SIG Governing Board Annual Report

Submitted by: Alan Berenbaum, Chair

1. Governance

1.1 The SIG Governing Board (SGB)

The SGB is comprised of the chief executive officer or designee of each regular SIG. The SGB is charged with forming SIGs, with managing them and setting policies for their management, and with recommending their dissolution. The SGB elects a Chair, Executive Committee and 3 additional representatives to Council.

1.2 The SGB EC

The SGB elects a Chair and an Executive Committee, which has full authority to act on behalf of the SGB between its meetings. The SGB EC is bound by the SGB's actions and the SGB may override any decision of the SGB EC. The SGB EC is made up of the following positions:

• SGB Chair
• SGB Past Chair
• Vice Chair for Operations - Presides over SGB meeting, including SGB EC conference calls
• Vice Chair for SIG Development - Identifies emerging technical areas, oversees transitional SIGs, the SGB Information Director, SGB committees, and SIG Liaisons to ACM Boards.
• Secretary - Acts as elections advisor, policy advisor and financial and budgetary advisor
• Conference Advisor - Oversees issues related to conferences as directed by the SGB
• Large SIG Advisor - Acts as liaison for large SIG issues
• Small SIG Advisor - Acts as liaison for small SIG issues
• Publications Advisor - Acts as liaison between SGB and Publications Board
• Director of SIG Services - Staff liaison

During FY'03 the following individuals held the positions indicated:

Name	Position	Term End
Alan Berenbaum	Chair	July 1, 2004
Alain Chesnais	Past Chair	July 1, 2004
Rob Corless	Conference Advisor	July 1, 2003
Hal Gabow	Vice Chair for SIG Development	July 1, 2004
Kathy Haramundanis	Small SIG Advisor	July 1, 2003
Bruce Klein	Vice Chair for Operations	July 1, 2004
Fred Niederman	Secretary	July 1, 2003
Robert Walker	Large SIG Advisor	July 1, 2004
Tamer Ozsu	Publications Advisor	January 1, 2005
Donna Baglio	Staff Liaison

 

1.3 Council Representatives

The SGB elects 3 representatives to the ACM council for two-year terms.

During FY'02 the following individuals held the ACM Council positions indicated:

 

Name	Position	Term End
Alan Berenbaum	SGB Chair	July 1, 2004
Jim Cohoon	SGB Representative	July 1, 2003
Stuart Feldman	SGB Representative	July 1, 2004
Mark Scott Johnson	SGB Representative	July 1, 2003

 

1.4 Standing Committees

The SGB is responsible for the oversight of the Federated Computing Research Conference Steering Committee.

Barbara Ryder chaired the FCRC'03 Conference Committee. As Past Chair of the FCRC'99 conference committee, David Johnson was the event's Steering Committee Chair. The conference was held from June 7-14 at the Town and Country Hotel in San Diego. Ryder worked with staff liaison Baglio on administrative details. The conferences that participated included:

• APL 2003: Array Programming Language Conference
• CRAW: CRAW Mentoring Workshop
• EC'03: The Fourth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
• LCTES: ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems
• ISCA: International Symposium on Computer Architecture (Affiliated Workshops: WCED03, NSC-2, VPW1, WCAE, Self-Manage '03, WDDD-2)
• MOD/PODS: ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2003 Conference (Affiliated Workshops: WebDB, DMKD, DEBS, MPDS2003)
• PLDI: ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (Affiliated Workshops: PEPM, IVME)
• PPoPP: ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming
• PADS: Parallel and Distributed Simulation Workshop
• PCK50: Principles of Computing and Knowledge: Paris C. Kanellakis Memorial Workshop
• SAS: Static Analysis Symposium 2003
• SCG: Annual ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry
• ACM SIGMETRICS: International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (Affiliated Workshops: Self-Manage '03)
• SPAA: ACM Annual Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures
• STOC: Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing
• SOFTVIS: ACM Symposium on Software Visualization

FCRC'03 had record attendance of 2,400+ and a standing room only crowd for all plenary sessions. The technical program for each affiliated conference was independently administered, with each responsible for its own meeting's structure, content, and proceedings. The affiliated conference committees are to be commended for putting together exceptionally strong, interlinking technical programs. To the extent facilities allowed, attendees were free to attend technical sessions of other affiliated conferences being held at the same time as their "home" conference. Proceedings from other affiliated conferences were available for purchase on-site. Most conference exceeded attendance expectations.

