie Abdul-Rahman (King's College London) and was the 38th annual computer graphics, visualization, and visual computing gathering organised by the Eurographics UK Chapter.

Computer Graphics and Visual Computing (CGVC) 2020 conference.Dr Panagiotis Ritsos, who was the joint programme chair for the CGVC2020 conference, and Lecturer in Visualisation in the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering said “it was a privilege to be one of the two programme chairs for the CGVC 2020 conference. Together with Kai Xu (Middlesex University) we managed the papers, organised the peer-review process and the programme for the event. It was a pleasure to see international submissions from the UK, Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, USA, China and Saudi Arabia ”

Dr Ritsos went on to say “We had a variety of topics, ranging from visualization, graphics, to machine learning, and Virtual and Augmented Reality, which demonstrates the variety of research that is taking place in the UK in Computer Graphics and Visual Computing. I was pleased to be involved in this conference, especially because the area matches well with teaching and research activities in Bangor. We have several researchers at the School with world class research in visualisation, data modelling, computer vision and graphics, and we also have specialist undergraduate courses in related topics such as Computer Science with Games and BSc Creative Technologies and MSc in Advanced Data Science.”

Professor Nick Holliman (Newcastle University) delivering his keynote presentation at the CGVC 2020 conferenceProfessor Jonathan Roberts, Professor in Visualisation at the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering and past chair of Eurographics UK Chapter, said “Every year the conference brings together academics and PhD students and researchers in computer graphics and visual computing. It is good to meet up with friends. This year, with COVID-19 the decision was taken to hold it online. It was excellent to have around 40 attendees during the presentations, with 79 users interacting via the conference’s Slack channel, and to meet up with friends that I had not seen for a whole year. I particularly enjoyed the keynote talk by Prof Nick Holliman (Newcastle University) titled ‘Visual Entropy as a tool for Better Visualization’. He spoke of his work on Petascale cloud-supercomputing research for terapixel visualisations, to create a digital twin of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.”

Dr Franck Vidal, who is the Secretary of the Eurographics UK chapter and Senior Lecturer in Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at Bangor, said “The Eurographics UK Chapter is a group of researchers in the UK who are interested in graphics, visualisation and visual computing. As an organisation our effort has been to encourage PhD students to write and publish papers, and present their work at an annual conference, and within a friendly atmosphere. I personally encourage outstanding undergraduate students to convert their dissertations into research articles. This year two of Bangor’s graduates (Joshua Gardner and Gary Fergusson) published the work they did for their final year project.”

Franck went on to say “We are an active chapter of the Eurographics Association, which is an international group of researchers. It means that we can run a UK conference and publish papers on a high-quality digital library. I want to encourage PhD students, especially throughout the UK, in this topic area to submit their work next year. We are a friendly group of graphics and visual computing researchers, and we believe that visual computing is a growing and important field for today’s society. Keep your eye on the CGVG conference website and the Eurographics UK Chapter site for details of the conference next year”.

Publication date: 16 September 2020