The 2009 SIAM/ACM Joint Conference on Geometric and Physical Modeling, which was a federation of the 2009 SIAM Conference on Geometric Design and the 2009 ACM Symposium on Solid and Physical Modeling, was held in San Francisco, from October 5 to October 8, 2009.
The SIAM Geometric Design and the ACM Solid and Physical Modeling communities both have a heritage dating back to the early 1980s. This joint conference represented a historic union of these communities.
In 2007, the 10th biennial SIAM conference on Geometric Design and Computing was held in San Antonio, Texas. Conferences in this series have been flagship events organized by the SIAM Special Interest Activity Group on Geometric Design over the past 20 years. These meetings have been one of the main general international conferences on geometric modeling and related areas, and have been well attended by mathematicians and engineers from academia, industry, and government.
In 2008, the 13th ACM Symposium on Solid and Physical Modeling was held in Stony Brook, New York. It was organized by the Solid Modeling Association under the auspices of ACM/SIGGRAPH. Ever since its inception in 1991, the symposium, originally named the ACM Symposium on Solid Modeling Foundations and CAD/CAM Applications, has been the primary international forum for disseminating research results and exchanging new ideas in solid and physical modeling, and various applications.
The two conferences have been combined in 2009 to further expand the areas of interest and the number of attendees. The joint conference attracted high-quality, original research contributions that strive to advance all sorts of aspects of geometric and physical modeling, and their application in design, analysis and manufacturing, as well as in biomedical, geophysical, digital entertainment, and other areas. A shared objective of the SIAM GD and ACM SPM communities is the desire to highlight work of the highest quality on the problems of greatest relevance to industry and science.
In ACM SPM tradition, the conference included a track for submission of technical papers for those wishing rigorous peer review and published proceedings. In response to the call for papers, 85 technical papers were submitted and reviewed by an international program committee with 96 experts, and several external experts, from around the world. Nearly all submissions got five reviews. A total of 24 papers have been selected for plenary presentation and publication as full papers. Moreover, a total of 18 papers have been selected for poster presentation and publication as short papers. These full and short papers are published here, representing the proceedings of the 2009 ACM Symposium on Solid and Physical Modeling.
In addition, in the tradition of previous SIAM GD events, abstracts for minisymposia and contributed presentations/posters were solicited. Nine minisymposia, 28 contributed presentations, and one poster have been selected from the received proposals.
The 2009 Pierre Bezier Award for Solid, Geometric, and Physical Modeling and Applications was awarded at the conference to Richard Riesenfeld and Elaine Cohen. Along with receiving the award, they presented the Pierre Bezier Award Lecture.
Finally, the conference program included six invited presentations, by David Baraff (Pixar Animation Studios), Ted D. Blacker (Sandia National Laboratories), Leonidas Guibas (Stanford University), Baining Guo (Microsoft Research Asia), Stefanie Hahmann (Grenoble Institute of Technology, France), and Bert Juttler (Johannes Kepler University, Austria), all prominent researchers in their fields.