SIGACCESS FY’04 Annual Report
SIGACCESS FY’09 Annual Report
July 2008 - June 2009
Submitted by: Vicki L. Hanson, Past Chair and Andrew Sears, Chair
SIGACCESS continues to expand its membership and activities to meet member needs. This report highlights SIGACCESS Awards as well and the SIG's conference, publication, and other activities.
Awards
ACM Student Research Competition (SRC)
First Place in this competition was awarded to Xu Liu. ASSETS'08 SRC winners competed in the ACM-wide SRC. Across all ACM SIGs and conferences participating, Xu was awarded first place in the Graduate Student Category for his paper "Mobile Currency Reader for People with Visual Impairments." He was invited to the ACM Awards ceremony in San Diego in June where the award was announced. For more information, see
This is a tremendous honor for Xu. In addition, SIGACCESS is pleased that this is the second time in the past few years that the ASSETS SRC has produced the ACM 1st Place Winner. The previous recipient of this prize was Eugene Borodin in 2007.
ACM SIGACCESS AWARD for Outstanding Contributions to Computing and Accessibility
Two years ago the ACM SIGACCESS Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computing and Accessibility was created. The award, given every other year, recognizes individuals who have made significant and lasting contributions to the development of computing technologies that improve the accessibility of media and services to people with disabilities. Outstanding contributions through research, practice, or advocacy are recognized. The award recognizes members of the community for long-term accomplishments or those who have made a notable impact through a significant innovation. The inaugural award was presented in 2008 to Jim Thatcher. Nominations to begin the 2010 award process will be announced shortly.
2008 SIGACCESS Best Paper Award
Feng, J., Lazar, J., Kumin, L., and Ozok, A. 2008. Computer usage by young individuals with down syndrome: an exploratory study. In Proceedings of the 10th international ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, October 13 - 15, 2008). Assets '08. ACM, New York, NY, 35-42. DOI=
2008 SIGACCESS Best Student Paper Award
Borodin, Y., Bigham, J. P., Raman, R., and Ramakrishnan, I. V. 2008. What's new?: making web page updates accessible. In Proceedings of the 10th international ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, October 13 - 15, 2008). Assets '08. ACM, New York, NY, 145-152. DOI=
ASSETS Conference
ASSEST'08 was held in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. This was the first time ASSETS has been held outside the US since 2002. Conference attendance was excellent, exceeding attendance projections. Particularly notable was that the conference continues to expand areas of research, with a number of cognitive issues represented in this year's papers. This broadening of research interests attests to the growing importance of considering the needs of a diverse population.
For the fifth year, the conference featured an NSF-sponsored Doctoral Consortium (see ). This consortium allowed advanced doctoral students to present their dissertation topics and receive feedback during formative stages of their work.
The conference also hosted its third Microsoft Student Research Competition (SRC) event. The SRC allows students from diverse ACM areas to present their work and get recognized for achievement. Award winners were:
1st Prize: Keith Trnka, University of Delaware, for 'Adapting word prediction to subject matter without topic-labeled data'
2nd Prize: Xu Liu, University of Maryland, for 'A Camera Phone Based Currency Reader for the Visually Impaired'
3rd Prize: Mohammed Hoque, MIT, for 'Analysis of Speech Properties of Neurotypicals and Individuals Diagnosed with Autism and Down Syndrome'
The SIGACCESS Business Meeting held at ASSETS updated attendees on SIG activities and discussed ideas for new activities. Key issues included accessibility of publications in the ACM Digital Library. Specifically, it was considered important to work with ACM to ensure that ASSETS Proceedings are accessible.
Publications
The inaugural issue of the ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS) appeared in May, 2008. Since May, four additional issues have been published. See for details. TACCESS is a quarterly journal that publishes refereed articles addressing issues of computing as it impacts the lives of people with disabilities. It provides a technical forum for disseminating innovative research related to computing technologies and their use by people with disabilities. This journal is available online to SIGACCESS members.
The SIGACCESS newsletter continues with its regular online publications with Sri Kurniawan, Editor-in-Chief, see .
Also available on the SIGACCESS website is the monthly 'left field' column (see ) by Yeliz Yesilada. The goal of Left Field is to bring to the attention of members publications from the ACM Digital Library that are of interest, but published in venues typically outside the reading of SIGACCESS members.
In Cooperation Conferences
SIGACCESS provided financial support for the International Cross Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility 2009 (W4A) at the WWW Conference in Madrid this past April (see ).
SIGACCESS Website
The SIGACCESS website recently received a new look. This accessible site was created and is maintained by the new SIGACCESS webmaster, Darren Lunn of the University of Manchester.
In Memoriam
We note the passing on April 11 of our friend and colleague Noelle Carbonell. Those of you who knew her personally know of her great humanity, keen intellect, and dedication to high quality work. As Secretary-Treasurer of SIGACCESS these past three years she was a staunch advocate for people with disabilities and was a strong advocate for international cooperation on research in this area. We will greatly miss her energy and passion.
SIGACT FY’09 Annual Report
July 2008 - June 2009
Submitted by: Richard E. Ladner, Past Chair
1. Awards
▪ 2009 Gödel Prize: For “Entropy waves, the zig-zag graph product and new constant degree expanders,” Omer Reingold, Salil Vadhan and Avi Wigderson, Annals of Mathematics, Vol 155, (2002), 157-187 and “Undirected connectivity in Log-Space,” Omer Reingold, Journal of ACM, Vol 55 (4) (2007).
▪ Knuth Prize: Volker Strassen for his seminal and influential contributions to efficient algorithms. The Knuth Prize is given jointly by SIGACT and IEEE TCMFCS.
▪ Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award: Corinna Cortes and Vladimir Vapnik for their development of Support vector machines. This award is an ACM award sponsored in part by SIGACT.
▪ Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing: Baruch Awerbuch and David Peleg for their paper “Sparse partitions” in the Proceedings of the 31st Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 1990). The Dijkstra Prize is given jointly by SIGACT and SIGOPS.
▪ SIGACT Distinguished Service Award: To be awarded in 2010.
▪ Best Papers Award at STOC 2009: Chris Peikert for “Public-key cryptosystems from the worst-case shortest vector problem” and Robin Moser for “A constructive proof of the Lovász local lemma.”
▪ SIGACT Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award at STOC 2009: Robin Moser for “A constructive proof of the Lovász local lemma.”
2. Significant papers on new areas published in proceedings
This second was prepared with help from Michael Mitzenmacher, Claire Mathieu, and Boaz Patt-Shamir, program chairs of STOC 2009, SODA 2009, PODC 2008, respectively.
STOC 2009
The ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2009) covers much of computer science theory.
Chris Peikert’s best paper at STOC 2009 represents a major advance in cryptography. In 1997 Ajtai published a breakthrough result: one-way functions based on the assumption that approximations for the shortest vector problem (SVP) in an integer lattice are intractable (for any lattice). One-way functions are the most basic building block in cryptography, as they yield commitment protocols and digital signatures. However, they do not yield full public-key encryption schemes. Thus, an obvious question emerged: base a public-key encryption scheme on the difficulty of approximating the size of the shortest vector. A year later Ajtai-Dwork in 1998 did base a public-key encryption scheme the worst case unique-SVP approximation problem. The unique-SVP problem is a special case of the general SVP problem and it was clear that this is a first result on the way to the general case. Can you build a public key cryptosystem based on the worst case difficulty of SVP? This has been open since 1998. Peikert finally resolves this question. His technique utilizes a clever reduction from the worst case of case SVP to learning with errors. Additionally, his stronger proof is simpler and more direct than previous works.
Robin Moser’s Best Paper and Best Student Paper at STOC 2009 represents a new and constructive way to find satisfying instances of complex satisfiable formulas. The Lovasz Local Lemma (LLL) provides a tool for showing the probability a set of events happens, even when there are non-trivial dependencies among the events. As an example, the LLL implies that any k-CNF formula in which each clause shares variables with at most 2k-2 other clauses is satisfiable. However, the proof is nonconstructive. This paper shows how to give an efficient algorithm that constructs the solution for such a problem. The proposed algorithm uses a drastically different approach from previous similar attempts and is extremely simple. The algorithm starts with a random assignment and tries to satisfy any violated clauses using local changes. If this procedure takes too long the algorithm simply chooses a new random assignment and starts again. The paper is elegant, both in terms of its algorithm and analysis. It promises to increase the applicability and the utility of the LLL throughout the fields of probability and randomized algorithms.
SODA 2009
SODA is a major conference that focuses on algorithms and combinatorics.
Bernard Chazelle’s Best Paper at SODA 2009, “Natural Algorithms,” analyzes the convergence of flocking algorithms. A flocking model consists of a set of entities that adapt their behavior depending on other entities in their neighborhood. In a discrete time version, the behavior is adapted in the next time step. Flocking comes down to the behavior that an entity will adapt its velocity by taking the velocities of entities nearby into account (basically, by averaging). This paper uses techniques from the analysis of algorithms to analyze convergence of models for flocking. The neighborhood of an entity (bird) is defined as the other birds within unit distance. For one recent model, the Cucker-Smale flocking model, convergence time is proved, with an upper bound on the number of time steps that is some tower-of-twos in the input size. A lower bound on convergence time is also given, again with a (much shorter) tower-of-twos. This analysis is from a point of view that control theorists have not looked at, when analyzing models of coordinated motion. It is a very fresh and welcome view of this style of algorithm.
Gabriel Nivasch’s Best Student Paper at SODA 2009, “Improved Bounds and New Techniques for Davenport-Schinzel Sequences and Their Generalizations”
Davenport-Schinzel sequences are fundamental to the analysis of a variety of geometric algorithms and their outputs: Davenport-Schinzel sequences appear in bounds for the complexity of lower envelopes of line segments, of the graphs of simple functions, of single faces of arrangements, of geometric partitions in higher dimensions, of transversals. An (n,s) Davenport-Schinzel sequence is a sequence of symbols (alphabet size n) that has no subsequences isomorphic to ababa... (length s+2). What is the maximum length of an (n,s) Davenport-Schinzel sequence? Although the paper is technical, it simplifies or improves all previous upper and lower bounds, comes up with a simplified construction, and obtains in several cases very nice definitive results (exact asymptotics for Davenport-Schinzel sequences of order 3, correct exponent for growth of Davenport-Schinzel sequences for even s). The best part of the results is their comparative simplicity. It will be a landmark for the experts on the topic.
PODC 2008
PODC is a major conference that focuses on the theory of distributed computing.
Armando Castañeda and Sergio Rajsbaum’s Best Student Paper Award for PODC 2008 “New Combinatorial Topology Upper and Lower Bounds for Renaming” reexamines the well known renaming problem. This paper throws surprising light on the central problem of Renaming. Specifically, it is shown that contrary to previous belief, there are some special values of n such that wait-free renaming of n processors into [1,...,k] names is possible for k < 2n-1. The paper goes on to characterize the precise set of numbers n for which renaming n processors into [1,...,k] names requires k ≥ 2n-1. Thus, using combinatorial topology analysis, the paper extends our understanding of the foundations of asynchronous distributed systems.
3. Significant programs that provided a springboard for further technical efforts
SIGACT sponsored or co-sponsored a number of important conferences including the Symposium on Theory of Computation (41st STOC), Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (27th PODC), Symposium on Computational Geometry (25th SOCG), Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures (21st SPAA), and Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (19th SODA). SIGACT also supports several conferences in-cooperation including Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS), Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL).
4. Innovative programs which provide service to our technical community
The Committee for the Advancement of Theoretical Computer Science (CATCS) sponsored by SIGACT has been very active this past year. The committee meets by conference call every two weeks and has developed and executed action plans to increase the visibility of theoretical computer science and to increase the funding base for theory of computation at the NSF. The Committee has helped advise the NSF CISE Assistant Director on several matters including recruiting for positions within CISE and restructuring the organization.
CATCS with funding from the Computing Community Consortium held the Visions for Theoretical Computer Science Workshop which consolidates theoretical research agendas into compact visions that are accessible to people outside of our field.
A new Ad Hoc Committee on STOC has been formed chaired by Shafi Goldwasser and Richard Ladner with the goal of finding alternatives to ensure that STOC continues to welcome interesting, path breaking submissions, regardless of whether or not they are mathematically hard. More generally, the committee's charge is to explore alternatives that allow SIGACT to continue to publish contributions that introduce new topics, approaches, frameworks, and techniques to our field, without creating a new conference. A report from the Committee will be given to the SIGACT Executive Committee for possible action.
With the help of ACM headquarters SIGACT continues to produce press releases for the Gödel and Knuth Prizes. This effort is intended to make our research more accessible to the general public.
SIGACT continues to support student attendance at SODA and STOC by funding Student Best Paper Awards, travel, lunches, and reduced registration fees. This helps ensure that the maximum number of students can attend these conferences.
SIGACT, through ACM, has applied for and received funding from NSF for travel for students to attend STOC 2009. This program will continue from year to year as funds are available.
SIGACT continues to support the SIGACT web page, the theorynt listserv, and conference software through the SIGACT server.
SIGACT is in the process of building a new presence on the web. The new web page will have the property that individuals can manage different parts of the web page independently. This will turn the webmaster’s job into one of managing editors of the web page.
5. Summary of key issues that the membership of the SIGACT will have to deal with in the next 2-3 years
Funding and articulating the importance of theoretical computer science are perennial issues that are being addressed by the Committee for the Advancement of Theoretical Computer Science (CATCS).
The funding situation has improved greatly at NSF, but there is a need for the theory community to submit more high quality proposals in order to maintain or improve the funding levels.
There continues to be concern about the academic job market which in the past was affected by the lack of growth in computer science majors, but is now caused by the economic recession and lack of funds in academia. Hiring freezes and cutbacks are common place this last academic hiring season.
There was a SIGACT election in spring 2009. The new officers will serve 3 year terms instead of the current 2 + 2 (2 years plus 2 renewable). There is the feeling that 3 year terms will attract the strongest candidates because 4 years is too long and 2 years is too short.
SIGAda FY’09 Annual Report
July 2008 - June 2009
Submitted by: Ricky E. Sward, Chair
SIGAda Awards
Started in 1994, the ACM SIGAda Awards recognize individuals and organizations that have made outstanding contributions to the Ada community and to SIGAda. The Outstanding Ada Community Contribution Award is given for broad, lasting contributions to Ada technology and usage. The Distinguished Service Award is given for exceptional contributions to SIGAda activities and products.
This year the Outstanding Ada Community Contribution Award was awarded to two individuals:
Peter Amey - Peter was closely involved in the Ada community and was intimately involved in a number of high-profile Ada projects. In particular, he was responsible for the continued success of SPARK Ada. Peter also had a large role in the development of Praxis' software development methodology built around SPARK, which is called "Correctness by Construction". Sadly, Peter passed away this year after a long battle with cancer.
John McCormick - John has been active in many aspects of Ada as a teacher, user of Ada and as an Ada promoter. He is a well-known author of Ada books conducting courses, tutorials and lectures. His textbook Ada Plus Data Structures: An Object-Oriented Approach is a popular text for Ada courses. He is an internationally recognized educator, well known for his work with real-time scheduling using model trains.
The Distinguished Service Award was awarded to Greg Gicca this year:
Greg Gicca - Greg has been active in the Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS) effort and represents ASIS at International Standards Organization meetings. Greg has worked extensively on the commercialization and growth of Ada. He has been a dependable resource at SIGAda conferences organizing workshops and serving as exhibits co-chair and conference co-chair for SIGAda 2006 and 2009.
