Best Practices: New Challenges
SIG Leaders may add to these Best Practices at this Google Doc
SIGSOFT: Will Tracz, [email protected] 03 October 2016;
Neno Medvidovic, [email protected] 07 October 2016
iSoft: Indian branch of SIGSOFT - receives free access to our newsletter and electronic email distribution of messages
cSoft: In the process of being organized - similar to iSoft.
India and South America Conference Speakers: We provide travel support for 2 invited speakers/year to conferences. The speakers must be best paper award winners of previous year’s SIGSOFT conferences
Support for three speakers/panelists annually to travel to South America (Brazil, Chile, Argentina) to give talks and advise local students in preparation for the Int’l Conference on Software Engineering (“ICSE Warm-up Workshops”)
SIGSOFT’s CAPS program provides support for conference travel, which is very often used as a way of shoring up our global outreach
Regular 3-year rotation pattern for the ICSE conference (North America, Europe, rest of the world)
Beginning to move the FSE conference outside exclusively North America and Europe
SIGOPS: Robbert van Renesse, [email protected]. October 4, 2016;
Shan Lu, [email protected] 07 October 2016
EuroSys: European Chapter of SIGOPS: eurosys.org
SIGOPS and EuroSys co-organize annual EuroSys conference (2006--)
ChinaSys: Chinese Chapter of SIGOPS: chinasys.org
SIGOPS are supporting regional workshops: ChinaSys (2011--)
Robert gave keynote at ChinaSys; more keynote speakers from US to ChinaSys
SIGOPS flagship conference (SOSP) will be hosted in Asia (China) for the first time in 2017 (was in Europe once every 3 times). ChinaSys will be co-located, and we are planning more activities to engage local people.
APSys: APSys is not a chapter, but a well developed regional system workshop that SIGOPS has been supporting, started in 2010
SOSP kinds of rotate out of US once every 3 times
SIGCSE: Amber Settle, [email protected], October 6, 2016
SIGCSE Chapters:
China
Australasia
Turkey (Bilkent)
India (iSIGCSE)
Spain
Travel Grant Program
Funds attendance for first-time teachers and faculty at the SIGCSE Symposium
Applicants from around the world (Albania, Brazil, Jamaica, and the UK) have been funded.
Special Projects
Funds small grants (up to $5K) for projects of benefit to the SIGCSE community
Multiple previous awards have gone to projects from around the world: http://sigcse.org/sigcse/programs/special/awards
The SIGCSE Board has agreed to have ACM Europe and Informatics Europe representation on the ITiCSE conference committee. ITiCSE will be held in Europe in the next five years after a successful conference in Peru in July 2016.
Computer science research conference (ICER) held every four years in Europe and every four years in Australasia
Conscious selection of candidates for the SIGCSE Executive Board
SIGDA: Sharon Hu, [email protected], Oct 7, 2016
SIGDA local chapters:
Korea
Northern China
Southern China
Hong Kong
Singapore
Taiwan
Annual Electronic Design Automation (EDA) summer school in Asia:
Co-sponsor with IEEE CEDA
Invites speakers of recent major conferences, DAC, DATE, ASP-DAC to give talks to local attendees
Co-located with some other events
Organized several sessions/panels hosted in latest computing/EDA conferences in China to focus on EDA
ACA 2016
CTC 2016 (machine learning at DAC)
In the process of forming an EDA Chapter under the framework of China Institute of Electronics (CIE)
Initiate an EDA and DAC outreach workshop
December, Beijing, China
The purpose of the workshop is to promote the impact of EDA society in China
SIGKDD: Bing Liu, [email protected], October 6, 2016
SIGKDD has three large overseas chapters. They focus on their respective regions, and carry out the missions of SIGKDD in their regions.
Australia-New Zealand
China
India
We also have two chapters in the US, Austin and Seattle, which are also quite active.
SIGKDD are particularly active in these three regions (besides the US). Each of the chapters organizes a regional data mining conference and many educational activities, which are very well attended.
SIGKDD gives grants to chapters. The amount of grant depends on activity proposals from each chapter.
SIGKDD provides $100,000 each year to fund graduate students to attend the KDD conference. Students from overseas get more grants. KDD is our flagship conference.
During each KDD conference, we organize symposiums for regional chapters.
SIGMM: Shih-Fu Chang, [email protected], Oct 6, 2016
SIGMM has two very active local chapters:
SIGMM Bay Area Chapter. Starting 2013, has hosted 11 very successful workshops, Bay Area Multimedia Forum (BAMMF) on popular topics interesting to practitioners. Some events have attracted more than 500 attendees. SIGMM is the founding sponsor and provides seed funding, with joint support from IEEE Computer Society Multimedia Computing TC.
