SIGecom FY'04 Annual Report
July 2003 - June 2004
Submitted by: Michael Wellman, SIGecom Chair
SIGecom's two primary activities are its annual conference and its electronic newsletter.
The Fifth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC-04) was held in May 2004, in New York City, in conjunction with the WWW Conference. The conference attracted 97 attendees, approximately the same as last year. In an effort to broaden coverage, this year we appointed two Program co-Chairs, one from an area of existing strength (Theory, in this instance), and one from an area we seek to increase representation (Systems, in this instance). The approached worked, increasing the breadth of papers while maintaining a very high level of quality.
Next year's Program co-Chairs, Michael Kearns (U Penn, Theory/AI) and Michael Reiter (CMU, Security/Systems), will continue this approach, and also likely move to grow the conference through an expanded poster program. The General Chair, John Riedl (U Minnesota), is currently in the process of site selection for EC-05.
Our newsletter, "SIGecom Exchanges".
The newsletter is published quarterly in electronic format, and distributed to members and others. Our Founding Editor, Peter Wurman, has completed his term of service after producing the newsletter for four years. Our new Editor-in-Chief, Amy Greenwald (Brown U), published her first issue in February, and second in July.
Our main challenge in the coming years continues to be broadening and expanding the SIG and the Conference. The ACM EC Conference has already established itself as the premier venue for research at the intersection of game theory and computer science, as related to economics and commerce (e.g., auctions and mechanism design). This is clearly the source of excitement at our gatherings, and the focus of the most active SIG constituency. However, we all recognize that this is a relatively narrow slice of the field of E-Commerce, and for the long-term vitality of the SIG we need to cover a broader scope. The 2004 conference reflected some broadening (e.g., many papers in the area of P2P commerce and incentives), and we look to make further progress next year.
Awards:
Best Student Paper Award: Ryan Porter, Stanford University
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