SIGAda also makes the Outstanding Student Paper Award at its annual conference. At SIGAda 2008 this award was presented to Elaheh Safari-Sharifabadi for the paper "Dynamic Analysis of Ada Programs for Comprehension and Quality Measurement." Constantinos Constantinides and Kung-Kiu Lau coauthored this paper.
Significant Papers published in proceedings
This year's conference celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Ada programming language. The keynote speakers each presented on a topic related to the birth of Ada 30 years ago, including:
"From Strawman to Ada 2005: A Socio-Technical Retrospective" from Dr. Benjamin Brosgol, Senior Technical Staff, AdaCore Corporation.
"30 Years after Steelman: Does DoD Still Have a Software Crisis?" from Dr. Joyce Tokar, President of Pyrrhus Software.
"The Ada Paradox(es)" from Dr. Jean-Pierre Rosen, President of ADALOG Corporation.
The papers reflected the different applications of Ada that have evolved over the past 30 years. For example:
"Ada and Software Engineering Education: One Professor's Prospective" by John McCormick. This paper shows empirical evidence that students complete software engineering projects when using Ada versus C-based languages.
"Implementing the Extended Return Statement for Ada 2005" by Tucker Taft. This paper discusses a new feature of the Ada language that has been included in the 2005 language standard. This work exemplifies that fact that Ada continues to grow as a language.
"Anima: A Language for Real-Time Embedded Software Development" by Steven Doran. This paper shows that Ada is being used for real-time applications.
"A Distributed, Multi-Language Architecture for Large Unmanned Ground Vehicles" by Cynthia Cicalese, Richard Weatherly, Joel Sherrill, Robert Bolling, Kevin Forbes, Robert Grabowski, Keven Ring, and David Seidel. This paper was a great experience report on how Ada was used to control an autonomous ground vehicle that competed in the DARPA grand challenge.
Overall, the papers being submitted to the SIGAda conference continue to be of high quality.
Significant Programs that provided a springboard for further technical efforts
A formal liaison exists between SIGAda and WG9. 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 Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
In March 2007 the ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) in Geneva, Switzerland announced the formal completion of the process to revise the Ada 95 language, with the publication of the Ada 2005 standard - officially named ISO/IEC 8652:1995/Amd 1:2007. This announcement culminates a collaborative international effort under ISO's Ada Working Group (WG9) to enhance the 1995 version of the Ada language.
At least one SIGAda Officer participates and represents the membership at the WG9 meetings held twice each year.
Innovative Programs which provide service to some part of our technical community
Since 1994 SIGAda has conducted an "Ada Awareness Initiative". Its centerpiece has been our SIGAda professional booth display unit in exhibition halls at important software engineering conferences. This lets folks know that Ada is very much alive and a sound part of any software engineering effort having real-time, high integrity, high-assurance, and highly distributed requirements. This year we developed several new posters that are displayed prominently in the Ada booth. We brought the booth to the SIGCSE conference and the Software and Systems Technology Conference (SSTC). Attendance at the SSTC conference continues to decline, so we need to reconsider if this is the right conference to bring our booth to.
Via this exhibiting, SIGAda sustains Ada visibility ("name recognition"), provides various Ada-advocacy materials and makes available Ada experts (our booth staff volunteers) who can intelligently answer questions, provide pointers and help, and debunk the misinformation about Ada that many attendees at these shows have. This program continues to be extremely successful and viewed as a highly important thrust by the SIGAda membership. SIGAda graciously acknowledges and thanks the Ada Resource Association (ARA), a consortium of Ada vendors, for their financial support of SIGAda's Ada Awareness Initiative and our booth activities.
Summary of key issues to deal with in the next 2-3 years
One of the key issues for SIGAda is continuing to host a financially successful conference. Last year was one of the first years in several years that the conference was not profitable. We will continue to encourage our SIGAda members to participate in and to attend the conference.
To help with this issue, our Vice Chair for Liaison will poll each of the local chapters to see if they are viable or not. He will also work to see if we should establish new local chapters in other areas of the country. He will also determine which conferences are the best ones to bring our booth to. Our Vice Chairman for Liaison also has great ideas about how to market SIGAda better including changes to our SIGAda web site and the conference web site. These marketing efforts are aimed at increasing the participation and attendance at our conference.
In order to ensure the conference revenue is appropriate, the Chair and Treasurer will examine the current fee structure and compensation policy for the SIGAda conference. We will establish a clear policy that is fair and reasonable and enforce that policy.
We will continue to publish three issues of the Ada Letters journal and seek participation in the form of contributing articles and papers. We will replace the current Managing Editor because he has moved up to Vice Chair for Meetings and Conferences.
SIGAPP FY’09 Annual Report
July 2008- June 2009
Submitted by: Barrett R. Bryant, Past Chair
The SIGAPP mission is to further the interests of the computing professionals engaged in the development of new computing applications and applications areas and the transfer of computing technology to new problem domains.
SIGAPP Officers
Chair - Barrett R. Bryant, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA
Vice Chair - Sung Shin, South Dakota State University, USA
Secretary - Ronaldo P. Menezes, Florida Institute of Technology, USA
Treasurer - Lorie Liebrock, New Mexico Institute of Technology, USA
Web Master - Hisham Haddad, Kennesaw State University, USA
ACM Program Coordinator, Irene Frawley, ACM HQ
Status of SIGAPP
The main event that took place within SIGAPP over the past year was the return of the Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) to the U. S. after premiering in Asia and South America the last 2 years. This year's SAC was very successful. More details about SAC will follow in the next section. We also supported several additional conferences with in-cooperation status, and will continue supporting additional conferences in the coming year.
The Student Travel Award Program continues to be successful in assisting SIGAPP student members in attending conferences sponsored by or in-cooperation with SIGAPP. 49 students were granted awards to attend SAC 2009, representing 14 countries. This was much more than last year and the amount of these awards was increased as well. We supported all qualified applicants. We also implemented a Developing Countries Travel Award for researchers from developing countries who would otherwise have difficulty attending the SAC conference. For 2009, this award was sued exclusively for students from developing countries but in 2010 and beyond, we also hope to support faculty-level researchers from such countries.
SIGAPP continues to have a stable membership. SIGAPP's and SAC's strength and uniqueness among ACM SIGs continues to be the opportunity for scientific diversity and crosscutting multiple disciplines within the ACM community. The officers look forward to continue working with the ACM SGB to further develop the SIG by increasing membership and developing a new journal on applied computing. Development of a SIGAPP logo is also planned.
Status of SAC
SAC 2009 was held in Honolulu, Hawaii, March 8-12, 2009, hosted by Chaminade University of Honolulu and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Thanks to a great organizing committee, it was extremely successful. The number of SAC papers submitted was 1084, the second highest ever, in 45 tracks with 316 papers accepted based upon extensive Track reviews, for a 29% ratio. The poster session featured 97 posters, the most number ever.
SAC 2010 will be held in Sierre, Switzerland, March 22-26, 2010, and will be hosted by the University of Applied Sciences, Western Switzerland (HES-SO) in Sierre and Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL). The web site has further details such as symposium committee, technical tracks, and track chairs.
SAC 2011 is being planned for Taiwan which will be only the second time SAC has been held in Asia.
Summary
1. Awards that were given out
a. Distinguished Service to SAC - Ronaldo Menezes
b. Student Travel Awards - 49 awards granted, totaling $28,982
c. Developing Country Participant Travel Awards - $10,196 to 13 recipients from Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, China and Malaysia
2. Significant papers on new areas that were published in proceedings - new tracks in SAC 2009 on Autonomic and Cloud Computing, Agreement Technologies, Human Computer Interaction, Operating Systems, Relational Learning, Service-Oriented Architectures and Programming, Universally-Accessible Systems, and Wireless Sensor Networks
3. Significant programs that provided a springboard for further technical efforts - SAC continues to have tracks that represent application areas which are not covered by other SIGs (e.g., bioinformatics, computer forensics, etc.).
4. Innovative programs which provide service to some part of your technical community - expansion of Student Travel Award Program for SIGAPP student members, initiation of Developing Countries Travel Award Program
5 A very brief summary for the key issues that the membership of that SIG will have to deal with in the next 2-3 years - continuation of awards and development of a refereed journal in Applied Computing
SIGARCH FY’09 Annual Report
July 2008 - June 2009
Submitted by Doug Burger, Chair
Overview
The primary mission of SIGARCH continues to be the forum where researchers and practitioners of computer architecture can exchange ideas. SIGARCH sponsors or cosponsors the premier conferences in the field as well as a number of workshops. It publishes a quarterly newsletter and the proceedings of several conferences. It is financially strong with a fund balance of over two million dollars. The SIGARCH bylaws are available online at .
Officers and Directors
During the past fiscal year Doug Burger served as SIGARCH Chair, David Wood served as Vice Chair, and Kevin Skadron served as Secretary/Treasurer. Margaret Martonosi, Krste Asanovic, Bill Dally, and Sarita Adve served on the board of directors, and Norm Jouppi also served as Past Chair. In addition to these elected positions, Doug DeGroot continues to serve as the Editor of the SIGARCH newsletter Computer Architecture News, and Nathan Binkert was appointed as the new SIGARCH Information Director, providing SIGARCH information online. Rob Schreiber serves as SIGARCH’s liaison on the SC conference steering committee.
The Eckert-Mauchly Award, cosponsored by the IEEE Computer Society, is the most prestigious award in computer architecture. SIGARCH endows its half of the award, which is presented annually at the Awards Banquet of ISCA. Joel Emer of Intel received the award in 2009, "For pioneering contributions to performance analysis and modeling methodologies; for design innovations in several significant industry microprocessors; and for deftly bridging research and development, academia and industry.” Last year, SIGARCH petitioned ACM to increase the ACM share of the award to $10,000, using an endowment taken from the SIGARCH fund balance, which ACM has approved. The increase will happen when IEEE approves a matching increase, which will increase the amount of the award to $20,000.
SIGARCH has endowed the Maurice Wilkes Award, an award established to recognize computer architects early in their careers, named after one of the pioneers of computer architecture who began making significant contributions early in his career. The award is selected by a vote of the Executive Committee and Board of SIGARCH, from a list of nominees supplied by a three person nominating committee. The 2009 award went to Shubu Mukherjee of Intel, "for outstanding contributions to modeling and design of soft-error tolerant microarchitectures."
SIGARCH also cosponsors, along with the IEEE-CS TCCA, the Influential ISCA Paper Award which is presented annually at the ISCA conference. This award recognizes the paper, presented at the ISCA conference 15 years previously, which has had the most impact on computer architecture. The fifth Influential ISCA Paper Award was presented to Jeffrey Kuskin, David Ofelt, Mark Heinrich, John Heinlein, Richard Simoni, Kourosh Gharachorloo, John Chapin, David Nakahira, Joel Baxter, Mark Horowitz, Anoop Gupta, Mendel Rosenblum, and John Hennessy for their paper "The Stanford FLASH Multiprocessor" which appeared in the proceedings of the 21st ISCA (1994).
In 2007 the ACM Awards Committee approved the establishment of the SIGARCH Distinguished Service Award, for “important service to the Computer Architecture community.” The second recipient was Mark Hill of Wisconsin, who spent many years serving on the SIGARCH board/executive positions, and served as program chair for ISCA 2005. Nominations each year are due February 15th, and can be sent to the SIGARCH Secretary/Treasurer at any time.
All four awards, the Eckert-Mauchly Award, the Maurice Wilkes Award, the Influential ISCA Paper Award, and the Distinguished Service Award were presented at ISCA 2009 in Austin, TX. SIGARCH is also a partial sponsor of the new Ken Kennedy Award.
Conferences
SIGARCH is a 50% cosponsor of ISCA, the International Symposium on Computer Architecture, which is the premier conference in the field of computer architecture. The 36th annual ISCA (ISCA 2009) was held in Austin, TX. Stephen Keckler was the General Co-Chair and Luiz Barroso was Program Chair. ISCA 2010 will be held in Saint Malo, France, with Andre Seznec as General Chair, along with Uri Weiser and Ronny Ronen as Co-Program Chairs. ISCA 2011 will be held in San Jose as a part of FCRC, with Ravi Iyer and Qing Yang as Co-General Chairs. The location of ISCA 2012 has not yet been set.
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. SC 2008 was a large success in Austin. SC 2009 will be held in Portland, OR.
SIGARCH is a cosponsor of the Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, commonly known as ASPLOS, along with SIGPLAN and SIGOPS. The conference had been held biannually since 1982, alternating its location between San Jose and Boston. Starting in 2008 the conference has been held annually. ASPLOS 2009 was held in Washington D.C., with Mary Lou Soffa serving as General Chair and Mary Jane Irwin serving as Program Chair. ASPLOS steering committee representatives of SIGPLAN and SIGOPS pointed out that their premier conferences are historically held within a week of ASPLOS' recent date in the fall. This conflict created a danger of ASPLOS degenerating into merely another architecture conference. This problem and a decision by the ASPLOS steering committee to move the 2008 conference to a date between but not including President's Day week and the first week with a significant number of spring breaks (the second week of March) was discussed at ASPLOS 2006. This time window allows papers rejected from OOPSLA or SOSP to be revised and resubmitted to ASPLOS, and papers rejected from ASPLOS to be revised and resubmitted to ISCA. Unfortunately, since there are over a dozen architecture conferences a year, moving any conference creates conflicts. The steering committee has done their best to minimize conflicts given the constraints above, and picked the dates furthest from HPCA within the window described above. ASPLOS 2010 will be held in Pittsburgh, PA, with Vikram Adve of Illinois serving as General Chair and James Hoe and Todd Mowry of CMU serving as co-Program Chairs. ASPLOS 2011 will be held in southern California with Rajiv Gupta serving as General Chair.
SIGARCH sponsors the International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS). ICS 2009 took place at the IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. Michael Gschwind and Alex Nicolau were the General Co-Chairs, and Valentina Salapura and Jose Moreira were the Program Co-Chairs.
The nineteenth Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA 2009), jointly sponsored by SIGARCH and SIGACT, was held in Calgary, Canada in August. Friedhelm Meyer auf der Heide of the University of Paderborn was General Chair and Michael Bender of SUNY Stony Brook was Program Chair.
SIGARCH is one-half cosponsor of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing. Grid Õ09 will be held in Banff, Colorado. Dieter Kranzimueller of LRU and LRZ, Germany, and Jill Kowalchuk of Cybera, Canada, will be the General Co-Chairs, and Paul Lu of the University of Alberta will be the Program Chair.
SIGARCH is one-half cosponsor of the International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing.
HPDC ‘09 was held in Munich, in June. Dieter Kranzimueller of LRU and LRZ, Germany was the General Chair, with Arndt Bode of TUM and Heinz-Gerd Hegering of LRZ as the General Co-Chairs. Michael Gerndt of the Technische Universitat Munchen and Henri Casanova of the University of Hawaii are the Program Co-Chairs.
SIGARCH is one-third cosponsor of the Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compiler Techniques (PACT), along with the IEEE Computer Society and IFIP, and annually held in the fall. PACT 2009 will take place in Raleigh, North Carolina in September. Sally McKee of Chalmers University and Martin Schulz of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will be General Co-Chairs. Bronis R. de Supinski and Frank Mueller of North Carolina State University will be the Program Co-Chairs.