SIGMM China Chapter. Hosted annual conference in collaboration with local universities and professional organizations since 2009 with 100+ attendees.
SIGecom: Kevin Leyton-Brown, [email protected], Oct 6, 2016
We do reach a fairly global audience, but as a small SIG haven’t seen the need for local chapters. We have the most activity from participants from North America, Europe and Israel.
We have a sister conference, WINE (Web and Internet Economics). This conference has a different governance structure (with a 5-person steering committee that hasn’t changed since the conference began in 2005), and isn’t part of the ACM. The community is at least somewhat interested in deepening ties between ACM-EC and WINE, but it’s not clear how we’d proceed from an organizational perspective. Also, the relationship is currently very smooth, so it’s not clear if there’s a problem that needs fixing.
We see our organization as a meeting ground between different academic communities: CS theorists, AI researchers, microeconomists, empirical researchers from business schools and OR departments. We thus overlap substantially with other “parallel” organizations such as STOC/FOCS, AAAI/IJCAI, economics venues such as the International Game Theory Congress and NBER.
SIGGRAPH: Jeff Jortner, [email protected], October 6, 2016
SIGGRAPH has 25 non-US professional chapters. The chapters focus on their respective areas, but have been extremely active in areas where we hold conferences (Vancouver and Hong Kong in particular).
SIGGRAPH Asia (SA) serves the Asian market. The conference has been held in Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shenzen, Kobe and is being held in Macau this year. Efforts are being made to have SA work closely with the Asia Graphics organization
SIGGRAPH has cooperative agreements with a number of organizations/conferences throughout the world. These agreements provide registration, media, and advertising exchanges
Digital Content Association of Japan
Laval Virtual (France)
FMX (Germany)
View Conference (Italy)
Eurographics (Europe)
Spark Animation Festival (Vancouver)
Anima Mundi (Brazil)
VFX Rio (Brazil)
ISEA International
The ACM SIGGRAPH International Resources Committee has members from around the world and provides an English Review Service, multi-lingual guides for the SIGGRAPH conference, staffs the International Center at SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia, and helps with translation services for our social media channels.
Our Digital Arts and Education committees have many international members and work with people in many regions of the world.
SIGBio: Srinivas Aluru, [email protected], October 7, 2016
cBio: China chapter just initiated.
Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI) is a high-quality, three day, single track conference that has been running in Europe for a number of years now. SIGBio forged an agreement with WABI to hold it in the U.S. every odd year, co-located with our flagship conference ACM BCB. Because of a unified fee structure and access to both meetings, this brings additional value to our members, and also provide incentives for WABI attendees to join SIGBio.
Computational Bio and health sciences is a very important area. In addition to traditional competitors such as IEEE and SIAM, there are societies such as American Medical Informatics Society (AMIA) and International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). The top rated conferences in the field in terms of quality are RECOMB (unaffiliated) and ISMB (affiliated with ISCB). I am working to bring RECOMB under SIGBio.
SIGWEB: Dick Bulterman, [email protected], October 7, 2016
SIGWEB already has a strong focus on EU events (DocEng, WebScience), with good partnerships from local organizing partners. Historically, we have been strong in organizing events in South America (mostly Brazil). We also participate in larger co-hosted events with other SIGs that have more Asian and Australian participation. I would think that the majority of SIGWEB events take place outside of North America.
Our focus for the coming years is in seeding a number of local events in different regions. We do this to increase local interactions (often with local academic societies), with the hope of feeding new life into our existing scientific meetings and conferences.
What we’ve noticed is that the big attractions for partnering with SIG/ACM has been (a) access to the DL and (b) access to financial resources. My impression is that major global societies already have cut DL deals. That fact that we as a SIG have available funds remains an important factor.
Some issues: many sets of global partners (particularly in Asia) have different perceptions of the role of a program committee. Bluntly punt: they use it to reward friends and punish enemies. This requires some extra attention. Another problem is that having too many organizers from one location or partner is still seen as a red flag issue. We many need to relax our requirements.
Getting ACM support to optimize global events remains a challenge, since our conference support people tend to focus on US-brand hotels and not the local botique options. We also need to be more sensitive to the challenges (and opportunities) of local tax and organizational rules.
