Author Description

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 in2000. WiththesupportofIBM,the?rsttwoInternationalSymposiaonSmart 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 ?eld of computer graphics, arti?cial intelligence, cog- tive psychology, and ?ne art. Each of these disciplines contributes to what we mean by the term “Smart Graphics”: the intelligent process of creating expr- sive and esthetic graphical presentations. While artists and designers have been creating communicative graphics for centuries, arti?cial intelligence focuses on automating this process by means of the computer. While computer graphics provides the tools for creating graphical presentations in the ?rst place, cog- tive sciences contribute the rules and models of perception necessary for the design of e?ective graphics. The exchange of ideas between these four discip- nes 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.