1.5 SIG Project Fund

$50,000 in support was made available for travel grants for faculty at minority/female institutions to attend FCRC'03. The proposal was submitted by Barbara Ryder, FCRC'03 conference chair and supported by: SIGPLAN, SIGARCH, SIGSOFT.

The following information summarizes the submitted project: In an effort to improve the representation of women and minorities in computer science and engineering, the organizing committee of FCRC 2003 proposes a Faculty Travel Support Program to support faculty actively involved with the education of women and minorities to attend constituent conferences of FCRC 2003. Targeted schools will include primarily undergraduate institutions, including historically African American colleges, women's colleges, and other colleges with large minority enrollments. By strengthening faculty knowledge of recent research trends and results, we hope to improve the quality of computer science and engineering courses at these institutions, and thereby interest individuals from these underrepresented groups to consider a career in our field.

Travel support for fifty educators, who may not otherwise have sufficient institutional funding to attend, is being requested from the SIG Project Fund under the sponsorship of ACM SIGPLAN. The constituent FCRC meetings will pay the registration fees for those supported faculty who choose to attend their conference.

1.6 Miscellaneous Appointments

The SGB liaisons are either the Chairs of the corresponding ACM Board or Committee or have joint appointments with the corresponding ACM Board or Committee. This includes the Education Advisor, the Publications Board Liaison, the Membership Activities Board Liaison and the Awards Committee Liaison.

 

Name	Position	Term End
Peter Denning	Education Board Liaison	July 1, 2004
David Arnold	Membership Board Liaison	July 1, 2003
Tamer Oszu	Publications Board Liaison	January 1, 2005

1.7 SGB Nominating Committee

The SGB Nominating Committee nominates candidates for the SGB EC, in addition to nominating candidates for SGB Chair and SGB Representatives to ACM Council. The nominating committee:

 

Name	Position	Term End
Alain Chesnais	Past SGB Chair	July 1, 2004
Alan Berenbaum	SGB Chair	July 1, 2004
Donna Baglio	Staff Liaison

2. SIGs and SIG Membership

Appendix B summarizes basic SIG Statistics for FY'03. Included are member and subscriber totals, newsletter and proceedings activity, and conference involvement.

2.1 Membership Counts by class of membership:

		FY'01		FY'02		FY'03
ACM/SIG Members		41,542		40,667		38,754
SIG Only Members		5,461		6,820		8,064
Subscribers		4,282		4,179		3,272
Total SIG Memb/Subs		51,285		51,666		50,090
Total ACM Members		73,816		69,547		73,709

The SIGs overall member/subscriber count is 50,090 as compared to 51,666 in FY'02.

2.2 Membership Gains and Losses

Most Significant Membership Gain					Most Significant Membership Loss
SIG	# New Members				SIG	# Lost Members
GRAPH		1,390			GRAPH		1,621
CHI		967			CHI		1,238
CSE		441			KDD		723
SOFT		433			ART		516
IR		370			SOFT		499

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.

The SIGs with the highest renewal rates are:			The SIGs with the lowest renewal rates are:
APL	87%		KDD	46%
ARCH	84%		APP	46%
Ada	82%		Ecom	54%
PLAN	81%		DOC	61%
SAM	80%		UCCS	62%

3. New SIG Formation and Dissolution

2 new SIGs were chartered during FY'02 with an official start date of July 1, 2003.

Embedded Systems SIGBED

SIGBED is intended to be a focal point within ACM for all aspects of embedded computing systems, including both software and hardware. Embedded systems has come to be recognized as a key discipline, which includes new computer and systems science foundations, new design technology, and new hardware and software frameworks. Members of the SIGBED community serve on the editorial board of ACM's publication, ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems.

Information Technology Education SIGITE

SIGITE's mission is to provide a forum for the interaction of practitioners, educators and others in the field of Information Technology Education to exchange ideas and engage in activities that advance the knowledge of its members, the curriculum and teaching of information Technology and the development and transfer of innovative concepts and applications in teaching and pedagogy.