SIGARCH is one-fourth co-sponsor of the Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems (ANCS). The fifth ANCS, ANCS 2009, will be held in Princeton, NJ in October. Peter Onufryk of IDT and K.K. Ramakrishnan of AT&T Labs are the General Co-Chairs, and Patrick Crowley of Washington University and John Wroclawski of USC are the Program Co-Chairs.
In 2007 SIGARCH was a founding co-sponsor of the International Symposium on Networks-on-Chips (NOCS). NoCS 2009 was held in May in San Diego, California, with Bill Yin of UCSD and Partha Kundu of Intel as General Co-Chairs, and Radu Marculescu of CMU and Axel Jantsch of KTH as Program Co-Chairs. SIGARCH also became a cosponsor of the International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC) in 2007. ICAC 2009 was held in Barcelona, Spain in June. Simon Dobson of UCD Dublin and John Strassner of Waterford Institute of Technology were the General Co-Chairs, and Manish Parashar of Rutgers and Onn Shehory from IBM Research Haifa were Program Co-Chairs.
In addition to the above conferences, SIGARCH has taken a small sponsorship position, or in-cooperation status, with several other conferences. SIGARCH has ceased to be been a minor sponsor of the International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC), held annually in December and alternating between Bangalore and Hyderabad, India, but is now in cooperation with HiPC. SIGARCH also has a small sponsorship position in SenSys, a conference on Sensor Systems. In addition, SIGARCH has in-cooperation status with TridentCom, DOCSS, Euro-Par, GridNets, and Nano-Net.
Travel Grants
In the past, SIGARCH supported travel grants to students who attended ISCA or ASPLOS. SIGARCH has now broadened travel grants to other SIGARCH-sponsored conferences, although the exact policy of how much to allocate to each conference has not yet been finalized. The grants are restricted to student members of SIGARCH, following several votes of the SIGARCH membership. The precise amount of the grants depends on the number of students who apply, but we have made an attempt to give at least a modest grant to every student coauthor that applied. For ISCA 2009, SIGARCH combined NSF funding of $15K with matching funding from IEEE TCCA ($10K), and used these funds to support a pool of 110 applications for student travel grants.
In 2007 SIGARCH sponsored a companion travel grant program for ISCA, which includes child-care costs for SIGARCH-sponsored conferences This program provides funds for travel grants to attend ISCA 2007 for a companion care-provider for a SIGARCH member who are either (1) a person with a physical disability necessitating a companion, or (2) a parent of an infant less than one year old who cannot travel without the infant and a care-provider for the infant. This program is similar to SIGPLAN's child care/companion travel grant program. This program was presented to other SIGs at a SIG Governing Board (SGB) meeting, and may be adopted by other SIGs in the future as a best practice. In 2009, SIGARCH had four applications for such travel grants.
SC Conference Grants
In 2008, the SC leadership requested $426,779 in funds for special projects related to the SC community, and for FY'09, $308,489 has been budgeted.
Publications
CAN (Computer Architecture News), SIGARCH's newsletter, is published 4 times a year. In addition, the ISCA Proceedings form a special fifth issue, and the ASPLOS Proceedings is likewise distributed as a special sixth issue. The newsletter consists of technical contributions, reports of panels, Internet nuggets (the most interesting or controversial articles from the comp.arch newsgroup), book reviews, and calls for papers. There are occasional single topic special issues. Proceedings of SC, SPAA and ICS are available through the Member Plus program. This year SIGARCH is offering a new electronic membership for regular members and students, at reduced cost with no proceedings mailed.
Finances
SIGARCH enjoys a healthy fund balance that is currently larger than the roughly one million dollar fund balance required by the ACM for sponsorship of SIGARCH conferences. SIGARCH actually loses money on each member, but makes money on average from conferences. The SC conference often has a large surplus due to its exhibition component. SIGARCH and the SC Steering Committee have an agreement that some of the 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). The grant amounts are capped by the average surplus over the first two of the previous three years. In 2008 the grants provided $426,779.
Bylaws
In 2008 the SIGARCH Chair submitted proposed changes to the SIGARCH Bylaws, making leadership positions gender-neutral, and including the role and title of the SIGARCH Information Directory. The Bylaw changes were approved in 2009.
Membership
SIGARCH membership has been declining gradually since 1999, dropping from 1452 in 2005 to 1315 in 2008. However SIGARCH's membership retention rate was the highest among all of ACM’s SIGs in 2007, at 80%, with the number of SIG-only members gradually increasing, even as student and professional members gradually drop, and as ISCA, SIGARCH’s flagship conference, continues to grow.
Innovative Programs
SIGARCH was a partial supporter of an NSF-sponsored workshop on Computer Architecture and Parallel Computing held at Brown University in August, 2008. This workshop, aimed primarily at women and under-represented minority undergraduates, is intended to interest young students in the field of computer architecture and to encourage their pursuit of graduate school and a research career. 40 students the program, and SIGARCH funding (along with NSF and industry support) supported their travel and workshop expenses.
Summary
SIGARCH remains a financially healthy institution with an enthusiastic membership. The interest of its members can be gauged by the health of all of its major conferences in the past year. The challenges remain as they have in previous years: how to better serve our members, how to encourage other members of the architecture community to join, how to help steer the community as the nature of our field changes, and how to use our fund balance most effectively.
SIGART FY’09 Annual Report
July 2008 - June 2009
Submitted by: Maria Gini, Chair
The scope of SIGART consists of the study of intelligence and its realization in computer systems. These include areas such as autonomous agents, intelligent user interfaces, knowledge discovery, human-language
technology, cognitive modeling, knowledge representation, planning, scheduling, logic programming, problem solving, search, connectionist models, machine learning, robotics, and computer vision.
During 2008/2009:
1. Viability
SIGART was reviewed in October 2008 by the Sig Governing Board and found viable to continue its status for the next four years.
2. Awards
The ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award is an annual award for excellence in research in the area of autonomous agents.
The 2009 SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award was presented in May 2009 to Dr. Manuela Veloso,
of Carnegie Mellon University. Prof. Veloso has made significant and sustained contributions to
Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems in the areas of planning and control learning in multi-agent systems.
Prof. Veloso's research is particularly noteworthy for its focus on the effective construction of
teams of robot agents where cognition, perception, and action are seamlessly integrated to address planning, execution, and learning tasks. She has made significant contributions to agents in uncertain and dynamic
environments, including distributed robot localization and world modeling, strategy selection in multiagent systems in the presence of adversaries, planning by analogical reuse, and more recently, robot learning from
demonstration. Her research contributions have also been realized concretely in the form of teams of robot soccer playing agents that have won several international championships at the annual RoboCup robot soccer
competitions. Her impact and visibility has been consistently high over the past two decades for her technical contributions, for her impressive robot teams, and for her leadership within the research community.
Prof. Veloso gave an invited presentation on "Teams of Robots: A Fascinating Multiagent Research Adventure" at the AAMAS 2009 conference.
3. Conferences
SIGART co-sponsored the following conferences:
ASE (Automated Software Engineering, September 2008, L'Aquila, Italy), IUI (Intelligent User Interfaces, February 2009, Sanibel Island, USA), HRI (Human Robot Interaction, March 2009, San Diego, USA), and IAT (Intelligent Agent Technology, December 2008, Sydney, Australia).
In addition, SIGART cooperated with many international conferences, such as:
AAMAS (Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, May 2008, Budapest, Hungary), BIOSTEC (Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies, January 2009, Porto, Portugal), CIA (Cooperative Information Agents, September 2008, Prague, Czech Republic), ICAART (Agents and Artificial Intelligence, January 2009, Porto, Portugal),
ICEC (Electronic Commerce, August 2008, Innsbruck, Austria), IEA/AIE (Industrial & Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence & Expert Systems, June 2009, Tainan, Taiwan), IVA (Intelligent Virtual Agents, September 2008, Tokyo, Japan), PerMIS (Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems, August 2008, Washington, DC),
RuleML (RuleML Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications, October 2008, Orlando, Fl),
SAMT (Semantics and Digital Media Technology, December 2008, Koblenz, Germany), SASO (Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, October 2008, Venice, Italy), SMART GRAPHICS (August 2008, Rennes, France)
4. Educational Activities
a. SIGART awarded a number of scholarships to students to attend the conferences co-sponsored by SIGART. The amounts of scholarships varied from $1,000 to $20,000 per conference, depending on the conference size. Funding students is a good way of ensuring long term growth and vitality of the AI community.
b. SIGART co-sponsored, with AAAI, the annual SIGART/AAAI Doctoral Consortium. The Doctoral Consortium, held in conjunction with the 2008 AAAI conference, provides an opportunity for Ph.D. students to discuss in depth their research interests and career objectives with the other participants and a group of established AI researchers
that act as individual mentors. Presentations and discussions took place over two days of intense meeting prior to the AAAI conference.
5. Plans for the future
* Increase services for members. We will continue adding contents to the Web page and look for other ways to increase member interactions.
* Continue supporting communities related to AI in a broad sense. SIGART is actively expanding the areas covered by co-sponsored and in-cooperation conferences to ensure that communities that work in AI or find inspiration from AI topics maintain ties with AI. This increases the visibility of SIGART and helps the growth of new communities.
* Establish connections with AI societies in other countries. The effort will start with a meeting at the IJCAI 2009 conference of representatives from all the AI societies.
* Continue discussion with AAAI to start the activities of the CACM Research Committee that AAAI and SIGART have agreed to establish. AAAI has not yet appointed the chair of the committee, so no work has started.
SIGBED FY’09 ANNUAL REPORT
July 2008 - June 2009
Submitted by: Lothar Thiele, Past Chair
1. Awards that were given out
-----------------------------
In 2006, ACM SIGBED established a student award in the name of late Dr. Frank Anger to promote cross-disciplinary research between embedded systems and software engineering. SIGBED solicited applications from qualified student members also in 2008. The submission deadline was beginning of August and the call has been distributed to all SIGBED members well in advance. In 2008, the recipient of the Frank Anger Memorial ACM SIGBED/SIGSOFT Student Award was Georgios Fainekos (University of Pennsylvania).
In 2008, SIGBED established a new SIGBED-EMSOFT Best Paper Award. The SIGBED EMSOFT Best Paper Award will be presented to the individual(s) judged by the award committee to have written the best paper appearing in the EMSOFT (Embedded Software) conference proceedings. The selection criteria are the scientific quality of the paper and the exposition of the ideas. The first award has been presented at the ESWEEK (Embedded Systems Week) 2008:
Authors:
Rajeev Alur, Aditya Kanade, S. Ramesh and K. C. Shashidhar
Title:
Symbolic analysis for improving simulation coverage of
Simulink/Stateflow models.
2. Significant papers on new areas that were published in proceedings
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We consider the paper that received the best paper award at EMSOFT as a significant contribution to the area of embedded systems. In addition, we would like to highlight a major contribution to the area of sensor networks which received the IPSN best paper award:
Author:
Haifeng Yu (National University of Singapore)
Title:
Secure and Highly-Available Aggregation Queries in Large-Scale
Sensor Networks via Set Sampling.
3. Innovative programs which provide service to some part of your technical community
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From 2006 to 2008, SIGBED has made a conscious effort to bring together related meetings. ESWEEK is now established as the major event in embedded systems research by hosting EMSOFT as well as CODES-ISSS (a conference focused on low-level issues of design and implementation of embedded systems) and CASES (a
conference with emphasis on architecture and compiler aspects of embedded systems).
In addition, SIGBED is sponsoring the major conferences at the CPSWEEK (Cyber-Physical Systems Week) which attempts to continue the success of ESWEEK in a related area. Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are the ones that integrate computation, communication and storage capabilities with the monitoring and/or control of the physical and engineering systems. ACM SIGBED sponsors and co-sponsors HSCC (International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control) and IPSN (International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks).
ACM SIGBED completely renewed its web presence by establishing a new website at . It is now hosted by ACM and uses ZOPE. The major improvements are:
- Much more detailed information about benefits to ACM SIGBED members.
- Information about SIGBED-related conferences, journals and web-sites.
- SIGBED News.
- Information about upcoming events related to ACM SIGBED.
- Extension of SIGBED Newsletter towards (a) the quarterly
SIGBED REVIEW and (b) SIGBED community information that is
provided by SIGBED members.
This way, we intend to improve our service to SIGBED members.
4 A very brief summary for the key issues that the membership of that SIG will have to deal with in the next
2-3 years
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Going forward, we will continue to be a catalyst for integrating various research themes in embedded systems into a coherent academic subdiscipline. We would like to focus on attracting more young researchers and student members. This issue has also been discussed at the SIGBED business meeting in 2008.
Currently, several ideas are under investigation like providing a year of free SIGBED membership when registering to one of the SIGBED-sponsored conferences.
SIGCAS FY’09 ANNUAL REPORT
July 2008 - June 2009
Submitted by: Flo Appel, Chair
1. Awards
The nomination process for the 2009 SIGCAS "Making a Difference" and "Outstanding Service" awards is in progress. Mark Perry, SIGCAS Executive Committee member, is responsible for its oversight.
2. Significant papers on new areas that were published in proceedings
3. Significant programs that provided a springboard for further technical efforts
4. Innovative programs which provide service to some part of your technical community
Although SIGCAS has not historically sponsored its own conferences, we have been proactive in forging relationships with other organizations, and continue to find venues in which to present and publicize the good work of our membership:
SIGCAS has continued to collaborate with SIGCSE, and through our very popular Birds of a Feather (BOF) session, we have had a formal and visible presence at the SIGCSE Symposium for the past four years. In addition, this year we offered a Special Session at the SIGCSE Symposium to commemorate SIGCAS’ 40th anniversary. The session, From The Man On The Moon To 2001 And Beyond: The Evolving Social And Ethical Impact Of Computers drew an audience of approximately 50 participants.
SIGCAS has continued to build a collegial relationship with the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology (INSEIT), and had a representative at the 2009 CEPE conference in Greece this past June. We are also presenting SIGCAS panels, workshops and tutorials at CCSC conferences (Consortium for Computer Science in Colleges). And, we have been approached by IEEE’s Society for the Social Implications Technology (SSIT) to co-sponsor their ISTAS 2011 conference.
Carol Spradling from Northwest Missouri University continues in the capacity of SIGCAS representative to the newly- formed ACM Education Council, while Don Gotterbarn from Eastern Tennessee State University represents SIGCAS on the USACM. Don is also the ACM representative to IFIP’s TC9 Group on computers and society.
Finally, our September 2009 issue, which is currently in production, will feature a retrospective of SIGCAS’ last 40 years. We have invited past award recipients to respond to a set of questions regarding the history and future of the social and ethical impact of computing.
5. Brief summary of key issues that the SIG membership will have to deal with in the next 2-3 years.
The SIGCAS Executive Committee is beginning its second year of leadership: Flo Appel, Saint Xavier University, is in her second term as Chair; Diana Burley, George Washington University, last year was newly elected to the Vice-Chair position; Mark Perry, University of Western Ontario, was re-elected to the position of Executive Committee Member-at-large; and Tom Jewett, California State University, Long Beach, serves on the EC as past Chair.
The challenges identified over the past years continue to exist. While we have made sustained and important inroads into collaboration at the leadership level with other organizations, we continue to struggle to mobilize our membership to become more actively involved in these liaisons.
