SIG Governing Board FY 2002 Annual Report

The SIGs overall member/subscriber count is 51,666 as compared to 51,285 in FY’01.

2.3 Membership Renewal Rates

Membership renewal rates are indicators of several realities, including 1) the degree to which members are satisfied with the services they are receiving as a result of membership and 2) the rate at which individuals are leaving the technical specialty.

3. New SIG Formation and Dissolution

No new SIGs were chartered during FY’02.

4. SIG Program Reviews and Annual Reports

4.1 Program Reviews

Every 4 years the SIG Chairs are required to provide a short presentation including a question and answer period during the SIG Chairs meeting. This presentation includes an outline of technical highlights, general direction of the SIG, and concerns for the next one to three years.

The SGB conducted 8 full program reviews during the year: 6 were deemed viable under existing criteria and at their request, 2 were granted a change in status and found viable. SIGUCCS was converted from multi-service to conference-only and SIGCAS was converted from multi-service to publication-only.

The following SIGs were found viable: SIGACT, SIGAda, SIGCSE, SIGDA, SIGGRAPH and SIGMETRICS.

The following SIGs remained or were placed in transition: SIGAPL, SIGAPP, SIGGROUP. SIGWEB was placed in transition and converted from a multi-service to a conference-only SIG.

4.2 Annual Reports

Annual reports for FY’02 were received from:

SIGACT, SIGAPL, SIGARCH, SIGART, SIGCAS, SIGCHI, SIGCOMM, SIGCSE, SIGDA, SIGDOC, SIGGRAPH, SIGIR, SIGKDD, SIGMIS, SIGMM, SIGMOD, SIGOPS, SIGPLAN, SIGSAC, SIGSOFT, SIGUCCS, SIGWEB.

Annual reports for FY’02 were not received from:

SIGAda, SIGAPP, SIGCAPH, SIGecom, SIGGROUP, SIGMETRICS, SIGMICRO, SIGMOBILE, SIGSAM, SIGSIM, SIGSOUND

5. SIG Technical Highlights

The strength of the SIGs lies in their technical excellence. Once again we have seen a continued growth in conferences, improvements in publications, innovations in many areas, expansion of the awards program, increased attention to educational activities and increased cooperative efforts among the SIGs. The following excerpts from the FY’02 SIG Annual Reports detail only some of the outstanding activities going on in the SIG Community. I urge you to review the individual SIG Annual reports, which can be found in Appendix D.

5.1 Electronic Community

The SIG-IRList is a SIGIR-sponsored electronic newsletter, (http://www.acm.org/sigir/sigirlist/).  The IRList provides a regular newsletter of IR information and nicely compliments the archival publication SIGIR Forum.  The SIG-IRList contains job announcements, notices of publications, conferences, workshops, calls for participation, and project announcements.
This year SIGGRAPH added some important new sections to its site, including the Conference Advisory Group site,  an expanded CD-related Links section, and a selection of computer graphics news items, obtained via an agreement with Computer Graphics World magazine.
SIGCAS is in the process of transforming itself from a traditional multi-service SIG into a new online community. They believe that this form has the potential to reach a far broader audience than our current membership. The most important innovation has been the proposal for Computers and Society to become an ACM online magazine instead of a SIG-only “newsletter.” The ACM Publications Board approved this proposal in July 2002, with rollout of the new publication scheduled for September. 

5.2 Publications

SIGACT  reports that significant papers in new research areas dealing with problems inspired by the  Internet have been published in proceedings. These papers include structural studies of the web, routing strategies for web traffic, and strategies for pricing digital goods. The latter two have introduced ideas from  game theory and mathematical economics into the TCS (Theoretical Computer Science) literature.

SIGARCH has planned a major initiative in digital publication, modeled on efforts by

SIGMOD, to collect digitized versions of as much of the literature in computer architecture as it  could and issue the collection on a series of CD-ROMS or DVD-ROMS. They would like to include all SIGARCH-sponsored publications as a start, as well as publications from other ACM organizations, such as the MICRO conference sponsored by SIGMICRO. They finally obtained permission from the IEEE Computer Society to include some of its architecture-related publications this year.

SIGCSE is particularly excited by the June 2002 issue of inroads, a special issue on

Women and Computing. This extended issue included an impressive array of new articles, re-prints, and editorials, framing the topic and providing resource material for educators. This issue was circulated well beyond the SIGCSE membership.  SIGCSE received funding grants for distribution from ACM Council, ACM-W, the SIG Project Fund (with co-sponsorship by SIGCSE, SIGGRAPH, and SIGDA), a separate contribution by SIGDA and SIGCOMM, and Microsoft.  An NSF grant allowed 5,000 copies to be distributed to K-12 teachers at NECC.

SIGDA continued to produce a CDROM compendium of SIGDA-sponsored conferences as a benefit for SIGDA members.
SIGMIS requested proposals and appointed new co-editors of its newsletter, Data Base.