SIGCOMM: S.Keshav, [email protected] October 7. 2016
We co-sponsor several regional networking conferences: COMSNETS (India), LANC (Latin America), AINTEC (Asia-Pacific)
ACM SIGCOMM China chapter was initiated in May 2016, first conference to be held along with ACM China Academic Conference (ACAC) in May 2017
We have a strong geodiversity grant program that pays for the student authors of best-paper award papers from regional networking conferences to travel to SIGCOMM and for postdocs and young faculty to apply for travel grants to attend SIGCOMM
The flagship conference rotates between US/Europe/ROW, and has been held in New Delhi, Hong Kong, and Florianopolis (Brazil) in the last 6 years.
We provide travel grants to student attendees of national networking summits
We pay for keynote speakers to travel to regional/national networking conferences
We sponsor summer schools that are both thematic and regional. For example, we sponsor an annual summer school on traffic management and analysis, held in Europe, as well as a regional summer school held every December in Chile.
All but one of the current Exec committee members are from outside the US
SIGMETRICS: Vishal Misra, [email protected] October 7, 2016
We cooperate with the IFIP WG 7.3 extensively. That working group is very eurocentric
Every 3 years, Sigmetrics and Performance (the IFIP WG 7.3 conference) is held jointly. The joint conference is typically organized in Europe, though sometimes North America has been a venue
We give out travel grants from the SIG budget for non-US students, NSF travel grants typically cover US students
The exec committee members have typically been split between North America, Europe and Asia (mainly Hong Kong)
We co-sponsor conferences around the world.
In non-joint years with Performance, SIGMETRICS contributes towards a travel grant.
We are exploring organizing the conference in Asia in the next couple of cycles.
Performance was held in Australia last year, which SIGMETRICS supported.
SIGARCH: Sarita Adve, [email protected] October 7, 2016
We have a strong SIGARCH chapter in S. Korea. Our flagship conference, ISCA, was held in S. Korea in 2016 with record attendance and fund raising. The activities and participation of the S. Korean chapter were a large reason for the success of the conference.
There are also ongoing plans to establish a chapter in Europe and initial discussions for India and China.
ISCA is held outside of North America every three years and virtually always has robust participation from the local community. Other sponsored conferences also follow a similar geographical balance.
We work closely with IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA). ISCA is co-sponsored with TCCA. We have a joint business meeting at ISCA where we discuss concerns common to the architecture community and develop consensus for future activities. We are working towards increasing this cooperation; e.g., we currently have a joint dissertation award proposal in progress.
We have overlap in interests with the HiPEAC organization in Europe. There is also overlap in leadership, but there is no formal collaboration yet.
SIGPLAN: Mike Hicks, [email protected] Oct 7, 2016
We are actively trying to increase activity in Asia. We have held several conferences there by now: ICFP in Nara, PLDI in Beijing, POPL in Mumbai. The most recent (ICFP'16 in Nara, Japan) set a record for attendance at ICFP overall. The ICFP steering committee would like to go to Asia at least once every five years. There is some interest in increasing activity in South America as well, but no conference scheduled to appear there, as yet.
Our travel grants are open worldwide and often are used for students from Asia and South America. SIGPLAN's PAC typically offers $100K or more in grants to SIGPLAN conferences annually.
As parallel organizations: ETAPS (Europe) -- conferences are ECOOP and ESOP. We cooperate frequently. For example PLDI and ECOOP have been colocated on multiple occasions; they are set to colocate in Barcelona next year.
SIGAI: Sven Koenig, [email protected], Oct 7, 2016
Most members in SIGAI are from the US, even though AI conferences are currently growing tremendously due to Asian (especially, Chinese) researchers increasing their paper presence at top AI conferences. For this reason, we are currently reaching out to a variety of countries, including China, India, Australia, etc.
SIGAI is supporting several conferences all over the world (both sponsored and in-cooperation conferences) and funds student travel to a variety of conferences.
There is another global organization that serves the AI community, namely AAAI (which, among other things, runs one of the top conferences in AI), with a membership ratio of roughly 3-4 to 1 in AAAI’s favor. Both organizations serve complementary purposes. ACM’s strength is is ability to easily reach out to computing professionals as a whole (and, I suspect, also to more computing professionals with a casual interest in AI), while AAAI aims to specifically represent AI professionals. Both organizations work together from time to time, for example, co-fund doctoral consortia and co-organize job markets in AI (although there is also some healthy competition among the organizations). Similar people are involved in leadership positions in both organizations.
SIGCAS: Mikey Goldweber, [email protected] Oct 7, 2016
Sadly, SIGCAS’s primary draw is in the English speaking world. In spite of the ubiquity of the area, inroads where English is not the primary language has been elusive. Two new (for us) initiatives may show progress on this>
We are finally getting into the conference business. The conference we are working towards has global representation on the conference committee.