The continued lack of a Computers & Society (C&S) editor-in-chief, still with nobody stepping forward to fill the position, places an undue burden on the leadership to edit and produce the newsletter. We have been successful, however, in recruiting and retaining a talented and effective editorial board, whose members work well together and are in the process of determining an appropriate format for and character of the newsletter. Our newsletter, online since 2002, must be stabilized from the perspective of both its editorship board and its publication. The migration to electronic format-only has had a great cost-saving benefit, but we have lost our ability to provide our members with a cohesive and tangible quarterly publication, and until last year, we have had difficulty with timely publication. We continue to discuss plans to leverage the online character of the newsletter.
Our website, which was renovated last year, requires ongoing work to become more interactive, and has proven to be a vast improvement over our previous web presence. It has definitely been more effective in its ability to mobilize our membership. We routinely receive responses to the “Volunteer Opportunities” page, and this is gradually resulting in a more active & engaged membership.
New leadership must be nurtured for the next election period when the chair will step down and new blood must come forward. A particularly important administrative task that must be carried out in the coming year is a revisiting of the SIGCAS bylaws regarding elections and leadership.
SIGCHI FY’09 ANNUAL REPORT
July 2008 - June 2009
Submitted by Julie Jacko, Past President
1. Awards
1.1 SIGCHI made the following awards in 2008-2009:
• Lifetime Achievement Award: Sara Kiesler
• CHI Academy Inductees: Mark Ackerman, Bill Gaver, Clayton Lewis, Wendy Mackay, Aaron Marcus, Elizabeth Mynatt and Tom Rodden
• Lifetime Service Award: Clare-Marie Karat and Steven Pemberton
• SIGCHI Social Impact Award: Helen Petrie
• Five SIGCHI members were inducted as ACM Fellows: Gregory Abowd, Bill Buxton, Alan Kay, Joe Konstan, and Judy Olson. One SIGCHI member, Andreas Girgensohn, was recognized as an ACM Distinguished Scientist. One SIGCHI member, Susan M. Dray, was recognized as an ACM Distinguished Engineer.
1.2 SIGCHI Conference awards:
CHI 2009 awarded seven best paper awards:
1. Predicting Tie Strength With Social Media
Eric Gilbert, Karrie Karahalios, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
2. Undo and Erase Events as Indicators of Usability Problems
David Akers, Stanford University, USA, Matthew Simpson, Robin Jeffries, Google, Inc., USA, Terry Winograd, Stanford University, USA
3. From Interaction to Trajectories: Designing Coherent Journeys Through User Experiences
Steve Benford, The University of Nottingham, UK, Gabriella Giannachi, The University of Exeter, UK, Boriana Koleva, Tom Rodden, The University of Nottingham, UK
4. Musink: Composing Music through Augmented Drawing
Theophanis Tsandilas, Catherine Letondal, Wendy E. Mackay, INRIA / Université Paris-Sud, France
5. Sizing the Horizon: The Effects of Chart Size and Layering on the Graphical Perception of Time Series Visualizations
Jeffrey Heer, Stanford University, USA, Nicholas Kong, Maneesh Agrawala, University of California, Berkeley, USA
6. Social Immersive Media: Pursuing Best Practices for Multiuser Interactive Camera/Projector Exhibits
Scott S. Snibbe, Sona Research, USA, Hayes S. Raffle, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
7. Ephemeral Adaptation: The Use of Gradual Onset to Improve Menu Selection Performance
Leah Findlater, Karyn Moffatt, Joanna McGrenere, Jessica Dawson, University of British Columbia, Canada
CHI 2009 awarded four best notes awards:
1. Fast Gaze Typing with an Adjustable Dwell Time
Päivi Majaranta, Ulla-Kaija Ahola, Oleg Špakov, University of Tampere, Finland
2. Awareness, Training and Trust in Interaction with Adaptive Spam Filters
Henriette S.M. Cramer, Vanessa Evers, Maarten W. van Someren, Bob J. Wielinga, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
3. Graph Sketcher: Extending Illustration to Quantitative Graphs
Robin Stewart, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, mc schraefel, University of Southampton, UK
4. Finding Canonical Behaviors in User Protocols
Walter C. Mankowski, Peter Bogunovich, Ali Shokoufandeh, Dario D. Salvucci, Drexel University, USA
2. Significant Programs and Key Issues
2.1 Membership:
4,845 total members
2,980 professional members
718 student members
1,146 affiliate members
1 institutional member
2.2 Member Benefits Provided to SIGCHI Members
• Subscription to interactions magazine, published six times per year
• On-line subscription to SIGCHI Bulletin
• Reduced registration at conferences sponsored and co-sponsored by SIGCHI
• Access to proceedings of SIGCHI-sponsored and co-sponsored conferences in the ACM Digital Library, as well as selected conference proceedings for other conference held in-cooperation with SIGCHI
2.3 Community Benefits Provided by SIGCHI
• Sponsorship of the leading conferences in the field
• Support for students through student volunteer and scholarship programs
• A wide range of electronic forums including over a dozen popular e-mail lists on topics ranging from public policy to HCI for the Web
• Support for activities worldwide, including over 60 chapters on 5 continents and programs to support HCI in developing countries
• SIGCHI's awards program that recognize outstanding contributions to the field
• SIGCHI's Web site and other on-line resources
• Support for a variety of volunteer activities addressing issues ranging from public policy to education to mentorship
2.4 Conferences:
SIGCHI continues to sponsor a mix of long-running and newer conferences which provide the highest-prestige outlets for research while also serving as venues for emerging work (e.g., the workshop programs and poster sessions in many of our conference), promoting student education (e.g., the doctoral colloquia and student volunteer programs in our conferences), and promoting continuing professional education and networking (e.g., the tutorial and course programs and our special interest group gatherings and recruiting and networking events). Most of our conferences are stable, and are well run by the communities they serve. We put substantial direct effort into our flagship CHI conference, which has undergone continuous redesign and evaluation.
CHI 2009. CHI 2009 was again a successful conference. No doubt location and a recovering technology sector play a role in our continued success. The four day conference model which was implemented in 2006 (with more diversity in the program and courses incorporated into the conference has proven to be working well. A new venue this year is the video showcase, providing an opportunity for many different kinds of design, innovation, opinion and futurism. Some highlights include:
• Attendance has been growing till CHI 2007, numbers are stable from 2007, around 2200 – 2300
• Conference revenue is systematically at, or over, the budgeted allocation and overhead
• CHI 2009 shows an all times high in student attendance: where we “normally” meet 700 students, this time we registered 900.
• Feedback from conference survey continues to be positive
• Attendance is diverse and communication across disciplines is noted by attendees
Conference attendance for 2009 largest categories in detail: 904 members; 419 non members; 624 student members; 274 student non members; Plus doctoral consortium; exhibitor and sponsor registries, and press. Total attendees 2300; of which 312 comp. Fee structure (category, early, late, on site): Member, $760, $960, $1160; Non-Member, $960, $1160, $1360; Student Member, $350, $370, $390; Student Non-Member, $450, $470, $490.
Conference sponsors: 4 champion sponsors, 4 contributors, 4 friends of CHI.
Survey of the reviewing process
This year’s review process combined papers and notes reviewing, whereas the previous years’ numbers are for papers only. The CHI Review Process survey is in its fourth year of monitoring process quality. From the author’s survey, overall the process seems healthy. Ratings of the fairness in general is up slightly over last year; metrics of review quality are down somewhat, but not enough to be concerned. Rebuttals and blind reviewing continue to be seen as improvements by the majority of authors, and authors are more positive about this than in the previous years, even rejected authors (only 6% of whom believe their rebuttal made a difference).
With respect to the new process changes – subcommittees, contribution types and the half-point scale – the majority of authors were positive, and the rest were split between neutral and disagree. Authors strongly favored the half-point reviewing scale; other innovations were received more positively than negatively.
Our survey feedback is positive and consistent with years past. Eighty nine percent of those responding report that CHI was worth the time and money. This has been a very stable number over the years. Based on this year’s experience, ninety two percent would recommend the conference to others. Most questions on the survey are retained from year to year. However some are included to capture feedback on changes in the conference. This year we included a question regarding the conference length (which had been extended from 3 days to 4 days) in 2006. Seventy three percent said the length was about right, and 21% felt the conference was too long.
Venues rated most positively (average between “good” and “excellent”) were: Papers and Notes, CHI Madness, Workshops, and Design Vignette Demos; as well as the new Video Showcase. The lowest ratings this year were for the Job Fair (between “fair” and “neutral”)
As a result of continuing successes, we have more than rebuilt our fund balance and we have opportunities to invest substantially in new development activities. We are grateful to ACM's financial operations staff, to ACM SIG services staff, and to the volunteers that have helped us change CHI to reflect today's conditions and to help us emerge stronger.
Specialized Conferences (sponsored/co-sponsored). SIGCHI sponsors and co-sponsors a number of top-tier conferences in fields that are closely aligned with SIGCHI. Those that were sponsored/co-sponsored in 2007-2008 and those for 2008-2009 are:
Second half 2007 & first half of 2008
20th User Interface Software and Technology (UIST)
1st International conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys)
3rd Conference on computer-based systems that have an impact on groups, organizations and social networks (GROUP)
3rd Conference on designing for user experience (DUX)
14th Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST)
8th International conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI)
10th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI)
5th International conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS)
2nd annual conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI)
6th Creativity and Cognition conference (C&C)
5th Eye Tracking Research & Applications Conference (ETRA)
1st Symposium on CHI for Management Information Technology (CHiMiT)
Second half 2008 & first half of 2009
SoftVis 2008: International Symposium on Software Visualization (SoftVis)
9th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI)
21st Annual UIST Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST)
2nd International conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys)
15th conference on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST)
13th Int. conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
2nd Computer Human Interaction for the Management of Information Technology (CHiMiT)
11th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI)
1st Workshop on Intercultural Collaboration (IWIC)
3rd annual conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI)
4th Conference on computer-based systems that have an impact on groups, organizations and social networks (GROUP)
1st International Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems (EICS)
Specialized Conferences (In-cooperation).
Those conferences that were in-cooperation with SIGCHI in 2007-2008 and those projected for 2008-2009 include (an exhaustive list is available here ):
2007 & first half of 2008
2nd Tangible and Embedded Interaction (TEI)
2nd International Conference on Persuasive Technology (Persuasive)
European Conference on Interactive TV (EuroITV)
Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces (DPPI)
7th International Symposium on Smart Graphics (SG)
7th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA)
11th International Workshop Cooperative Information Agents (CIA)
2nd Int. Conf. on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts (DIMEA)
2nd Int. Conf. on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII)
6th International Workshop on TAsk MOdels and DIAgrams (TAMODIA)
9th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Mobile HCI)
6th International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2007)
(25th anniversary) European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (ECCE)
3rd Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction (TEI)
3rd International Conference on Body Area Networks (BodyNets)
10th International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI)
7th Sketch Based Interfaces and Modeling (SBIM)
7th International Interaction Design and Children (IDC)
International conference on Computational Aesthetics (CAe)
2008 & first half of 2009
9th Annual ACM SIGCHI_NZ Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (CHINZ)
8th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA)
3rd Int. Conf. on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts (DIMEA)
10th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) 10th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Mobile HCI)
5th Nordic forum for human-computer interaction research (NordiCHI)
4th International Conference on Collaborative Computing (CollaborateCom)
5th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment (IE)
1st International Working Conference on Human Factors and Computational Models in Negotiation (HuCom)
1st ACM SIGGRAPH Conference and exhibition in Asia (SIGGRAPH Asia)
11th Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction (TEI)
3rd International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (Pervasive Health)
Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technologies (DESRIST)
International Symposium on Collaborative Technologies and Systems (CTS)
9th International Symposium on SMART GRAPHICS (SG)
European Conference on Interactive TV (EuroITV)
8th International Interaction Design and Children (IDC)
1st conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T)
3. Chapters
Chartered Chapters
Two new SIGCHI chapters were chartered in 2009 in Ireland and Greece.
There are now 34 professional SIGCHI chapters:
• Atlanta ACM SIGCHI
• Bangalore ACM SIGCHI
• Belgian ACM SIGCHI
• Brazil ACM SIGCHI
• Central Russia ACM SIGCHI
• Chicago ACM SIGCHI
• China ACM SIGCHI
• Czech ACM SIGCHI
• Finland ACM SIGCHI
• Greater Boston ACM SIGCHI
• Greece ACM SIGCHI (GrCHI)
• Ireland ACM SIGCHI
• Italian ACM SIGCHI
• Korea ACM SIGCHI
• Mexico ACM SIGCHI
• Milwaukee ACM SIGCHI
• Mumbai ACM SIGCHI
• Netherlands ACM SIGCHI
• New Zealand ACM SIGCHI
• Northern Utah ACM SIGCHI
• Orange County ACM SIGCHI
• Ottawa ACM SIGCHI
• PhillyCHI (Philadelphia ACM SIGCHI)
• Portland ACM SIGCHI
• Puget Sound ACM SIGCHI
• Romania ACM SIGCHI
• San Francisco Bay ACM SIGCHI
• South Africa ACM SIGCHI
• South India ACM SIGCHI
• Southern Michigan Northern Ohio ACM SIGCHI
• Spain ACM SIGCHI
• St. Louis ACM SIGCHI
• Swiss ACM SIGCHI
• Toulouse/France ACM SIGCHI
There are 5 student SIGCHI chapters:
• Cornell University Student ACM SIGCHI
• George Mason University ACM Student SIGCHI
• Penn State University ACM Student SIGCHI Chapter
• University of Michigan ACM Student SIGCHI
• University of Washington ACM Student SIGCHI
2009 Local Chapters Workshop
The annual SIGCHI chapters workshop was held at CHI 09 in Boston. There were 16 chapter leaders from around the world who took part in the meeting to share their successes and challenges, to learn from one another, and to network.
The ideas below illustrate the innovative approaches chapters have developed to serving their members and communities:
• Boston: Sharing calendars with other related local groups to foster collaboration and member sharing as opposed to competing with each other
• Atlanta: Using social media such as Flickr, streaming video, and Twitter to expand reach and build community
• Some chapters sponsor annual student awards e.g. for Master's theses in HCI
• Planning programs around visits by interesting speakers to reduce costs with hosting speakers
• Norway: HCI Mentorship program - experienced HCI practitioners mentor novices
• Prague: Physical library of HCI books for loan to members
• Netherlands: Received an infusion of money from Ministry of Economic Affairs. Other chapters were inspired to try to replicate this model of seeking funding from supportive local organizations.
Chapters continue to face common challenges as well. These examples highlight opportunities for SIGCHI and ACM to assist chapters:
• Finding and attracting speakers
• Strategies for membership dues, offering compelling benefits (e.g. annual dues vs. pay per event)
• How to handle potential competition from similar local groups (UPA, HFES, IxDA, etc.)
• Chapter technology infrastructure (mailing lists, tracking memberships, collecting dues)
• Ways to link academia and industry
• Building/maintaining sense of community
• Ways to attract and retain volunteers for chapter
CHI 2010 and Local Chapters
The CHI 2010 committee is pushing for greater outreach to and involvement from local chapters around the world. We are collaborating to develop strategies for increasing attendance and sponsorship by working with local chapter leaders on CHI promotion activities.
