| The International Symposium on Smart Graphics 2003 was held on July 2–4, 2003 in Heidelberg, Germany. It was the fourth event in a series that started in 1999 as an AAAI Spring Symposium. In response to the overwhelming success of the 1999 symposium, its organizers decided to turn it into a self-contained event in 2000. With the support of IBM, the first two International Symposia on Smart Graphics were held at the T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY. The 2003 symposium was supported by the Klaus Tschira Foundation and moved to the European Media Lab in Heidelberg, thus underlining the international character of the Smart Graphics enterprise and its community.
The core idea behind these symposia is to bring together researchers and practitioners from the field of computer graphics, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and fine art. Each of these disciplines contributes to what we mean by the term “Smart Graphics”: the intelligent process of creating expressive and esthetic graphical presentations. While artists and designers have been creating communicative graphics for centuries, artificial intelligence focuses on automating this process by means of the computer. While computer graphics provides the tools for creating graphical presentations in the first place, cognitive sciences contribute the rules and models of perception necessary for the design of effective graphics. The exchange of ideas between these four disciplines has led to many exciting and fruitful discussions, and the Smart Graphics Symposia draw their liveliness from a spirit of open minds and the willingness to learn from and share with other disciplines.
Since the beginning, there have been discussions as to what qualifies as smart graphics and what doesn’t. Although the term is intuitively clear to most, there are different interpretations along the outer boundaries of the field. Instead of giving an explicit definition, we decided to have invited papers from researchers to represent certain aspects of the field, and asked these authors to spread word in their respective communities. The result was a large number of submissions with hardly any out of topic, out of which a high quality program with clear focal points could be assembled.
We would like to thank all authors for the effort that went into their submissions, the program committee for their work in selecting and ordering contributions for the final program, the Klaus Tschira Foundation and the European Media Lab for providing space and time for hosting the event, and Springer-Verlag for publishing the proceedings in their Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. |