5.3 Technical Meetings

The Twenty Fourth Annual ACM SIGIR International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR’01) was held in New Orleans, LA . This was a successful meeting in which 46 full papers, 32 posters, and 9 demonstrations were presented.  In addition, there was a strong program of 8 tutorials preceding the meeting, and a varied workshop program following the meeting.  There were 360 attendees for the main conference, 217 for workshops and 153 for tutorials.

CIKM'01, the Tenth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, was co-sponsored by SIGIR and SIGMIS (http://www.cikm.org/2001/).  The 2001 meeting was held in Atlanta, GA USA. CIKM has a strong focus on databases in combination with information retrieval and management techniques.  This year there was good representation of new work on web databases and structured data. The conference continues to improve in quality and provide a bridge between the database and information retrieval communities.

SIGPLAN continues to co-locate some of their smaller conferences (LCTES, PPoPP, PPDP this year) with the larger ones in order to minimize local arrangements overhead.  They also directly sponsored 13 workshops this year (excluding OOPSLA workshops), all of which were co-located with their conferences.

SIGCSE 2002 set a new record with over 1,100 attendees.  The main symposium now extends three full days (Thursday, Friday, and Saturday) with plenary sessions, papers, panels, special sessions, birds-of-a-feather sessions, and both faculty and student posters.  Workshops and SIGCSE's Doctoral Consortium provide activities before and/or afterward, extending some activities from Wednesday through Sunday morning.  Special activities were organized for students and for first-timers.

SIGGRAPH 2001 was held in Los Angeles, California, and chaired by Lynn Pocock. It drew almost 34,000 attendees, with a technical attendance of over 7,600 and had 300 exhibitors. The Conference Advisory Group is seeking to reach out to other technical communities and to increase the presence of games and interactive techniques in the annual conference.

ACM Multimedia 2001 (MM’01) was held in Ottawa Canada. Total attendance was 199.  The accept ratio was 16% overall (45 accepted from 277 submissions). The number of submissions increased approximately 30% over MM’00 and MM’02 submissions were up over 15% over MM’01. The interest in multimedia research is clearly growing.

SIGOPS launched a new award at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), its flagship conference, in Banff, Canada last October. The participants were impressed by the excellent technical program. The Mark Weiser award was inaugurated at this SOSP. Frans Kaashoek of MIT was the first recipient. Future awards will be presented at OSDI and SOSP each year.

The SIGCOMM conference continues to be to be innundated with submissions and its acceptance rate now hovers at about 10%.  The conference is now listed by CiteSeer as the ACM publication with the highest impact rating (which measures the average number of citations per paper).
The Fall User Services Conference (SIGUCCS) was held October 17-20 in Portland, Oregon.  The theme was “Bridging the Gap: Technology, Service and You".  390 people attended the conference, with tutorial registration at 195. 74 papers were published in the proceedings, which were made available in both hard copy and CD Rom format.

SIGWEB's HT’02, held at the University of Maryland, College Park from June 11 to 15, 2002, was fairly small, but a larger number than usual were students, so they appear to have attracted new attendees. There was also a good international turnout.

5.4 Professional Recognition/Awards

5.5 Educational Programs and Special Projects

In 1999 SIGACT started a program of STOC Student Travel Awards, in which $10,000 is given annually to support student attendance at STOC. This year we are adding STOC Developing Country Travel Awards. These will be given to faculty and researchers from developing countries, who are STOC authors or who are  contributing to the STOC conference in some other capacity. We are allocating $5,000 annually to this program. The first awards will be for STOC 03. These will be an experiment -- the program may be discontinued if is not achieving the desired effect.

In order to increase the breadth of perspectives and approaches represented at SIGIR, a mentoring program was introduced, keynote speakers from related disciplines chosen, and student travel support was increased. In another effort to increase the breadth of work represented in SIGIR, we offered a Mentoring Program to assist authors who have not previously had a full length paper accepted to SIGIR.  The program was great success with 16 participants during its first year and will be repeated in 2002. A growing amount of student travel to SIGIR is supported by SIGIR.

In conjunction with representatives of the Association for Information Technology Professionals (AITP) and the Association for Information Systems (AIS), SIGMIS has been involved in the development of model curriculum for education in information systems both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The latest version of the undergraduate curriculum, IS'02, is expected to be published in 2002.

SIGARCH and the SC Steering Committee have agreed that future profits from SC'XY will be in large part returned to the SC community, in the form of a series of large project-oriented grants (to be matched by the other sponsor of SC'XY, the IEEE Computer Society). For SC 2000 and SC 2001, SIGARCH supported the funding of a 2-year program to invest in improving the conference's outreach to teachers and students from under-served populations. For 2002 and 2003 we are in the process of funding two similar but different programs for SC.

SIGPLAN continued providing $50K to OOPSLA to sponsor travel and attendance of professors from 2-4 year colleges at the tutorials and conference. They also instituted a housing scholarship program for OOPSLA which makes it easier for academic faculty to attend the conference.