4. Publications
Efforts in the area of publications in 2009 include supporting the activities and achievements of the major SIGCHI-connected publications, including:
• interactions Magazine: The new editors John Kolko and Richard Anderson are firmly in place and seem to be regularly producing issues of substance.
• Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) – addresses the needs of researchers. Jack Carroll’s term as Editor-in-Chief is coming to an end and there is an active search for a new editor. There is a new policy in place so that papers accepted for TOCHI can be presented at the CHI conference to increase their exposure.
• The CHI conference proceedings + very strong smaller conferences
5. Elections
SIGCHI terms of office run for three years, and elections were held in Spring 2009 for all offices. SIGCHI nominated a full slate of candidates, and the following individuals were elected for terms running July 1, 2009 through June
30, 2012:
President: Gerrit C. van der Veer
Executive VP: Elizabeth F. Churchill
VP for Finances: Gary M Olson
VP Membership/Communication: Loren Terveen
VP at Large: Paula Kotzé
VP at Large: John Charles Thomas
In accordance with SIGCHI's by-laws, Julie Jacko will serve on the EC as Past President and four appointed positions will be filled by the new EC.
6. Electronic Infrastructure
Working with ACM's IS department and a consultant, SIGCHI has implemented a new web site utilizing the open source content-management system: Plone. Plone is the system being used for both the ACM web site and SIGGRAPH's web site, which moves our maintenance and administration of the site into the mainstream for ACM.
The site is scheduled to launch on August 2.
On the down-side, the SIGCHI Photo History site has once again failed. The SIGCHI Photo History site is a consultant-developed site that has proven to not be maintainable. We originally thought we were going to be able to merge the site into the new SIGCHI site, but that has proven to be unfeasible. We are going to work with our Plone consultant to resurrect the site for the short term and look for longer-term solutions which either takes advantage of external picture hosting sites or advances in the Plone itself.
Beyond these activities, we continue to maintain the other aspects of our electronic infrastructure, such as mailing lists, conference web sites, etc.
SIGCOMM FY’09 ANNUAL REPORT
July 2008 - June 2009
Submitted by: Mark Crovella, Past Chair
SIGCOMM continues to be a healthy and vibrant SIG. There are a number of highlights in the past year.
First, the SIG has continued to look for ways to increase the transparency of EC activities, and to increase discussion of SIG matters in general in the community. To that end, the SIG established a blog (blog.) in September 2008. This was accomplished through the work of Neil Spring, SIGCOMM's Information Services Director, and with the help of ACM.
Blog topics have covered a lot of ground: there has been vigorous discussion of the SIGCOMM conference itself -- reviewing and openness; discussion of SIG policies and issues (steering committees, double-blind reviewing, and dual submission); and information for the community on SIG elections and "what the EC does."
Over the past year, the EC has received considerable feedback on the organization of the SIGCOMM conference, and this has prompted a series of discussions on how conference oversight may be improved. Currently the conference is managed by the EC in the role of steering committee.
The EC has developed a proposal for a new arrangement with technical oversight vested in a separate steering committee, and is now gathering feedback on the proposal from the SIGCOMM membership.
SIGCOMM held elections in June, leading to election of Bruce Davie as the new chair, and re-election of Henning Schulzrinne as Vice-Chair and Tilman Wolf as Secretary/Treasurer. SIGCOMM also has a new awards chair this year: Ramesh Govindan (USC) takes over from John Byers as the SIG's new Awards Chair.
With respect to awards, SIGCOMM has recognized Jon Crowcroft with the SIGCOMM award for lifetime achievement; he will receive his award and present a keynote talk at the annual SIGCOMM conference in August 2009 in Barcelona. SIGCOMM also has recognized Paramvir Bahl, Ranveer Chandra, Thomas Moscibroda, Rohan Murty, and Matt Welsh for the best paper in that conference, "White Space Networking with Wi-Fi like Connectivity"; and SIGCOMM has recognized Randolph Baden, Adam Bender, Daniel Starin, Neil Spring, and Bobby Bhattacharjee for the best student paper in that conference, "Persona: An Online Social Network with User-Defined Privacy." A "Test of Time" award will also be given at the conference for the best paper(s) from 10-12 years ago.
Further, SIGCOMM members Hari Balakrishnan, Jennifer Rexford, Mark Squillante, and Doug Terry were recognized as ACM Fellows.
SIGCOMM has also recognized Dina Papagiannaki with its Rising Star award; she will receive her award at the CoNEXT conference held in December 2009 in Rome.
This year the SIG decided to add its support to ACM-W's scholarship program. ACM-W provides approximately 12 scholarships of $500 each to help women students attend a research conference. SIGCOMM decided to augment the scholarship for any recipient who chooses to attend a SIGCOMM-sponsored or in-cooperation conference or workshop. The additional funds provided by SIGCOMM will cover full costs of travel, lodging, and conference registration. In addition, SIGCOMM will help find informal mentors for such students before they arrive at the conference.
SIGCOMM continues its geodiversity travel grants: For the fourth year in a row, we have awarded travel grants to support junior researchers from under-represented regions in attending the main SIGCOMM conference; this year, support was extended to selected authors at the Latin American Networking Conference (LANC 2009).
The SIG Newsletter (Computer Communication Review) continues to publish lively and timely articles and commentary. Editor Keshav has continued the succcessful format that incorporates both peer-reviewed articles, fast-turnaround unreviewed articles, and community news and commentary.
Finally, the SIGCOMM main conference continues to thrive. In August 2009, the flagship SIGCOMM conference will take place in Barcelona, Spain. SIGCOMM 2010 will take place in Delhi, India. We are in the process of selecting a site in North America for SIGCOMM 2011.
SIGCSE FY’09 Annual Report
July 2008 - June 2009
Submitted by: Barbara Boucher Owens, Chair
By-Laws Revision
The revised SIGCSE By-Laws have finally been approved by all levels of ACM and are now in place! Many thanks are due to past and present SIGCSE boards for their tireless work in this process.
Membership
Historically, SIGCSE has had a very loyal membership. Recent initiatives to attract more members seem to be connecting well with many in the computing community. At the end of the 2008 fiscal year (the last year for which we have complete data), SIGCSE has 2671 members, an increase of 85 members over last year, with strong gains in both professional and affiliate members, against a 50 member decrease in the subscriber-only category. 54% of the one-year members have renewed, but 84% of those who had been members for at least 2 years have renewed, showing a loyal membership. However, we are not resting on our laurels. The membership committee of the Board is looking at ways to (1) increase membership, (2) improve communication with members, particularly new ones, and (3) improve publicity and visibility of SIGCSE.
Awards
Each year, SIGCSE gives awards to those who have been particularly helpful to the computer-science-education community. SIGCSE gave two awards this year, both officially at the Technical Symposium which was in March, 2009. Elliot Koffman, Temple University received the Outstanding Contribution award and gave the opening keynote address. The SIGCSE Award for Lifetime Service was presented to Michael Clancy of the University of California at Berkeley who addressed partakers of the first-timers luncheon.
Conference Highlights
In 2008-2009, SIGCSE sponsored three main conferences: the Technical Symposium, the summer (Northern Hemisphere) ITiCSE conference and the September/October research conference known as the ICER workshop. The SIGCSE Technical Symposium and the Digital Library revenues continue to generate additional revenue to support our many endeavors.
Reviewing
Our homegrown online submission and reviewing system for the technical symposia has streamlined the process and allowed reviewing to involve all interested SIGCSE members. Most papers for the Symposium and ITiCSE are now sent to six reviewers, giving significant input to program committees, and both submitters and reviewers can view the reviews of their papers after acceptance decisions are made. With over 1000 reviewers in the SIGCSE conference databases, some variation among reviews can be expected, and conference leadership and the SIGCSE Board are exploring how to best utilize reviewers and promote consistency. This year for the Symposium, the program chairs instituted a meta-reviewing process which seemed to work quite well.
There is much work to be done in this arena, and the Board is considering more intensive revisions as well as the possibility of utilizing an outside software review system, such as EasyChair.
Technical Symposium
SIGCSE 2009 was remarkably successful, with very strong attendance and a healthy surplus to support other SIGCSE programs (without raising conference fees) in spite of a struggling world economy. This year’s Co-Chairs, Mark Guzdial (Georgia Tech) and Sue Fitzgerald (Metropolitan State University) were incredible. Mark utilized his extensive blogging skills to blog about the conference and issues surrounding computing education. Sue kept a tight eye on the budget and all the details surrounding a conference. Last year's Symposium co-chair Susan Rodger was particularly effective in her new role as vendor liaison. Our second annual Kids’ Camp at the Symposium blended a childcare service with efforts to engage the next generation with computing. Children attending the camp wrote programs in both Scratch, a new graphical, multimedia language from MIT as well as in Alice, a 3D animation software from CMU. This effort was a sell-out.
Special thanks are due the 2009 Program Committee, led by Program co-chairs Steve Wolfman and Gary Levandowski who will be chairs of the 2010 Technical Symposium in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Additional keynote speakers at the conference were Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Craig Mundie, who excited the audience with the potential for development of new applications and Greg Abowd, Distinguished Professor, School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech who electrified the audience with his personal story of his research shift to aiding persons with disabilities.
ICER 2008
The International Computing Education Conference (ICER) originally began through the vision and guidance of Richard Anderson, Sally Fincher, and Mark Guzdial. New leadership began for ICER conferences starting in 2008 when ICER was held in Sydney, Australia. The number of papers submitted was double that in previous years and this conference also had two co-located events, the second 2008 doctoral consortium and the BRACElet research group workshop to study novice programmers. The former was held the day before ICER and the latter the two days following.
The 2009 conference will be held at UC Berkeley in August (trying an earlier date). Numbers of registrants were not available at this time, but it does seem that the number of participants in the doctoral consortium is down significantly. We will watch the planning of the 2010 conferences in Aarhus, Denmark, carefully and reflect upon the advisability of the co-location of the DC with ICER rather than the Symposium.
Other Conference Information and Issues
Behind the scenes, Bob Beck (Villanova University) and Scott Grissom (Grand Valley State University) have continued outstanding service as Symposium Site Coordinators; and Mats Daniels (Uppsala University) continues fine work as ITiCSE Site Coordinator -- with the help of Bruce Klein from Grand Valley State University. Michael Goldwebber will be joining the ITiCSE Site Coordination effort as an understudy for Bruce Klein.
SIGCSE's 2009 winter/summer conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education will take place 5-8 July in Paris. This conference's attendance is expected to exceed previous ITiCSE attendance. Patrick Brézillon is the conference chair and Jean-Marc Labat and Ingrid Russell are the program co-chairs.
Conference leadership has been procured through 2012, with the 2010 Symposium held in Milwaukee under the leadership of Steve Wolfman and Gary Levandowski, the 2011 Symposium will take place in Dallas under the leadership of Ellen Walker (Hiram College) and Tom Cortina (Carnegie Mellon), and the 2012 conference in Raleigh under the leadership of Laurie Smith King (Holy Cross) and Dave Musicant (Carleton College).
ITiCSE 2010 is set for Ankara, Turkey under the leadership of the seasoned SIGCSE leader John Impagliazzo and the ACM-W stalwart advocate Reyyan Ayfer. ITiCSE 2011 is set for Darmstadt, Germany under the leadership of ITiCSE regular Guido Roessling We have at least two proposals in various states of development for future ITiCSE events; so we expect all to go well.
One major concern the SIGCSE leadership holds is within the confines of a devastated economy. The SIGCSE leadership is working with our registration team and with ACM to procure pricing in the local currency for the non-US conferences and for curtailing expenses for all operations, where possible.
Publications
John Impagliazzo became Editor-in-Chief of the SIGCSE Bulletin in 1997. The consistent high quality of inroads led to the approval by the ACM Publications Board for SIGCSE to transition inroads to ACM magazine status and the unbundling of the conference proceedings from inroads beginning in 2010. Currently inroads is classified as a newsletter, but this in no way reflects the scholarly work that appears in it. John Impagliazzo and a Board-appointed committee are to be congratulated for this endeavor.
SIGCSE has also been hard at work establishing criteria for the nomination of its best papers for inclusion in the newly revamped CACM.
Additional Activities
Through the past seven years, the Board has sought to continue, regularize, and/or expand programs, as SIGCSE tries to support a full range of interests within the field of computing education. Our healthy surplus has allowed us to fund many important endeavors and our strong volunteer base has allowed for participation in many volunteer supported efforts. Details for many of these projects may be obtained at . We present a few for information purposes
Outreach: SIGCSE has provided funds for presenters from SIGCSE conferences to lead similar sessions at regional conferences. Although few conferences have taken advantage of this offer, SIGCSE is still strongly committed to this.
Doctoral Consortium: Since 1998, SIGCSE has sponsored a Doctoral Consortium with three main goals:
"To offer a friendly forum for students to discuss their work and receive constructive feedback",
"To offer relevant information on issues important to doctoral candidates", and
"To nurture a community of researchers."
This annual event had been held the Wednesday before SIGCSE symposia and has continued to have SIGCSE financial support. Capable leadership came from Josh Tenenberg (University of Washington at Tacoma) and Donald Joyce (Unitec New Zealand) in 2008 and consortium will be led by Beth Simon (UC San Diego) in August of 2009.
Since the Doctoral Consortium focuses on research issues, we began holding the Doctoral Consortium in conjunction with the ICER conference. Then, beginning in September 2008 and subsequent years, the Doctoral Consortium may meet in conjunction with the ICER conferences. A major logic for this plan was to afford more easy access to students from outside the United States. We will be assessing the advisability of this move.
Workshop for Department Chairs: SIGCSE held its fourth annual Roundtable for Department Chairs at SIGCSE 2008, under the capable guidance of Sandra DeLoatch (Norfolk State University), Dianne Martin (George Washington University) and Joyce Currie Little (Towson University).
Workshop for New Teaching Faculty. The 2009 Symposium hosted for the first time a Board-supported activity for new teaching faculty, spearheaded by Dan Garcia and Julie Zelenski.
Special Projects: SIGCSE has funding available “to support members who wish to investigate and introduce new ideas in the learning and teaching of computing." Grants are possible up to $5,000 USD per proposal, and successful recipients are expected to present their results at a SIGCSE conference.
SIGCSE Committees: The SIGCSE Committee Initiative was created in 2001-2002 to encourage "all SIGCSE members to participate in substantive discussions on areas of community interest, with the goals of investigating topics in depth and culminating with substantive reports." Three committees are active –women in computing, research methods and faculty evaluation. The committee on discrete math completed its work, publishing its final report in inroads and a collection of teaching materials on the SIGCSE web site. The effectiveness of this structure will have on-going review by the Board.
Web Site/Internet Presence: Scott Grissom (Grand Valley State University) continues to monitor and update the SIGCSE Web site at . Also, Frank Young (Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology) and William Turner (Wabash College) served ably as Information Directors, working to improve electronic communications between SIGCSE members. A concerted effort was begun this year to adopt the look-&-feel of the ACM web presence and utilize Plone to continue the update process. Samuel Mann of Otago Tech in New Zealand is championing this endeavor beginning with a course project with his students at Otago. Scott Grissom surpassed his usual fantastic job of keeping the website updated while the redesign effort is underway by smoothing the transition and design of the new website. SIGCSE was one of the SIGs who elected to have its past conference sites archived by ACM.
