The Top Ten Lab Directors currently are:
Points Name & Lab ========================================================= 282.50 Antoine McNamara, lab name: The Inverse Kinematics 272.00 John Hart, lab name: The GPU Abuse Center 255.00 Mira Dontcheva 240.00 T. Aila, J. Lehtinen, V. Miettinen, lab name: rand()%680 + 1 232.50 Aaron Hertzmann, lab name: Funky Homunculi 212.00 Jan Kautz, lab name: Pixel-Mob 180.00 Frank Losasso, lab name: The space partitioners 177.50 Eric Haines, lab name: A Growing Concern 169.50 Jonathan Cohen, lab name: Sigraphopoly 169.00 Alan Chalmers, lab name: only_once_a_year
out of 57 contestants. Yes, the previous year's winner, Antoine McNamara, is indeed in first place at this point. Could this be the year we have a two-peat? It almost happened in the second FGL, where Matt Pharr was leading the pack, only to be overcome in the end by Hanspeter Pfister's sketch winners. It's noteworthy that Antoine McNamara and John Hart each hired themselves for their own labs. Oh, and woohoo, I'm in 8th place - this is the first time I've actually come in anywhere over the median, let alone in the top ten.
Here are which researchers were chosen by the most lab directors:
Authors, by popularity on teams =============================== 14 Peter-Pike Sloan 12 Frédo Durand 11 Kavita Bala 10 Ren Ng 9 Ian Buck 9 Aaron Hertzmann 8 John Hart 8 Wojciech Matusik 8 Jovan Popovic 7 Michael F. Cohen 7 Jan Kautz 7 Aseem AgarwalaMost of these researchers, 9 of 12, were in the money. However, only two of them were among the most efficient, i.e. gave the most bang for the buck, or most quarks for the quatloo:
Authors ranked by efficiency ### Value Cost Efficiency Name =========================================== 294 80.00 15 5.3333 John Hart 572 45.00 10 4.5000 Steven M. Seitz 588 60.00 15 4.0000 Tao Ju 168 50.00 15 3.3333 Frank Losasso 427 27.50 10 2.7500 Michael Kazhdan 107 50.00 20 2.5000 Dani Lischinski 313 60.00 30 2.0000 Jovan Popovic 386 30.00 15 2.0000 Mario Botsch 519 20.00 10 2.0000 Robert Jagnow 673 20.00 10 2.0000 Yutaka Ohtake 21 20.00 10 2.0000 Alexander Belyaev
As far as sheer points earned goes, here's the researcher list (recall that this does not include authors new this year, but rather only those authors who could be chosen):
Authors ranked by highest point value ### Value Cost Efficiency Name ============================================= 294 80.00 15 5.3333 John Hart 209 65.00 170 0.3824 Heung-Yeung Shum 588 60.00 15 4.0000 Tao Ju 313 60.00 30 2.0000 Jovan Popovic 136 60.00 90 0.6667 Dinesh K. Pai 141 60.00 100 0.6000 Doug L. James 521 60.00 150 0.4000 Ronald Fedkiw 198 59.00 140 0.4214 Hans-Peter Seidel 267 55.00 100 0.5500 Jessica K. Hodgins 223 55.00 210 0.2619 Hugues HoppeKudos to John Hart, who managed to be both the largest grossing and most cost-effective researcher this year, along with currently being in second place in the FGL. Honorable mention goes to Tao Ju, who is third in both categories.
Interesting side note: if you picked the previous four years' winners of the FGL for your lab (all of whom could be hired as researchers), their stats are:
### Value Cost Efficiency Name ============================================= 403 0.00 30 0.0000 Matt Pharr 199 30.00 70 0.4286 Hanspeter Pfister 4 30.00 70 0.4286 Aaron Hertzmann 47 15.00 15 1.0000 Antoine McNamaraSo you would have received 75 points for 185 quatloos (with 215 left to spend). This would have started you off in 35th place among the 57 teams. And if you had noticed that Matt Pharr was writing a book, you would have ruled him out and had even more to spend. Of course, I didn't use this strategy either, but I lucked out picking John Hart.
This year is (probably - no promises) going to be the last time I run the FGL, since after about the fifth repetition of a joke it just might start to lose its edge. In the hopes of generating controversy and scandal, I'm on the SIGGRAPH Sketches committee this year. To head off any charges of favoritism, please let me know now which researchers you've hired are likely to affect your score: simply write their names on a $20 bill and send it to me.
If you want to check your results or have some peculiar desire to actually see what papers were accepted, see Tim Rowley's great web page. I've also put up the alphabetical listing of hireable researchers and how many points each earned this year.
If you're really desperate to waste more time, check out these links: