The Gizmodo story says that they presented it at SIGGRAPH Asia 2009. According to http://www.siggraph.org/asia2009/ that doesn't take place until December.
Papers for SIGGRAPH & SIGGRAPH Asia are accepted a few months before the conference.
These are the best two conferences in computer graphics, and the bar to get in is extremely high -- reviewers are very very tough and submitted papers have to not only be technically accurate, but also very polished in writing and presentation (and video).
That being said, a lot of these kind of systems have been coming out in the past few years, and it's a little hard to judge how successful they are due to the enormous amount of work required to reproduce results (their releasing a binary is commendable).
My own personal feeling is that this system probably works quite well for "common" things in their database, but there might be many small artifacts in generated images. Also, if you start trying to include stuff that's not well represented in the database, then the artifacts probably become quite severe.
Well, it is listed here: http://www.siggraph.org/asia2009/for_attendees/technical_pap... "Friday, 18 December | 9:00 AM - 10:45 AM | Room 301/302" Not sure what to think. Maybe they're writing in past tense in the same way sports sites write "such and such team played on Tuesday" even though it was Tuesday at the time of writing.