Local Chapters: Several groups have indicated an interest in organizing as local SIGCSE Chapters, and the Board has provided an appropriate framework. Although no new chapters were started in 2008, a North Africa site is under consideration.
Collaborative Efforts
Even with its expanded role in supporting computing education at all levels, SIGCSE also celebrates that various groups have emerged to focus on specific areas.
As SIGCSE Chair, I was pleased to have participated in the Rebooting Computing Workshop held in Mountain View, California in January. I was also an active participant in m June at the Future of Computing Workshop in Washington, DC led by Boots Cassel and Mark Guzdial.
Since ACM launched the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) in 2005 with a focus on K-12 computing education, SIGCSE and CSTA have worked to collaborate on areas of common interest. Chris Stephenson, the executive director of CSTA has been a regular visitor at the SIGCSE Board meetings and in June 2009, the SIGCSE Chair, Barbara Owens visited with the CSTA Board at their annual meeting.
In cooperation conferences and venues. SIGCSE has granted in-cooperation status to a variety of efforts. We have many in cooperation conferences including the Australasian Computing Education Conference, the New Zealand NACCQ Conference, the Scandinavian Koli Calling Conference, the South African Computing Lecturers Association Conference, the Game Development in Computer Science Education Conference, and all of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges (CCSC) regional conferences.
Summary and Conclusion
As this review of activities and events indicates, SIGCSE is a vibrant and expanding organization due to the activities of hundreds of people. Many, many thanks to each and every SIGCSE member for your many contributions that make SIGCSE so successful.
SIGDA FY’09 Annual Report
July 2008 - June 2009
Submitted by: Patrick Madden, Chair
----------- Awards Given Out:
SIGDA Distinguished Service Awards
Prof. Nikil Dutt, UC Irvine, for many years of service to SIGDA, in particular as editor-in-chief for ACM TODAES
Prof. Eli Bozorgzadeh, for coordinating the PhD Forum at DAC Dr. Vikas Chandra, for the Design Automation Summer School
ACM Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award in EDA
to Kai-Hui Chang from the University of Michigan
SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award
to Prof. Yu Kevin Cao from Arizona State
TODAES Best Paper Award to
Sivaram Gopalkrishnan and Priyank Kalla from University of Utah
ACM/IEEE A. R. Newton Award to
Robert Brayton, Richard Rudell, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, and Albert R. Wang
Pioneering Achievement Award to
Edward J. McCluskey
SIGDA Service Awards
Bryan Preas, Diana Marculescu, Robert Walker, Alex Jones, Patrick Madden, Igor Markov, Matt Guthaus, Qing Wu,
Massoud Pedram (all outgoing board members, or involved in significant programs).
--------- Significant Papers
Each of our major conferences and symposia have had best paper awards.
The major award for a related transaction is:
"Optimization of Polynomial Datapaths using Finite Ring Algebra." Sivaram Gopalakrishnan and Priyank Kalla. ACM Trans. on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (ACM-TODAES), vol 12, issue 4, article 49, September 2007.
--------- Significant Programs
University Booth: SIGDA sponsors a booth on the exhibit floor of the Design Automation Conference (DAC, the major conference in the area, with a total attendance of around 7000 people). Students from a wide range of universities have their travel expenses at least partially supported, and present their research projects along side industry vendors.
Around 45 research groups were represented.
PhD Forum: Also at DAC are presentations from a carefully selected set of PhD dissertations. 27 students were supported to present at DAC, and were featured during the annual member meeting.
SIGDA CADathlon: At the International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD), student teams compete in a set of design automation related programming problems. The contest is modeled after the ICPC, and attracts around twenty teams.
--------- Innovative Programs
Design Automation Summer School. While this program has been active for several years, we consider it to be innovative. At the Design Automation Conference, we invite students from a range of universities to attend short courses taught by leading academic and industry researchers.
Design automation is something of a niche field, and only a handful of universities have departments large enough to cover the full range of design automation topics. The objective is to broaden the education opportunities, such that we can keep more students in the field.
The DASS was partially supported by NSF and SRC.
--------- Brief Summary
This was an election year for SIGDA, with a new board beginning its term on July 1, 2009. The new board members are Patrick H. Madden (chair), Alex Jones (vice-chair, conferences), Igor Markov (communications), Tony Givargis (finance), Naehyuck Chang (technical activities), Iris Ruth Bahar (educational activities), and Diana Marculescu (past chair).
SIGDA is under financial pressure. The major conference, DAC, has shifted from an event that brought in large surpluses (in the range of $200,000 or more), to one where we expect a loss (in the range of $25,000). The conference has not covered the allocation to ACM for the past few years, and we have observed a declining fund balance. The prior board moved aggressively to scale back expenses and programs; this has slowed the fund balance decline, but it is not clear if it can be stopped without a major change to DAC.
DAC is jointly sponsored by IEEE, and EDAC (and industry consortium). At this point in time, it is not clear if EDAC can sustain their share of the financial burden, and the SIGDA board is working with the IEEE counterparts to address the situation. All conferences and workshops encountered difficulty due to the economy, but DAC is the most significant problem.
A secondary issue of concern for SIGDA is the relationship to a set of IEEE groups (CAS, CS, CANDE, DATC, some of which are being reorganized as part of a new group, CEDA). As IEEE groups have changed, there has been a "turf war" in some respects; some of the IEEE-affiliated volunteers are seeking greater control and sponsorship of ACM-sponsored events (in particular, the events that are profitable).
SIGDOC FY’09 Annual Report
July 2008 – June 2009
Submitted by: Brad Mehlenbacher, Chair
_SIGDOC Purpose
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group (SIG) on the Design of Communication (DOC) — ACM SIGDOC — emphasizes the design of communication for computer-mediated information products and systems. SIGDOC fosters the study and publication of processes, methods, and technologies for communicating and designing communication artifacts such as printed and online information, documentation designs and applications, multimedia and Web-based environments.
_SIGDOC Mission Statement
Until 2003, SIGDOC focused on documentation for hardware and software. With the shift in focus from documentation to the “design of communication,” SIGDOC better positioned itself to emphasize the potentials, the practices, and the problems of multiple kinds of communication technologies, such as Web applications, user interfaces, and online and print documentation. SIGDOC focuses on the design of communication as it is taught, practiced, researched, and theorized in various fields, including technical communication, software engineering, information architecture, and usability.
The mission of SIGDOC includes
• Promoting the professional development of its members
• Encouraging interdisciplinary problem solving related to online and print documentation and communication technologies
• Providing avenues for publication and the exchange of professional information
• Supporting research that focuses on the needs and goals of humans in technological contexts, and
• Supporting the development and improvement of communication technologies, including applications, interfaces, and documentation.
_SIGDOC Officers
• Brad Mehlenbacher, NC State University, USA Chair
Awards Chair
2009 General Co-Chair
• Rob Pierce, IBM Rational Software, USA Vice-Chair
Newsletter Editor
2009 Local Arrangements
• Liza Potts, Old Dominion University, USA Secretary/Treasurer
• Shaun Slattery, DePaul University, USA 2009 Program Co-Chair
• Ashley Williams, Bridgeline Software, USA Information Director
2009 Program Co-Chair
• Michael Albers, East Carolina University, USA Graduate Competition Chair
2009 Poster Sessions Chair
• Gloria Reece, Researcher, New Media & IT, USA INTECOM Representative
• Aristidis Protopsaltis, City University, UK 2009 General Co-Chair
• Scott Tilley, Florida Institute of Technology, USA Past Chair
• Kathy Haramundanis, Compaq, USA Member-at-Large
• Susan Jones, MIT, USA Member-at-Large
• David Novick, University of Texas at El Paso, USA Member-at-Large
• Clay Spinuzzi, University of Texas at Austin, USA Member-at-Large
• Henrique O’Neill, ISCTE, Portugal 2008 General Co-Chair
• Manuela Aparicio, ISCTE, Portugal 2008 General Co-Chair
• Carlos J. Costa, ISCTE, Portugal 2008 Program Chair
• Irene Frawley, ACM HQ, USA ACM Program Coordinator
_Viability
SIGDOC was found viable in 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004. In 2008, SIGDOC’s viability review resulted in the following feedback:
The SGB congratulates SIGDOC on its operational performance and finds it viable to continue its status for the next 2 years. The SGB requests that SIGDOC undertake an evaluation of its decrease in membership and conference participation during that time, and that it present its conclusions and plan as part of its Spring 2010 viability review.
_SIGDOC Conference Updates
SIGDOC’08 was hosted by the Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa (ISCTE) or the Higher Institute for Work and Enterprise Sciences at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, from September 22nd-24th, 2008. The conference was the second ACM SIGDOC conference held outside North America and the first conference held in a non-English speaking country. Henrique O’Neill and Manuela Aparicio served as General Co-Chairs and Carlos J. Costa served as Program Chair. The program committee had 37 members — 23 from the USA, 11 from Europe, 1 from Africa, 1 from South America, and 1 from Australia.
The conference surplus was approximately $7500.00.
Seventy-four papers were submitted from 13 countries, 33 full papers and technical papers, and — for the first time — 11 posters. The acceptance rate was 45 percent, a drop from 71 percent the previous year. The conference papers were published in the Proceedings of the 26th Conference on Design of Communication (ACM P) and emphasized documentation and design, usability, accessibility, evaluation and experimentation, document modelling, information design and learning, information systems and architecture, version control, aesthetics and creativity, knowledge management
The Invited Keynote Speaker was Dr. José Miguel Sales Dias, an internationally recognized expert in multimodal user interfaces, computer graphics, and augmented and mixed reality. Dr. Dias is director of the Microsoft Language Development Center in Porto Salvo, Portugal, and Associate Professor in the Department of Sciences and Information Technologies at ISCTE. Dr. Dias has BS in electrical engineering, a Msc in electrical and computer engineering from IST-UTL, and a Ph.D. in sciences and information technologies, specializing in computer graphics and multimedia, from ISCTE.
The co-recipients of the 2008 Rigo Award (for individual lifetime achievement in the field of communication design) were Dr. Susanne Bødker and Dr. Pelle Ehn. Dr. Susanne Bødker is a professor of human-computer interaction in the Computer Science Department at the University of Aarhus. Her research areas include participatory design and computer-supported cooperative work. She is associate editor of ACM ToCHI and the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. Dr. Pelle Ehn is a professor of design in the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University. His numerous books include Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts (1988), Manifesto for a Digital Bauhaus (1998), Participatory Design and the Collective Designer (2002), Participation in Interaction Design (2006), and Out of the Box (2007). In particular, Drs. Bødker and Ehn were especially noted for their influential collaboration on Computers and Democracy (1987) which has influenced user and documentation testing approaches for several decades.
Arrangements for our upcoming annual conference, SIGDOC’09, are well underway (see ). SIGDOC’09 is being co-sponsored by the Indiana University School of Informatics () and the Kelley School of Business () and is being held at Biddle Hotel and Conference Center in the Indiana Memorial Union at Indiana University Bloomington, IN, USA (). The conference organizers include Brad Mehlenbacher (NC State University, USA) and Aristidis Protopsaltis (City University, UK) as General Co-Chairs, Shaun Slattery (DePaul University, USA) and Ashley Williams (Bridgeline Software, USA) as Program Co-Chairs, and Rob Pierce (IBM Rational Software, USA) as Local Arrangements Chair. Pierce and Mehlenbacher visited the Bloomington site and established conference sponsorship from the Indiana University School of Informatics and the Kelley School of Business; in particular, arrangements were made that should encourage increased student attendance at the conference.
The conference Website is ) and lists the conference theme, invited speakers, and recipients of the 2009 Diana Award, Apple, Inc. ().
SIGDOC’10 is in the information-planning stages and discussions have centered around holding the conference in either São Paulo or São Carlos, Brazil. The SIGDOC Board is optimistic about our relationship with our Brazilian colleagues and it is encouraging that we had 11 people from Brazil submit 12 proposals for the SIGDOC’09 conference this year. Our primary contacts are Renata Fortes and Junia Anacleto, Department of Computer Science, Federal University of São Carlos-Brazil.
Discussions have also begun for SIGDOC’11 which the SIGDOC Board hopes will be held in Cambridge, MA, and SIGDOC’12 which might be held in Paris, France. Contact has been initiated with colleagues in India about a potential conference there. These efforts to plan further in advance are related to our goals of increasing SIGDOC membership.
_Publications
Rob Pierce continues to serve in the critical role of General Editor of SIGDOC’s quarterly newsletter (). The newsletter is e-mailed to all SIGDOC members, and archived versions of past newsletters are also available (). The newsletter consists of news from members (notes from the chair and from the general conference chair), future conference information, interesting items, feature articles, and job market information.
_Partnerships
This year, SIGDOC committed to the following in cooperation agreements:
• CNSR’09: Communications Networks and Services Research Conference
• DocEng 09: ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
• IWCMC’09: International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference
_Membership
SIGDOC had 316 members last year and this number has been dropping a little for the last several years. The SIGDOC Website now explicitly details the benefits of joining SIGDOC () in addition to encouraging existing members to volunteer (). We have also password-protected our quarterly newsletter to encourage membership for this added benefit. Following last year’s viability review, the SIGDOC Board has made it a priority to examine its membership and conference numbers and to write a plan for increasing them over the next several years. To that end, we have formed a membership committee and will establish its priorities and goals we this year. Conference planning for the next several conferences is currently ahead of schedule, reflecting this commitment. Finally, we have been exploring social networking spaces such as Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Ning; the implications of creating an organizational presence in these environments is under review.
._Key Issues for 2009-2010
Key issues for SIGDOC in the coming year include the following:
• To finalize plans for addressing the current falling membership numbers for our 2010 viability review. Additional strategies for accomplishing this goal will be discussed at this year’s annual SIG board meeting.
• To submit minor revisions of the SIGDOC Bylaws to reflect the 2003 renaming and orientation of the SIG.
• To establish conference locations and dates several years in advance.
• To continue to refine methods of carrying experiences and lessons learned in previous conferences into current and upcoming conferences.
• To return to our proposal for initiating an ACM SIGDOC journal and discuss re-submitting to the ACM Publications Board.
SIGecom FY’09 Annual Report
July 2008 – June 2009
Submitted by: David Pennock, Chair
SIGecom's two primary activities are its annual Conference on Electronic Commerce and its electronic newsletter SIGecom Exchanges.
The Tenth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'09) was held in July 2009 in Stanford, CA. The conference attracted 161 submissions, the second most in our history. The forty accepted papers formed a very strong technical program covering a range of topics from core theoretical foundations to practical innovations in the multi-billion dollar online advertising industry. About 180 people attended the main conference or the associated workshops and tutorials, at or near a record high. The healthy attendance combined with substantial corporate support, including from Google, HP, Microsoft, and Yahoo!, raised by the Conference Chair (John Chuang, Berkeley) made this a financial as well as a technical success.
Topics covered included areas of typical strength for the conference like auction design, traffic pricing, online advertising, and economic computations. Newer topics included voting, eliciting answers, crowdsourcing, and social lending.
Two co-located workshops -- the Fifth Workshop on Ad Auctions and the 2009 Workshop on The Economics of Networks, Systems, and Computation -- were well attended. Four tutorials and two fascinating keynote speeches prominent scholars and business leaders rounded out the program.