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 7 full program reviews during the year: SIGARCH, SIGCHI, SIGCOMM, SIGMICRO, SIGMIS, SIGPLAN and SIGSIM were deemed viable under existing criteria.

The following SIGs remained in transition: SIGAPP, SIGCAPH, SIGGROUP and SIGWEB.

4.2 Annual Reports

Annual reports for FY'03 were received from:

SIGACT, SIGAda, SIGARCH, SIGART, SIGCAS, SIGCHI, SIGCOMM, SIGCSE, SIGDA, SIGDOC, SIGecom, SIGGRAPH, SIGGROUP, SIGIR, SIGKDD, SIGMETRICS, SIGMICRO, SIGMIS, SIGMM, SIGMOD, SIGOPS, SIGPLAN, SIGSAC, SIGSAM, SIGSIM, SIGSOFT, SIGUCCS, SIGWEB.

Annual reports for FY'03 were not received from:

SIGAPL, SIGAPP, SIGCAPH, SIGMOBILE, 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'03 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

SIGMICRO is continuing to provide free online access to IA-64 and S/390 machines to researchers and educators. More details are on our web page www.acm.org/sigmicro.

SIGPLAN's conferences, PLDI, ASPLOS, POPL and PPoPP appear in the Citeseer top 15 of more than 1200 Computer Science publication venues, based on their citation rates.

SIGMOD has been aggressive in putting its materials on the Web; at this time all of SIGMOD's materials: almost 30 years of conference proceedings and newsletter issues, and video from the last few plenary sessions, are on the Web.

SIGACT began a review and improvement of PC software this spring. The current software support for their program committees is widely used by the theory community at large, but is not as helpful as it could be. A committee is investigating the alternatives of paying for an upgrade to their own software or using a vendor's.

SIGMETRICS is exploring approaches to improve services offered to its members; one such example is the addition of the PE Grad Student Database on its web page, which includes a database of students in performance evaluation who are graduating and looking for academic and industrial jobs.

5.2 Publications

SIGCHI continues to make progress on publications issues. This year, they have been working with the ACM Publications Board to investigate integration of video material into the ACM Digital Library. Their bi-monthly newsletter, the SIGCHI Bulletin, was moved online and integrated more closely with the SIGCHI web site to remove duplicative efforts.

Two new initiatives this year were SIGDA's E-Newsletter and DA TechNews. After existing for years in hardcopy format, the SIGDA Newsletter went electronic this fiscal year, under the direction of a new editor and several associate editors. The new E-Newsletter is emailed to SIGDA members twice each month, and contains information on upcoming conferences and funding opportunities - a great resource for both the electronic design automation professional as well as researchers and academics. Information on Asian activities is also included. A second new foray into electronic publishing this fiscal year was the DA TechNews, modeled on ACM's TechNews, the DA TechNews is emailed to SIGDA members twice each month, and contains a summary of the latest electronic design automation news.

SIGIR has been active in digitizing content so members can easily access materials from the SIGIR Proceedings and Forum. The Proceedings of all SIGIR conference from 1978 to present are available electronically in the ACM Digital Library. In addition, all issues of the SIGIR Forum from 1974 to the present have been digitized. The SIGIR'02 meeting marked the 25th Annual SIGIR Meeting. To honor that occasion they prepared CDs of the 25 years of proceedings. The CDs were distributed to all conference attendees and all SIGIR members.

The major SIGCAS activity for 2003 involved a combination of publication, technical innovation, and organizational change. This was its first year as a publication-only SIG Computers and Society, moved from print-only form to online-only form. SIGCAS was assisted in this by a generous grant from the SGB EC, which provided for the startup costs including customization of existing ACM software. To increase the visibility within ACM of this publication, it was also proposed that it be designated an ACM online magazine (similar to eLearn), although it continues to be edited, staffed, and written by SIGCAS volunteers. The ACM Publications Board concurred with this recommendation.