SIGCSE encourages membership through its conference registration fee structure, and 97 new members joined with their attendance at SIGCSE 2001.

SIGGRAPH has developed a reusable online survey system, and emailed 1200 randomly selected members in February 2002. After failed emails, about 21% responded. Some results were:
- Only about 10% of respondents identified themselves as artists or animators
- The most highly rated membership benefit was access to the past SIGGRAPH proceedings (which is implemented via the ACM Digital Library)
- The most highly rated potential future benefit is the SIGGRAPH Online recordings of conference sessions

SIGKDD sponsors the KDD Cup contest at KDD conferences. Many teams participate in this contest to determine the best data mining techniques against  a large real-world dataset and a data mining objective. Participants have included corporations and university teams. This contest has become a hallmark of KDD  conferences, and provides credence to existing best practices and an impetus for further R&D efforts.

One specific new initiative for SIGDA this year was the SIGDA Monthly Conference Planner.

Based on a similar planner published by the IEEE/CS TTTC, the Monthly Planner is a small (5”x8”) 40-page brochure to help the design automation community plan their activities with respect to submitting papers to, and attending, design automation conferences.  Calendars for each month list the submission deadlines during that month, as well as more detailed information for conferences held that month .

SIGCHI has been aggressively working on outreach to the design community. The early results of this have been very promising: at CHI 2002 SIGCHI held a design forum, co-sponsored and co-organized with AIGA; the event was very successful. Also, SIGCHI is planning a “spin-off” conference from its DIS conference (Designing Interactive Systems) called DUX (Designing the User Experience), which is also directed at bridging the gap between the design community and the core of the SIGCHI community.

5.6 International Activities

An important initiative that SIGSOFT has engaged in is the Impact Project, whose goals are to conduct a scholarly assessment of the impact of software engineering research on software engineering practice, and to provide a roadmap for future research funding. SIGSOFT obtained a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to partially fund the activities of the group.  The principal investigator of the grant is the SIGSOFT Chair, Alexander Wolf.  This is a truly international collaboration, with participation from researchers and practitioners from across the world.  In addition, the British IEE has provided a grant to support European participation. The Impact project can provide a blueprint for how other ACM SIGs can conduct similar assessments.

ACM SIGGRAPH supported Afrigraph 2001 and the Spring Conference in Computer Graphics held in Slovakia. The Afrigraph conference, held in Cape Town in November 2001, was the result of the successful ACM SIGGRAPH-Eurographics mission to Southern Africa in March 2001. The organisation for the next conference is already well under way, with the next event scheduled for February 2002 (See www.afrigraph.org).
SIGMOD has been attempting to be more international by establishing close relationships with societies in China (CCF DBS), Europe (EDBT, ICDT, Moscow ACM SIGMOD Chapter), andthe far east (SIGMOD Japan Chapter). There are ongoing efforts to establish similar linkages with Latin American countries (a Latin American Liaison Committee has been formed). There is an ongoing library donation program that is international in scope and $5000 per year has been allocated to facilitate the attendance to the SIGMOD Conference by influential researchers in eastern Europe.

5.7 Collaborative Efforts

SIGACT's STOC 01 (July 2001) was colocated with ICALP and SPAA, in Crete, Greece.

Colocation and meeting in Europe for the first time in 33 years will help with new collaborations and cross fertilizations. In the same spirit STOC 03 will be part of the FCRC.

SIGAPL is participating in an effort to bring different array programming groups together, to increase our visibility and make it easier to reach critical mass. It may also make sense to look at what other groups are doing in this area as we move towards FCRC.

SIGSOFT has begun two new co-sponsoring relationships.  One with the IEEE Computer Society on the UML conference series and the other with ACM SIGMETRICS on the WOSP workshop series.  The first UML co-sponsored event is planned for Dresden, Germany, in September 2002.  The second WOSP co-sponsored event is planned for Rome, Italy, in July 2002.

In addition to working closely with Eurographics, the Japanese Computer Graphics and Art Society (CG-ARTS), the Digital Content Association of Japan (DCAj), and Nordic Interactive, ACM SIGGRAPH has also been developing relationships with other computer graphics associations. A new co-operation agreement with the China Society of Image and Graphics (CSIG) was signed in Hangzhou, China and new agreements with the Independent Game Developers Association (IGDA), International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA), the Swedish Computer Graphics Society (SIGRAD) and Imagina are due to be signed at SIGGRAPH 2002.

SIGCOMM is currently in discussions with IFIP to hold a follow up workshop to its successful Latin American Data Communications workshop held in the spring of 2001. They expect to hold the workshop again in 2003.

Appendix A: SIGFY’02 Membership and Technical Activity Summary

Appendix B: SIG FY’02 Financial Summary

Appendix C: SIG FY’02 Conference Summary

Appendix D: Appendix D: Individual SIG Reports July 01 - June 02