Nicolas Lambert and Yoav Shoham won the Best Paper award for "Eliciting Truthful Answers to Multiple-Choice Questions". Lambert, a student at Stanford, won the award for the second year in a row, one of a number of brilliant young students representing the future of the SIG and the field.
Next year's Program co-Chairs, Moshe Tennenholtz (Technion) and Chris Dellarocas (Boston University), will aim to continue the momentum, in conjunction with David Parkes (Harvard) as Conference Chair. EC'10 will be held June 7-11 2010 in Cambridge, MA.
Our newsletter, "SIGecom Exchanges", is published three times per year as a free online resource for members and others. Under the stewardship of Editor-in-Chief Vincent Conitzer (Duke University), the newsletter has undergone a number of rejuvenating changes, including the addition of survey issues with articles written by invited leaders in the field, a re-design of the website with the help of Daniel Reeves (Yahoo!), and a mathematical puzzle accompanying each issue. The latter addition has proven very popular, with solutions often flowing in within hours of publication.
Our main challenge for next year is to maintain our strength in research at the intersection of economics and computer science and at the same time keep connected to practice, and include more application-related contributions in the conference program. Maintaining this balance and reaching out for opportunities in emerging areas will be a key focus of the conference officials for next year and beyond. Key SIG leaders and advisors met at EC'09 and continue to discuss online the best approach to broadening the SIG's scope without threatening its core strengths.
SIGEVO FY’09 Annual Report
July 2008- June 2009
Submitted by: Darrell Whitley, Chair
OVERVIEW
SIGEVO, the SIG on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, has an Executive Committee of 18 members, with elections held in odd-numbered years. Elections were held in spring 2009, with 6 positions on the committee being open for election. Three members of the board were reelected: W. Banzhaf, K. De Jong and E. Goodman. Three new board members were elected: J. Branke, A. Esparcia and P. Lanzi. The Executive Committee also voted to keep the current set of officers for 2 more years. The current officers are: Darrell Whitley (chair), John Koza (vice chair), Una-May O’Reilly (secretary), and Wolfgang Banzhaf (treasurer). Pier Luca Lanzi continues as editor of SIGEVO’s newsletter.
A business meeting of the Executive Committee was held in Montreal at the GECCO conference on July 10, 2009.
The 2008 GECCO conference in Atlanta had good attendance. The conference was also a financial success. SIGEVO continues to have a very solid budget and healthy reserves well beyond what is required by ACM. Our 2009 GECCO conference in Montreal was of high quality, with attendance of approximately 530 individuals. The 2010 conference will be held in Portland, Oregon, and early planning is underway for 2011. The General Chair for 2010 will be Martin Pelikan and the editorial-in-chief will be Juergen Branke. The General Chair for 2011 will be Pier Luca Lanzi.
A survey of our community indicates that approximately 40 percent of our members are based in North America, 40 percent are based in Europe and 17 percent are based in Asia. We are therefore planning to hold the 2011 conference in Europe.
The Foundations of Genetic Algorithms (FOGA) workshop was held in Orlando, FL, January 8-11, 2009, under co-chairs R. Paul Wiegand and Annie S. Wu of University of Central Florida. The next FOGA will be held in January 2011 in Austria and will be chaired by Hans Georg Beyer. Professor Beyer was also recently elected to become the next editor-in-chief of the MIT Press journal Evolutionary Computation.
We have been trying for three years to obtain an agreement between MIT Press and ACM to include our key journals in the ACM digital library. We have been told a couple of times in the last year that there is at last a verbal agreement between ACM and MIT Press that would result in the journal Evolutionary Computation becoming part of the digital library. However, there always seems to be some roadblock. We would like to see this become a higher priority for ACM.
SIGEVO will continue to seek innovative ways to help its members garner success in their professional work, and to expand the influence of the field, including attracting new members and sponsoring additional professional activities.
THE SIGEVO GEC SUMMIT IN CHINA:
SIGEVO held the “Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Summit” in Shanghai, China, June 12-14, 2009. The goal was to bring together leading Western researchers with faculty, industry, and students involved in Evolutionary Computation in China and other Asian nations. Our goal was to make Genetic and Evolutionary Computation more accessible to the many researchers and practitioners in China and throughout Asia. We encountered two major problems that we did not anticipate.
1) There is apparently strong pressure for Chinese authors to publish in conferences that are indexed; apparently other organizations have been able to “preapprove” indexing. Of approximately 220 papers that were accepted for the conference, 42 were withdrawn when we could not guarantee in advance that the conference would be indexed.
2) There was a strong pattern of Chinese professors sending Ph.D. students to present papers at the conference while the professors did not register and attend. We often lose money on student registrations and expect regular registrations to make up the difference.
Given these two factors, we are projecting we will lose between 11K and 15K on the GEC Summit in Shanghai. We will need to solve these two problems before we can consider holding another conference in China.
AWARDS:
We are in the process of creating a 10 year “Impact Award”. The initial version of this award will recognize 1 to 3 papers a year that were published in the GECCO conference 10 years ago which are both highly cited and deemed to be seminal by the SIGEVO Executive Committee.
Several competitions were held at GECCO-2009. Awards were presented at the SIGEVO Annual Meeting to winners of the Human Competitive Awards (the “Humies”), sponsored by Third Millennium On-Line Products, Inc. The prizes include 10,000 dollars provided by Third Millennium. First prize, second prize, and two third prizes were announced at the SIGEVO Annual Meeting on July 12, 2009.
There is now a process in place so that select papers from the Humie Awards and the GECCO best papers award will be recommended to CACM for possible publication.
First Place Human Competitive Award
A Genetic Programming Approach to Automated Software Repair;
Stephanie Forrest (University of New Mexico)
T.V. Nguyen (University of New Mexico)
W. Weimer (University of New Mexico)
C. Le Goues (University of New Mexico)
CONDENSED ABSTRACT:
Genetic programming is combined with program analysis methods to automatically repair bugs in
off-the-shelf legacy C programs. Fitness is defined using negative test cases that exercise the bug
to be repaired and positive test cases that encode program requirements. Once a successful repair
is discovered, structural differencing algorithms and delta debugging methods are used to minimize its size.
The paper describes the method, reviews earlier experiments that repaired 11 bugs in over 60,000 lines
of code, reports results on new bug repairs, and describes experiments that analyze the performance
and efficacy of the evolutionary components of the algorithm
Select Best Papers from the GECCO Conference
From the “Bioinformatics and Computational Biology” Track
Modeling Evolutionary Fitness for DNA Motif Discovery;
S. Rahmann,
T. Marshall,
F. Behler,
O. Kramer
From the “Evolution Strategies, Evolutionary Programming” Track
Efficient Natural Evolutionary Strategies;
Y. Sun,
D. Wiestra,
T. Schaul,
J. Schmidhuber
From the “Genetic Algorithms” Track
Tunneling Between Opima: Partition Crossover for the TSP;
Darrell Whitley,
Doug Hains,
Adele Howe
From the “Genetic Programming” Track
A Genetic Programming Approach to Automated Software Repair;
Stephanie Forrest,
T. V. Nguyen,
W. Weimer,
C. Le Goues
SIGGRAPH FY’09 Annual Report
July 2008 – June 2009
Submitted by: G. Scott Owen, President
The transition to our new structure as defined by the bylaws change in 2008 continued. The ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee (EC) consists of three officers (President, Vice-President, and Treasurer), six Directors-at-Large, and several ex-officio non-voting members. All operation functions have been moved to the Standing Committees. Thus the annual report is primarily a summary of the activities of the different Standing Committees. Most of the Standing Committee Chairs are selected by the EC however, some have been set by policy as follows: Awards Chair (Vice-President), Finance Committee Chair (Treasurer), Nominations Committee (Past-President), and External Relations Chair (Past-President).
Standing Committee Reports
Awards
Jim Foley (Vice-President)
There were three awards given this year as follows:
Technical Awards (John Hughes, Chair)
Significant New Researcher Award
Maneesh Agrawala
University of California, Berkeley
Computer Graphics Achievement Award
Ken Perlin
New York University
Service Award (Joe Marks, Chair)
Outstanding Service Award
Stephen Spencer
University of Washington
Finance Committee
Jeff Jortner, Treasurer
SIGGRAPH FY 2009 Budget Report
Opening Reserve Fund Balance: $5,899,997
Closing Reserve Fund Balance: $5,180,650
Major Income Areas
-------------------------
Dues: $240,000
Publications (includes ACM Digital Library): $267,000
Interest: $55,000
Contributions (Chapters $15,000): $24,000
Major Committee Expenses
--------------------------
Executive Committee
(Includes EC Travel, Project Manager, and Special Projects(SIGGRAPH ASIA) ): $450,000
Publications: $293,000
Education Committee: $24,000
Information Services Committee: $24,000
Chapters Committee: $61,000
Digital Arts Committee: $3,000
Communications and Membership Committee(includes SIGGRAPH Village at SIGGRAPH 2008 and SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 and the SIGGRAPH content capture costs): $77,000
Conferences
--------------------------
SIGGRAPH 2008: $191,000 profit
All small conferences: $64,000 profit
SIGGRAPH Asia 2008: $453,000 loss
SIGGRAPH 2008 Conference
Jackie White, CAG Chair
At SIGGRAPH 2008, the 35th International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, 28,432 (pre-audit) artists, research scientists, gaming experts, developers, filmmakers, students, and academics from 87 countries joined together for the annual conference and exhibition in Los Angeles this week. Plus, more than 230 international companies exhibited - an increase in exhibits from the previous year.
"When we began planning for SIGGRAPH 2008 three years ago, the vision was to enhance the attendee experience and evolve along with the changing needs of the industry," said Jacquelyn Martino, SIGGRAPH 2008 Conference Chair from IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. "The result was a dynamic, multi-sensory, and cutting-edge event."
Highlights from SIGGRAPH 2008:
Industry pioneers and leaders offered Featured Speakers presentations:
Ed Catmull, President, Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios
Catherine Owens, Artist/Director and co-director of "U2 3D"
Takeo Kanade, Professor of Computer Science and Robotics, and Director of the Quality of Life Technology Engineering Research Center at Carnegie Mellon University.
The newly expanded Computer Animation Festival was open to the public for the first time ever. In addition to competition and invited screenings, production sessions, and discussion panels with filmmakers/artists/producers, the Festival featured three all-star production studio nights hosted by Pixar Animation Studios, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Lucasfilm. The SIGGRAPH 2008 Best in Show Award and Audience Prize went to Gobelins l'école de l'image in France for the film "Oktapodi."
The return of the FJORG! "Viking Animator" competition, where 16 three-person teams of CG animators competed for 32 hours straight to create the best overall animation of at least 15 seconds in length. Team Grojf won the competition for their animation "The Red Truck."
SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 Conference
Alyn Rockwood (then Thierry Frey), SACAG Chair
The world's top players and practitioners in computer graphics and interactive techniques flocked to Singapore in December 2008 as SIGGRAPH Asia made its debut in the region. More than 3,200 artists, researchers, developers, gaming experts, filmmakers, as well as academics gathered at Suntec City over four exciting days to discover new products, talents, technology, and techniques in the digital media industry. In all, a total of 49 countries were represented in an array of thought-provoking works and breakthrough ideas presented at the show.
"We first thought of introducing an Asian edition of SIGGRAPH almost two years ago, with a vision to bring the best in computer graphics and interactive techniques to players and audiences in the region. I am happy to note that we have indeed achieved this objective. Eighty percent of visitors to SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 were from within the region, including Australia and New Zealand. The excellent quality of work we have seen at SIGGRAPH Asia and the ideas that have been put forth bode well for the interactive and digital media industry in Asia," stated Alyn Rockwood, Advisory Group Chair, SIGGRAPH Asia Conference.
Animated caper comes up tops at Computer Animation Festival Awards
Winners of the Computer Animation Festival's Best of Show Award and two Jury Awards were announced in a lively award ceremony on 11 December 2008 at the Suntec Theatre. The winning pieces were chosen by a panel of industry experts based on their commendable use of computer-generated imagery, animation and storytelling.
"Picking three winners from 685 entries to represent the best of animation techniques and creativity was a challenge. The entries submitted were from around the world, making SIGGRAPH Asia a truly global platform. The Computer Animation Festival itself saw overwhelming support from the industry and public alike, with close to 1,300 people attending the Electronic Theatre sessions," said Jinny Choo, Chair, Computer Animation Festival 2008. "All of the shows were completely sold out."
Below are the 2008 Computer Animation Festival Winners.
• Best of Show Award: This Way Up, Smith & Foulkes, Nexus Productions Ltd, United Kingdom
Nexus Productions' short animated caper is about a day in the life of A.T. Shank & Son as they make their way cross country with just a coffin for company. The animation feature was not only entertaining, but also showcased high-quality computer animation.
• Jury Award: KUDAN, Taku Kimura, Links DigiWorks Inc., Japan
This 3D computer-animated fantasy film by Japanese production house Links DigiWorks is about a man who is accidentally transformed into a Kudan. Kudan is a Japanese monster which has a human head but the body of a cow. It speaks a human language, predicts war or disaster and dies in three days. The jury was unanimous in their decision to award Kudan a Jury award for its exceptional graphics display.
• Jury Award: Oktapodi, Gobelins, l'école de l'image, France
Six third-year students from Gobelins, l'école de l'image in France created a slapstick comedy about two octopuses as they help each other escape from the grasps of a stubborn restaurant cook. Oktapodi represented the best of all student works submitted to SIGGRAPH Asia, and jury members picked the award not only for its narrative and entertainment value, but also to encourage students to produce similar high-quality work.
Job Fair attracts top studios and thousands of job-seekers
The SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 Job Fair, produced by , was a big success with 20 studios from around the globe recruiting for more than 80 positions, and thousands of "right-brain" job-seekers visiting the Job Fair over the course of three days. Companies participating included Animal Logic, Double Negative Visual Effects, Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Ubisoft, among others. At the event, multiple job offers were tendered to candidates as a result of their high level of skill and experience.
" was very excited to be a part of SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 and provide a forum for talent and opportunity to connect. We are aggressively expanding our business into Asia since the digital media industry is growing exponentially in this part of the world. Many of the top animation, TV, film, visual FX and video game companies have opened studios and will be hiring aggressively for the months and years to come. As a result, SIGGRAPH Asia will become an increasingly important conference for the CG industries as a venue for continuing education and recruitment," said Ray Schnell, Partner/Chief Marketing Officer, .
The industry's best and latest
True to the tradition of SIGGRAPH since its inception in 1974, SIGGRAPH Asia is the platform where technology, art, culture, and science meet. Through its diverse programmes, SIGGRAPH Asia offers something for every member of the computer graphics world.
Said Lee Yong Tsui, Conference Chair, SIGGRAPH Asia 2008: "As SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 draws to a close, there is strong affirmation that Asia is indeed rising in prominence in the field of interactive and digital media. What we are seeing at SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 is only a glimpse of what the region's growing talent is capable of delivering. SIGGRAPH Asia will continue to be the driving force that will bring computer graphics in the region to a new level."
Standing Committees
Chapters Committee
Scott Lang, Chair
The ACM SIGGRAPH Professional and Student Chapters continue to be the largest network of SIG Chapters within the ACM organization. Sixty chapters exist in over fifteen countries around the world. During the last year, we chartered new Professional Chapters in Vienna (Austria), Manila (Philippines) and Austin (Texas, USA), and a Student Chapter at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. We also have several chapters In-Formation in Asia, including one which is very close to being chartered in Bangalore, India.