5.3 Technical Meetings

SIGMICRO is aiming to expand its conference portfolio with new high quality conferences. They have gone from 1 conference (MICRO) to 4 conferences recently (MICRO, CASES, CGO, CF). The attendees of MICRO-35 (http://www.microarch.org/micro35) had a great time in Istanbul, Turkey, from November 18 to 22, 2002. Total attendance reached 213, despite the global difficulties during that time period. MICRO-35 received support from 11 different organizations, and featured outstanding keynote speakers. SIGMICRO also created a new "Student Advocate" position among the conference officers, to ensure that students were well-represented in all aspects of the conference. Many student paper awards, a record amount of travel grants were given. 150 papers were submitted (a record for MICRO), and 36 were accepted. MICRO-35 also resulted in a good surplus.

SIGCSE's annual summer conference takes place in Europe and emphasizes Information Technology in Computer Science Education. This year's ITiCSE 2002 took place in June at the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece. Expanding the regular three-day (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday) format, several tutorials were on Sunday and Thursday. In addition, four working groups met concurrently with conference activities to produce reports on special topics. The conference was thrilled to have keynote addresses by Donald Knuth and Christos Papadimitriou.

SIGUCCS sponsored the thirtieth spring Computer Services Management Symposium (CSMS) from March 30 through April 1, 2003 in a new location, Monterey CA. The change in venue was designed to attract a wider constituency. Plans are now in place for this conference to move to alternate locations across the country to fulfill this goal. The conference was constructed as a series of plenary sessions, facilitated discussion groups and evaluated papers.

CHI 2003, while suffering from the same attendance issues plaguing almost all conferences this year, was a successful conference with a strong technical program, including a highly selective papers program. 2003 also saw the introduction of a new conference, DUX (Designing the User Experience), co-sponsored with SIGGRAPH and AIGA. SIGCHI also had successful offerings in the continuing series of DIS, UIST, IUI, and CSCW conferences, as well as our other specialized conferences. SIGCHI works to keep a high quality bar on all of its conferences and place the proceedings from all those conferences into the Digital Library - two reasons why SIGCHI's contributions to the DL are the most frequently downloaded of any ACM SIG.

For the coming year, SIGOPS has created two new conferences. Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI) is cosponsored with SIGCOMM and USENIX, and SenSys is cosponsored with SIGCOMM, SIGMOBILE, SIGARCH, and SIGMETRICS.

SIGDOC reports that submissions to its conferences come from both academia and industry, and attendees express the view that SIGDOC conferences are popular with them because of their intellectual stimulation and the availability to have direct discussions with speakers, opportunities that are rare at larger conferences.

SIGGRAPH 2002 was held July 21-26 in San Antonio, Texas. It drew over 17,000 people from 70 countries with a paid technical attendance of over 5,600. There were over 225 exhibitors occupying 82,000 square feet of space. There were record numbers of technical papers submissions and computer animation submissions. The new Web Graphics program was very well received by attendees. Attendees learned techniques for developing graphics for the Web so they can take advantage of its artistic, commercial, and personal potential. The Computer Animation Festival jury selected "The Cathedral" as the Best Animated Short and this film was later nominated for an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences award for best animated short film. This was the first time that an animated film that had debuted at SIGGRAPH was nominated.

SIGecom's 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 its 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. Toward this end, we are co-locating EC-04 with the World-Wide Web Conference (WWW-04, in NYC in May).

From its inception, SIGSAC's CCS has established itself as among the very best research conferences in security. This reputation continues to grow and is reflected in high quality and prestige of the program. The 2003 Conference introduced several innovations. It received a record 260 submissions (up 70% from last year's 153 submissions) from which a record 37 papers have been selected. The Workshop Program, the new Industry Track and the new Tutorial format have all been very successful.

SIGCOMM's Internet Measurement Workshop was held for a second year and is already drawing a large number of submissions. Its success has led to it become a conference in 2003.

ACM Multimedia 2002 (MM02) was held in Juan Les Pins, France from December 1-6, 2002. Total attendance was 226. This year, the student best paper competition was changed. It was modified to include both the paper and the presentation at the conference. Three nominees for best paper were selected. Each student gave his or her presentation during a special highlighted session of the conference. An awards committee made up of senior researchers in the field met afterwards to select the winner. Feedback from the community was extremely positive about this change to the competition. SIGMM plans to continue this organization in future ACM Multimedia Conferences.