We are assisting COPE in the reformulation of the ACM Code of Ethics. This is an opportunity for this Code to be seen in a global light and not just as an American artifact.
SIGMIS: Jeria Quesenberry, [email protected] Oct 7, 2016
SIGMIS supports the annual CPR conference which was held in Singapore and Ireland previously. The conference will be held in India in 2017 and Germany in 2019. The SIG also works to ensure members of these conference committees are largely drawn from the local area.
The CPR conference also draws global attendees and DC students. Travel grants are given to DC students (including those traveling from outside the US).
SIGMIS works closely with the Association of Information Systems (AIS) - we sponsor the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) doctoral consortium and also hold a reception at the conference. The conference is global - rotating from a US to a global location every other year.
SIGIR: Diane Kelly, [email protected], Oct 7, 2016
Our members are from all over the world and our flagship conference, SIGIR, rotates between North American, Europe and [places not in NA or Europe, e.g., Asia, Australia, South America).
Like many others, we have a large student travel grant program that supports students from all over the world. This includes support for students traveling to our flagship conference, as well as students traveling to our co-sponsored conferences. Also travel grants targeted toward increasing diversity (where student get to make the case for diversity).
Friends of SIGIR: we give grants of up to $5KUSD to groups from anywhere in the world to help them run events. These events include local conferences, workshops, summer schools, evaluation exercises. We have restrictions on how these can be used (e.g., to support students and keynote travel), but let the events decide how they will spend it.
We have a number of ‘in-cooperation’ conferences, most of which are hosted in places outside the US.
Our Executive Committee, and our other volunteers, are from all over the world. We have a policy that the PC Chairs of our conferences have geographic diversity. For SIGIR, there are three regional PC Chairs (Americas, Europe, Asia/Pacific).
We have just started a Student Liaison program and are using geographic diversity as a principle in determining composition.
SGB/SIGOPS: Jeanna Matthews, [email protected], October 7, 2016
I recall a shared challenge from a few years ago that I am not sure we resolved about the best way to deal with retirees. Best practices for reduced conference registration etc.
SIGOPS had a general best practice of having professional travel scholarships that could generally be used for people other than students. Could be faculty at teaching universities, professionals (academic and industrial) from under-represented areas of the world, retirees. The idea being - if you want to be at our conferences and are not coming because of funding, please tell us and we might be able to help. We’d rather hear a request and have to say no then never hear, especially when we have a healthy budget. Also easier to handle on a case by case basis than as a blanket policy that might be hard to sustain if the requests in any one category became too high.
SIGCHI: Helena Mentis, [email protected], October 7, 2016
Asian Development Committee: The Asian Development Committee is a part of executive committee. It’s mission is to promote the development of HCI in Asia, collaboration between SIGCHI and other HCI societies, and the integration of Asian HCI researchers and practitioners into the global HCI community. It has a representative from 5 countries/areas: India, Republic of Korea, Japan, China, South East Asia.
SIGACT: Paul Beame, [email protected], Nov 3, 2016
SIGACT does not have local/regional chapters. Conferences like PODC, SPAA, (previously SoCG) regularly alternate between North America and Europe (occasionally Asia) in the summer. The STOC conference was held in Europe (co-located with the usual European summer theory conference (ICALP), see below) in 2001 but has been in North America at all other times.
Areas of the world where there is the most activity on SIGACT topics
US & Canada
Europe
Israel
India
Japan
China
Parallel/Regional organizations to SIGACT
Within the IEEE Computer Society, the Technical Committee on Mathematics of Computing (TCMF), sponsors a parallel conference (FOCS) to SIGACT’s flagship conference to STOC which predates STOC by a decade. The TCMF also co-sponsors LICS with SIGLOG. There is a lot cooperation and the people involved are largely the same. The TCMF has virtually no organizational support and only 1-2 people involved so it is a much weaker organization than SIGACT. SIGACT and the TCMF co-sponsor the Knuth Prize and grant reciprocal member rates for conferences.
Within SIAM, the Activity Group on Discrete Mathematics works with SIGACT to co-sponsor a major conference (ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms).
The European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) is a long-standing organization that has run its own conferences (esp ICALP) and a semi-officially sponsored Elsevier journal (Theoretical Computer Science) since the 1970’s. EATCS co-sponsors the Goedel Prize with SIGACT. EATCS also has considerable overlap with SIGLOG.
There are other non-ACM organizations that are more associated with subjects that are contained within the purview of SIGACT. The International Association for Cryptology Research (IACR) sponsors a variety of conferences (Crypto, Eurocrypt, Asiacrypt). Most of the others are associated with individual conferences.