On November 1st of every year, the Finnish government publishes everyone’s salary. It’s a nice leveler of the playing field for workers, as they can see if they’re paid fairly and what to expect at another company.

In the U.S. we generally know elected officials’ salaries (president $400,000, senator $174,000, etc.) but not much else. Except for non-profits, who have to file public tax returns. Update: Angelo Pesce pointed out this useful site.

I’m doing my taxes this weekend. To avoid that time-sucking task – one that takes only five minutes in The Netherlands – I decided to go look up the ACM’s and IEEE’s forms. It takes a bit of searching, but it’s interesting to see where the money goes. To start, here are some ACM salaries from their 2015 return (actual return here):

Half a million for the outgoing Chief Executive Director – not bad. I’ve asked around, and on one level this amount is a bit shocking, but it’s evidently (for good or ill) the norm for non-profits of this size.

Putting this info on the blog makes me feel a bit embarrassed; it’s breaking a social norm here, revealing a salary. But, it’s public knowledge! We’re now used to services such as Zillow to see someone’s property value – something we would have had to work hard to do back in 2005 (e.g., go to some government office and look up the deed). However, in the U.S., knowing someone’s salary is usually not something you can look up and is pretty taboo. So, cheap thrills, and it’s easy to do so now for at least a few people.

Wading through the rest of the return turns up various tidbits. For example, the ACM’s overall budget:

So they added about $6.7 million to their total assets in 2015, and ended the year with assets of:

I find these documents worth poking at, just to get a sense of what’s important. For example, the ACM makes its revenue as follows (see Part VIII for details):

Expenses, in Part IX, go on and on, with a large portion of the $60 million going to conferences:

Conferences raise $29 million each year (the revenue snippet), so I guess I conclude that conferences netted $5 million for the ACM in 2015. That cheers me to hear, vs. the opposite. Me, I’m curious how much the ACM Digital Library costs and how much revenue is raised, from individuals and institutions, but these numbers are not found here. I asked once back in 2012; the ACM doesn’t split out the DL income and costs from their other publication efforts.

There are lots of other tidbits in the return, but take a look for yourself.

Let’s go visit the IEEE – hmmm, wait, there are two of them. But both have small budgets, less than $7 million, so that’s not them. Searching a bit (quick, what does “IEEE” stand for?), I found them:

The Assistant Secretary and Executive Director (one person) gets $1.2 million – OK. The actual Director & Secretary doesn’t get paid at all, which I find entertaining somehow:

Now, the IEEE’s budget is a lot higher that the ACM’s, $436 million vs. $60 million:

It’s a different report format, so it’s not clear to me what assets they have.

It’s fun to poke around, e.g.:

ACM doesn’t seem to have any lobbying expenses. I wonder what the IEEE lobbies for – they’re really not spending much, but it’s more than zero. Better electricity? Lobbying is not in and of itself bad (I like it when the AMA lobbies against the use of tobacco just fine), but it’s interesting to see and great for forming unwarranted conspiracy theories.

OK, enough goofing off, this took way more time than I expected; back to my own taxes.

First, the links you need:

• Stephen Hill’s wonderful SIGGRAPH 2018 links page. Note the fair number of presentations recorded and quickly put up.
• Material from the High Performance Graphics conference preceding SIGGRAPH is all online. Hats off to them for doing this.
• Matt Pharr guest-edited a special section of the latest issue (vol. 37, no. 3, June 2018) of ACM TOG, full of papers on how production renderers work.
• Bonus link: this GDC 2018 link collection by Krzysztof Narkowicz; also, GDC 2014 and earlier by Javier “Jare” Arevalo (thanks to Stephen Hill for the tip-off).

Beyond all the deep ray learning tracing, which I’ve noted in other tweets and posts, the one technology on the show floor that got “you should go check it out” buzz was the Looking Glass Kickstarter, a good-looking and semi-affordable (starting in the $600 range, not thousands or higher) “holographic” display. 60 FPS color, 4 and 8 megapixel versions, but those pixels are divided up among the 45 views that must be generated each frame. Still, it looked lovely, and vaguely magical (and has Sketchfab support).

I mostly went to courses and talked with people. Here are a few tidbits of general interest:

• Shadertoy is one of my favorite websites, but it takes too long to load and looks like it’s locked up. I learned that you can avoid this problem! Sign in, go to your profile, Config, and check “Use previews (avoid compilation times)”. The site is so much more usable now. Too bad it’s not the default, I expect because they want to show you cool things without clicking, but then end up not showing anything for awhile, e.g., 22 seconds for the popular page to compile on my fast workstation. Now this page shows up immediately, and I don’t mind that the animations don’t run when my mouse hovers over the image. (thanks, David Hart!)
• Colin Barré-Brisebois mentioned in NVIDIA’s real-time ray tracing course that Schlick’s Fresnel approximation could not be used in their work, but I didn’t quite catch why. The notes don’t mention this – I need to follow up with him… message sent. Aha, he replies, “It was because of total internal reflection. The Schlick approx doesn’t handle it.”
• One of the speakers in Path Tracing in Production mentioned in passing that some film frames took 300 hours of compute per frame, 1600 rays per pixel. Aha, it was for “Transformers: The Last Knight.” I recall Jim Blinn had some rule-of-thumb long ago about how frames will take 20 minutes no matter how much faster computers get and algorithms improve efficiency. I think that amount needs updating, maybe based on cost (after all, the computers he was using for computation back then weren’t cheap).
• The PDF notes for this course were extensive, though the course lectures were not recorded (heavens forbid anyone capture an unauthorized bunny or chimp). It’ll be interesting once consumer body cams become a thing. Anyway, the notes capture all sorts of bits of wisdom, such as ways of finding structure to help denoise images (yes, film rendering companies use denoising, too), e.g., “we used the tangent vector of the fur to provide the denoiser with “normals” as it proved to have higher contrast than either the true normals of the fur, or the normals of the skin that the fur was spawned from.”
• You know quaternions. David Hart noted a different algebra, octonions, which I’d never heard of before. Bunch of videos on YouTube.
• Regrets: I missed the “Future Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning Tools for VFX” panel, and there’s no video AFAIK. I wanted to go, because after Glassner’s intro to deep learning course (which was recorded, and well-attended & well-received), Doug Roble from Digital Domain showed me a little bit of their markerless facial mocap system, which looked great. He writes, “We’ll probably have some YouTube videos… soon.”

Finally, this, a clever photo booth at NVIDIA. The “glass” sphere looks rasterized, since it shows little refraction. Though, to make it solid, or even fill it with water, would have been massively heavy and unworkable. Sadly, gasses don’t have much of a refractive index, though maybe it’s as well – a chloroform-filled sphere might not be the safest thing. Anyway, it’s best as-is: people want to see their undistorted faces through the sphere. If you want realism, fix it in post.

You can now download 440.5 out of the 676 figures in the fourth edition. Go get them here. (the 0.5 is because there are five figures where we include only half the figure, because the other half was from someone else.)

There are also now links on the home resources page of figures where we took a snapshot from a live demo that runs in a browser. For example, the three listed here are a fun place to start.

We’ll be signing books at the ACM bookstore on Tuesday, August 14, from 12:30 to 1 PM. All six of us should be able to make it, and with any luck there will be books, too (go, printers, go!). Even if not, we have a back-up plan… Oh, and do note it’s the bookstore, which is usually tucked away somewhere and is not on the exhibit hall floor.

Anyway, we hope to see you there!