The Twenty-Fifth Annual ACM SIGIR International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR'02 (http://www.info.uta.fi/sigir2002/) was held in Tampere, Finland from Aug 11-15. The meeting featured a strong technical program, 2 keynote addresses given during the conference, 8 tutorials preceding the meeting, and 6 workshops on emerging topics and trends following the meeting. There were 337 attendees for the main conference, and more than 100 each for workshops and tutorials. The conference was successful financially as well, returning $30k to SIGIR.

The KDD-2002 conference included 6 tutorials and 6 workshops. The workshops were on data mining in bioinformatics, web mining, multimedia data mining, multi-relational data mining, temporal data mining, and fractals in data mining. The tutorials were on text mining for bioinformatics, querying and mining data streams, link analysis, multivariate density estimation, common reasons data mining projects fail, and visual data mining.

The SIGMOD conference continues to be very well attended. Paid attendance this year was 518, almost identical to last year's number of 525. In a list of the most referenced papers, papers from the SIGMOD conference appeared more often than any other conference, and more often than any journal except the ACM Transactions on Database Systems. SIGMOD Conference papers continue to be among the most popular downloadsfrom ACM Digital Library. This year, there was a significant increase in submissions, which necessitated accepting 11 more papers than last year in order to maintain our target acceptance rate of around 15%.

5.4 Professional Recognition/Awards

Sponsors	Award	Awardee
ACT	Godel Prize	Yoav Freund Robert Schapire
	Donald E. Knuth Prize for Outstanding Contributions to  The Foundations of Computer Science	Miklos Ajtai
	Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award	Thomas Hayes
Ada	SIGAda Outstanding Ada Community Contributions	Martin Carlisle, Robert Duff, Hal Hart, Andy Wellings
	SIGAda Distinguished Service Award	David Cook, John McCormick,  Thomas Panfil, Jean Sammet
ARCH	The Eckert-Mauchly Award (co-sponsored with IEEE CS)	Josh Fisher
	Maurice Wilkes Award	Dirk Mayer
	Influential ISCA Paper	Jean-Loup Baer, Wen-Hann Wang
ART	Autonomous Agents Research Award	Nick Jennings
CAS	SIGCAS 2003 Making a Difference Award	James Moor
	SIGCAS 2003 Outstanding Service Award	Richard Epstein
CHI	CHI Lifetime Achievement Award	John Carroll
	CHI Lifetime Service Award	Lorraine Borman
COMM	2002 SIGCOMM Lifetime Achievement Award	Scott Shenker
CSE	SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education	Eric Roberts
	The SIGCSE Lifetime Service Award	Harriet Taylor
DA	ACM/IEEE William J. McCalla ICCAD Best Paper Award	Andrea Pacelli, Prabhakar Kudva, William Dougherty, Andrew Sullivan
	Distinguished Service Award	James Plusquellicha
	Technical Leadership Award	Diana Marculescu
DOC	Joseph T. Rigo Award	Stephen Doheny-Farina
	Diana Award	Worldwide Web Consortium
GRAPH	2002 SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award	David Kirk
	2002 SIGGRAPH Outstanding Service Award	Bertram Herzog
	Significant New Researcher Award	Steven J. Gortler
KDD	SIGKDD Innovation Award	Jerome Friedman
	SIGKDD Services Award	Ramasamy Uthurusamy
METRICS	SIGMETRICS Achievement Award	E.G. Coffman, Jr.
OPS	Mark Weiser Award	Mendel Rosenblum
	Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing	Maurice Herlihy
PLAN	Distinguished Service Award	Mary Lou Soffa
	Programming Languages Achievement Award	John Reynolds
SOFT	ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award	Axel van Lamsweerde
	Outstanding Research Award	Leon Osterweil
UCCS	SIGUCCS Penny Crane Award	John Bucher
WEB	Vannevar Bush Award	Barbara M. Wildemuth, Gary Marchionini, Meng Yang, Gary Geisler, Todd Wilkens, Anthony Hughes, Richard Gruss

5.5 Educational Programs and Special Projects

STOC 03 initiated the STOC Developing Country Travel Awards. These are a new supplement to the ongoing program of STOC Student Travel Awards. The new awards are meant for faculty and researchers from developing countries, who are STOC authors or are otherwise contributing to the STOC conference. A maximum of $5,000 is to be awarded for each conference. Three awards were given this year.

In its fourth year, a doctorial symposium was held at Multimedia 2002 (SIGMM) at which students working on their dissertation gave a presentation to members of the research community. Five students were selected from the eight submissions to present their research. As in past years, both attendees and presenters were extremely positive about this program.

The focus of the strategic planning this year has been to develop the notion of the ACM SIGGRAPH website as a graphics hub, from which visitors should be able to find all computer graphics related material available on the web. Access to the site will be different based on the level of membership of an individual user. Non members will be able to browse a subset of the site, but will not be able to access everything and will not be able to post to the site. Chapter members will get the ability to post to forums and access more of the site than non members. Full members will get the maximum level of access, including extra services such as e-mail forwarding and possibly web page hosting as well.

The Design Automation Conference (sponsored by SIGDA, IEEE/CAS, and EDAC) fosters interest in the electronic design automation though various scholarships and support programs. The P.O. Pistilli Scholarship for Advancement in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering supports undergraduate students from under-represented groups. The DAC Young Student Support Program matches new graduate students in design automation with mentors from other schools. The DAC Graduate Scholarships provide 3-5 graduate students with one-year support, primarily from universities trying to establish a design automation program.

SIGARCH has, for several years, contemplated a major publication project of the collected literature on computer architecture. In 2003 SIGARCH will issue a DVD-ROM containing all the ISCA proceedings from 1973. They are also collecting material from all SIGARCH-sponsored conferences in 2003, including both proceedings and presentation materials, with the intention of issuing a compilation optical disc early in 2004.

SIGIR offers a Mentoring Program to assist authors who have not previously had a full length paper accepted to SIGIR. Seventeen papers were submitted for mentorship, and the program was viewed as a success by both mentors and mentee. Two mentored papers were accepted, and the program was continued in 2003. A growing amount of student travel to SIGIR is supported by SIGIR in its budget, by contributions from the 1998 SIGIR conference in Melbourne, and by an IBM student travel grant. Twenty six students from North America, South America, Europe, Middle East and Asia received support to attend the 2002 meeting. The submissions, attendance and awards all reflect a strong international and student participation in SIGIR. To further encourage student participation and growth, SIGIR will introduce a Doctoral Forum program next year in which students explore their research interests in a workshop under the guidance of a panel of distinguished researchers.

Over the past year, SIGCSE initiated a new program of Special Project Grants to help its members investigate and introduce new ideas in the learning and teaching of computing. Last year, the first four awards were distributed.

The Seventh SIGART/AAAI Doctoral Consortium (DC) was held in conjunction with the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2002), which took place in July 2002 in Edmonton, Canada. The DC provided an opportunity for 13 Ph.D. students to discuss and explore their research interests and career objectives with a panel of established AI researchers.

SIGSOFT continues to make an increasing number of travel awards to students to support their attendance at SIGSOFT-sponsored conferences, under its CAPS (Conference Attendance Program for Students) program. During this fiscal year, over $13,000 were provided in CAPS travel support, representing approximately a 25% increase over the previous fiscal year. The percentage of female CAPS awardees significantly increased as well. Another effort intended to broaden participation at SIGSOFT conferences is a new program, INDINET, which is being developed by an executive committee member. The goal of the program is to bring greater numbers of women and underrepresented faculty minorities to conferences as a means to "network" and, hopefully, increase their numbers. An NSF proposal is being developed to establish the program.

SIGMOD/PODS Conferences -These continue to be very successful and highly regarded events. The conferences will be in Europe for the first time in 2004. SIGMOD has also created a Conference Coordinator position to provide continuity in the organization of the conference from year-to-year.

Since 1994 SIGAda has conducted an "Ada Awareness Initiative". Its centerpiece has been the SIGAda professional booth display unit in exhibition halls at important software engineering conferences, such as OOPSLA, STC, SIGCSE and ESC-West. Via this exhibiting, SIGAda sustains Ada visibility and provides various Ada-advocacy materials, and makes available Ada experts (booth staff volunteers) who can answer questions. This program has been extremely successful.

5.6 International Activities

SIGGRAPH reports that twelve chapters were chartered this year - six student chapters and six professional chapters - which bring the total number of chapters to sixty-nine chapters in seventeen countries around the world - sixteen student chapters and fifty-three professional chapters. It is interesting to note that due to the ACM SIGGRAPH delegation to southeast Asia and Oceania in Spring of 2002, many chapters from this region have been chartered or are in formation, such as Bali, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Adelaide, Canberra, Perth, Canterbury/Christchurch.

SIGMOD has been attempting to be more international by establishing close relationships with societies in Europe (EDBT, ICDT, Moscow ACM SIGMOD Chapter) and the far east (China CCF DBS, 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. They had been allocating $5,000 per year to facilitate the attendance to the SIGMOD Conference by influential researchers from eastern Europe. This past year it was decided to re-position the program so that it can be open to researchers from a wider set of countries.

SIGGROUP reports that from the technological viewpoint, the emergence of new technologies like peer-to-peer computing, web services and semantic web will gain a significant influence on the development of future CSCW/groupware systems. Furthermore the combination of collaboration platforms with mobile, multi-user augmented reality systems will lead to a new forms of cooperation support in the office as well as the manufacturing environment. The integration of cooperation and communication functionality into every-day artifacts and the office environment offers new ways towards the realization of ambient intelligence - currently a hot topic in the EU research funding bodies.

ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22 WG9 is that body of international representatives responsible for the maintenance and evolution of the Ada International Standard. The National Bodies represented on WG9 are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. WG9 is planning to produce an Amendment to the existing Ada standard in lieu of developing a major revision as was done in 1995. SIGAda will be playing a prominent role in the evolution of the Amendment. ACM SIGAda was invited to become a Category C Liaison with WG9. Category C liaisons are liaisons to organizations, which make an effective technical contribution and participate actively at the WG level. A formal Liaison request was formally approved by the SIGAda Executive Committee and the ACM Executive Committee (EC).

5.7 Collaborative Efforts

SIGDA continued to produce a CDROM compendium of SIGDA-sponsored conferences as a benefit for SIGDA members. This past fiscal year, SIGDA also partnered with IEEE/CAS to jointly produce two DVDs: one DVD capturing 20 years of proceedings of the International Conference on CAD, and another DVD capturing 40 years of proceedings of the Design Automation Conference. A longer-range project, currently underway, is to produce a Super-Compendium of 10 years of proceedings of all the SIGDA conferences on DVD, possibly with live internal links. SIGDA is particularly excited about these projects, not only due to their value to the community, but also as a great example of inter-society cooperation.

The SC'XY Conference is jointly sponsored by SIGARCH and the IEEE Computer Society. Formerly known as the Supercomputing Conference, the conference has successfully evolved away from its focus on supercomputers and is now the High Performance Networking and Computing Conference. In addition to its technical success, SC'XY is large enough that it must be scheduled many years in advance.

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 Second Joint ACM/IEEE Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL'02) was held in Portland, OR USA from July 14-18 2002 (http://www.jcdl.info/jcdl02/). The conference was co-sponsored by ACM (SIGIR and SIGWEB) and IEEE (TCDL). The conference is the second merged DL conference, encompassing what had previously been two separate digital library conferences (ACM's DL conference and IEEE's ADL conference). The merged conference has proved very successful and this format will continue.

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, was published as "IS 2002 Model Curriculum and Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Information Systems" in Data Base, Volume 34, Number 1, Winter 2003.

Additionally, the ACM and the IEEE Computing Society are founders of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). IFIP acts on behalf of member societies in carrying out international cooperation to advance the information processing profession. SIGMIS continues to fund the attendance of the ACM's representative for one of the annual meetings of IFIP to promote involvement among the membership of SIGMIS and IFIP.

Appendix A - Membership & Technical Activity Summary
Appendix B - Financial Summary
Appendix C - Conference Summary
Appendix D - Individual SIG Reports