Associate Membership Program
We continue to make progress with this program. The NYC and Paris Chapters have spent the past year testing this system and we are now beginning to add new chapters. These include Silicon Valley (USA), Madrid (Spain), and Cascade (Portland, USA). We have also been working with ACM staff to add credit card processing to the system and this should be ready in time for SIGGRAPH 2009. We are also adding a Technical Profile Area that will allow us to capture member information in areas such as Job Title, Areas of Interest, and Volunteer Availability. We are currently finalizing these modules so that a presentation can be made at the SIGGRAPH 2009 Chapters Development Workshop in New Orleans.
Professional and Student Chapters Committee (PSCC)
In the interest of serving our chapters more efficiently and addressing areas that may need more attention than in the past, the PSCC has begun a re-organization that will result in a more flexible and responsive committee. This is being done by establishing several sub-committees and adding new members to lead these groups. Some of the new sub-committees being established include:
Web Site Sub-Committee
Eric Paquette of the Montreal ACM SIGGRAPH Chapter is serving as Chair of this group.
Sponsorship Sub-Committee
Brad Lawrence of the Orlando ACM SIGGRAPH Chapter will be serving as the Chair of this group.
Outreach Liaison with SIGGRAPH 2010
Jaime Radwan, a member of the chapters SCOOP Team last year, is working as a member of the PSCC and S2010 to ensure that there is consistent communication between these groups with the goal of fostering greater collaboration both in 2010 and beyond.
International Resources Committee Liaison
For years, Kirsten Cater and I have filled this role informally. As this committee has matured over the years, it makes sense to make this a formal position on the PSCC. The International Resources Committee and the PSCC share a great deal of common “interests” and goals. Greater collaboration between these two groups will benefit not only these two groups but also the organization as a whole – particularly our conferences. Sandro Alberti, the current Co-Chair of the International Resources Committee, will be serving this role on the PSCC.
Regional Sections
The idea behind these comes from a meeting we held at SIGGRAPH 2008 with our European Chapters. There are sections of the world where we have a large number of chapters and yet these chapters have not historically worked with together on a regular basis (if ever).
ACM SIGGRAPH India Chapters Advisory Council
The idea for this group came out of the desire to make sure that there is active collaboration between any chapters established in India and other that may have an interest in promoting computer graphics and interactive techniques in India. The initial guidelines and membership group have been discussed and we are hoping to finalize these items at SIGGRAPH 2009. Once our first chapter is chartered – currently, Bangalore is In Formation – we will begin regular meetings of this group.
SIGGRAPH 2009 Podcasting / SCOOP Collaboration
For the last three years, a team of chapters’ volunteers has attended the conference and helped in the production of a variety of video segments. At S2006 we produced 9 segments that provided overviews of various conference venues. In 2007, we worked with the conference Media team to capture B-roll and interviews for the S2008 Preview DVD. And last year we produced a number of venue overviews while also producing onsite videos used to promote SIGGRAPH Asia at S2008.
For SIGGRAPH 2009, our team will be working with the S2009 Podcasting Director, Jim Hillin, to produce podcasts at S2009. While we will be helping produce short podcasts for immediate placement on the S2009 and Chapters web sites, we will still be able to produce our longer-form SCOOP venue overviews for future distribution to our chapters and for viewing from the Chapters web site. We will also be working with the International Resources Committee to incorporate the multi-lingual Art Show tour podcasts that have been done the last two years.
SIGGRAPH 2008 Conference Activities
The ACM SIGGRAPH Chapters are involved with many activities at each year’s conference. The single most important event for the chapters is the Chapters Development Workshop that is held the day before the conference officially opens. Last year’s workshop drew approximately 40 chapter leaders from all around the world. Sessions at the meeting included Back To Basics”, “The Future of ACM SIGGRAPH”, and “Associate Membership Overview / Interface Walkthrough”, among others.
Over the course of the conference week, the Chapters hold several public meetings. One such meeting is the Professional and Student Chapter Start-Up Meeting. Last year’s meeting drew over 15 interested individuals.
The annual Chapters Party was held at the “Club 740” nightclub. Over 1,500 people attended this event. For the second year in a row, we also hosted and funded the second annual Student Volunteer Alumni Reunion. Though lightly attended, it was a success and we look forward to hosting it again in 2009.
Our SCOOP Team collected hours of video footage that was edited into nine short venue overviews. They also worked with the ACM SIGGRAPH Communications Chair to produce six segments that were broadcast in the Technical Session Rooms to promote SIGGRAPH Asia 2008.
SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 Conference Activities
The inaugural ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA Chapters Workshop was very successful. Many thanks to the SIGGRAPH Asia Conference support staff for the technical assistance we received at the Chapters Workshop.
We had participation from the following chapters: Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Paris, Silicon Valley, the University of Pennsylvania Student Chapter, and the IUPUI Student Chapter. Though attendance was less than at the SIGGRAPH Conference, it was a nice change which allowed attendees to speak at greater length with people from outside their own chapter. After doing a walkthrough of the Chapter Leaders web site with the workshop attendees (via Skype), the Chapters Committee Chair turned the remainder of the program over to Jenny Dana and Thierry Frey. Some excellent topics were raised during the workshop. Also, several contacts were made during the week with people interested in learning more about the ACM SIGGRAPH Chapters.
Program Year 2008 – 2009
During the 2008 – 2009 year, our chapters were very active. Total chapter membership around the world is between 2,500 and 3000 professional and student members. Total attendance at chapter events (from those chapters reporting) is over 18,000 people during the course of the year. Events range from lectures to screenings, multi-day conferences to art talks.
Some examples of topics covered over the last year include: “Digital Drawing: The International Visual Language”, “Innovation in Puppetry: From Animatronics to CGI with Jim Henson’s Creature Shop”, “Motion Capture: Designing for NASA's Orion Crew Module”, “Using the GPU to do Video Decoding, Encoding and Transcoding”, “The Nuts and Bolts of Iron Man”, “Lifegraphs for Mobile Mirror Worlds: Linking Supply, Value, and Customer Chains”. These are just a few examples of the hundreds of presentations that are hosted by the chapters each year.
Over 20 chapters presented the SIGGRAPH 2008 CAF DVDs. In addition, several chapters also presented the SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 Electronic Theater DVD. The Chapters Committee helps to support these screenings financially (when possible).
Collaboration with other groups is also important for the chapters network. Over the last year, our chapters have worked with groups that include the following: Society for Women in Engineering (SWE), Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Cite des Sciences et de l’Industrie, Sony, Autodesk, Charlex, Pratt Institute, NYIT, CGInstitute, Bogota Film Festival, British Columbia Innovation Council (BCIC), National Film Board of Canada, Visual Effects Society (VES), Hong Kong Game Industry Association, LucasFilm, and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, to name just a few.
Finally, several of our chapters continue to nurture local animation festivals and multi-day conferences that have great potential beyond their local chapter area. These include the NYC (MetroCAF), Vancouver (SPARK Animation, SPARK VFX), Vienna (Pixel), and Madrid (Animation Festival 2009) chapters.
Communications and Member Services
Kathryn Saunders, Chair
Activities in Brief:
A. SOMA: (Content Capture Partner for SIGGRAPH ’08 ) We requested that the SOMA DVD be included on the registration form. However, checking with the CAG and ACM, we determined that selling a ‘third party’ product was not allowed under our non-profit status. Although it was not done for SIGGRAPH 09, we are trying to have a pop-up window display a link to the SOMA point-of-purchase site for SIGGRAPH Asia registration. I organized for SOMA to receive the registration list for S09 the exhibitor list and contacts (Mike Weil) and last year’s attendee list.
B. E-Quarterly Newsletter: I proposed a strategy for the E-Quarterly and received feedback from the CAG Chair as well as potential authors and the editor of e-Quarterly. After listening to everyone and evaluating all feedback, I am going to offer people who successfully submit an article to the e-quarterly a 25% discount to a maximum of 50% for any one conference (either SIGGRAPH or SIGGRAPH Asia)
C. Village / Conferences: Celebrating our Membership: AT SIGGRAPH 2009 we intend to take photographs of members again. We have used these photos for graphics in the S2009 Village and at a booth in Shanghai. In the Communications budget, I set aside money to produce graphics of members that could be used again and again for both SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia. I also produced a re-usable banner for SpaceTime Gallery that will save money over time. The graphics were produced in Canada and shipped (in 6 boxes) down to New Orleans. Photographs to follow in the next report.
Cost-cutting at the SIGGRAPH Village: As Communications Chair, I am responsible for the coordination of the Village and assembling the budget for approval. We managed to save almost half the designated budget due to cut-backs across the board as well as the production of re-usable graphics. All Village stakeholders made a concerted effort to cut costs this year and should be commended for their flexibility in this matter.
China Fantasy Fair Trade Show: Scott Owen traveled to Shanghai as a guest of the China National Center for Developing Animation, Cartoon and Game Industry (NCACG), to give a talk, meet with dignitaries and promote SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia. I was asked to design the booth and was assisted in the production by the Kolenmesse Shanghai Office. I used member photos for the walls.
D. Integration with Conferences: It is my hope that the objectives of the Communications Committee and the Conference Committees can work together towards identifying opportunities for greater member benefits. We have been allowed to ‘advertise’ member benefits in the session rooms in between sessions.
E. Member Discounts: Mike Weil developed a list of companies exhibiting at SIGGRAPH 08 who were willing to grant special discounts to our ACM SIGGRAPH members. The list was passed out at the Members booth during the conference. The initiative was very popular but will NOT be continued for SIGGRAPH 2009, as the interest from companies was minimal due to the recession.
F. Member Brochure: A NEW ‘Member Resource Guide’ is being developed for SIGGRAPH Asia 09 that may have Japanese as a secondary language. We will be using last year’s guide and ‘cheat sheets’ for SIGGRAPH 2009.
G. Membership Rate Review: As of July 1st, we implemented the higher rate of $42.00
Digital Arts Community (DAC) Committee (arts.)
Jacquelyn Ford Morie, Chair
The DAC has passed the 300 member mark on our social networking site! There is a constant buzz of activity there with over 800 artists’ work being featured on the front page in an ongoing slide show, along with postings, events, blog entries and conversation between the artist members. The news about the new ACM SIGGRAPH artist award is also being prominently featured on the front page.
The remaining artworks being stored at the Freeman warehouse in Anaheim have been inventoried and we are in the process of finding current contact information for each artist. The return of the Traveling Art Show works has begun with the first 7 packages being shipped out this week. It is expected that this process will take several months.
We are planning to interview potential new members for the core committee at SIGGRAPH 2009, since we have had some resignations. We will also approach the Student Volunteers group for what we are calling Production Assistants for the web site and other activities. Out conference meeting is being held in conjunction with Leonardo. We are also working on collaborative agreements (informal at this point) with The International Society of Electronic Arts (ISEA) and the College Arts Association’s New Media Committee (CAA).
We have been talking to Doug Dodds and others at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. They have accepted Patric Prince’s computer art collection and are now making a focus on collecting such art at the V&A. They are also working on detailed history, and will collaborate with the DAC for information and connections for this work.
Education (education.)
Marc Barr, Chair
Through this annual report, the ACM SIGGRAPH Education Committee aims to help the SIGGRAPH community become more familiar with its year-round education and conference based activities, and seeks to demonstrate ways in which passionate members of the community can participate.
The past year brought important changes to our format and contents. The pages of this 2009 Annual Report contain detailed descriptions of the various activities of our subcommittees and also presents an elaborate celebration of the spectacular work of students from around the globe who participate in our prestigious annual juried competitions.
The SubCommittees
Curricular and Instructional Resources is responsible for managing the Curriculum Knowledge Base (CKB), the Computer Graphics Educational Materials Source (CGEMS), the cgSource education resource collection, Visualization education, and the Digital Art Curriculum Framework project.
Community Building and Support administers the Education Committee Website, the Education Index, Games and Interactive Media, Primary / Secondary Education (P/SE), the Undergraduate Research Initiative, and all Global Outreach, and Conference Activities.
SpaceTime conducts the SpaceTime Student Competitions and Exhibitions
For a comprehensive report of all activities please see ()
Information Services
Jenny Dana, Chair
The Information Services Committee (ISC) provides information services support to the ACM SIGGRAPH community. Our responsibilities include managing/maintaining the servers infrastructure (software/hardware), managing the ACM SIGGRAPH organization website though specific content is provided by the client committees (Chapters, Education, etc.), handling community (volunteer, contractor, member) requests for access to installed technologies, evaluating and installing new technology offerings both by request and proactively, acting as a liaison on technical tasks between ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM, contractors (Q, Talley, etc.). The ISC does not develop large scale applications internally though we serve as a technical support resource when such systems are being developed by a group within the community, for example, the Education Index.
The ISC is made up of a core team of three part time paid consultants - Ken Bauer - system administrator, Viveka Wiley - web design consultant, Gustavo Orrillo - Plone consultant. Note that currently the Plone consultant position is filled by a volunteer. We also receive support from two system administrators from Ken’s company, Eduardo Romero and Belia Romero. The paid consultants are supported by a number of volunteers including the ISC Chair - Jenny Dana, ISC past-chair - Thierry Frey, Leo Hourvitz - application/utility expert and sysmgrs. The sysmgrs are a team of approximately 20 dedicated volunteers/contractors including representatives from the EC and ACM’s system administration team who monitor, discuss and handle requests from the community
ISC Activities:
Jenny Dana took over as chair of the committee from Thierry Frey in early March. The committee wishes to thank Thierry for his leadership of ISC and help making a smooth transition
Sysmgrs meeting and wrap-up held at S2008. Annual sysmgrs meetings arranged for SIGGRAPH 2009
Thierry and Jenny met with a group of chapter leaders during SA2009
Meetup of new ISC chair with S2009 committee members occurred in April.
Introductory presentation of ISC services to the S2010 committee was made in May.
Smooth submission cycles for S2009 and SA2009
Django FAQ application written by Leo. Data entry of the FAQs that were compiled by Erin Butler completed by ISC Chair
New YouTube ACM SIGGRAPH non-profit channel registered. Processes are being evaluated for how to make this most useful for Scoop and conference podcasts. Other streaming media server solutions are being investigated as well.
New Drupal install/maintenance for creation of S2010 site by Q Ltd.
New WordPress MU (Multi-user) install being evaluated by Fjorg and also a few chapters have expressed interest in this blogging software.
SVN source control installed for use if needed for any internal software development efforts
Detail fields for RSS feeds from ACM chapter administrative database. These feeds will be used to create a new chapters directory and events listing. Requested feeds were setup by ACM IT staff member Chris Guccio.
Worked with social games chair for S2009 so that wiki could be utilized to host the CBCG game.
Updated schedulers for various S2009 groups conference activities
Handled additional workload (aliases, mailing lists, submission deadlines, etc.) introduced by SIGGRAPH Asia.
Setup electronic services for approximately half-a-dozen new chapters
Reviewed and corrected majority of website issues gathered by Terrence Masson
System Administration (contracted) - Back end, software and system maintenance:
Average 30 hours per month
40% System Requests - attending to setup requests (accounts, mailing lists, aliases, webspace)
30% System Updates - software updates/installs, monitoring system and logs,
15% Conference support - system load/capacity for submission deadlines, external drives synced up for shipping to reviewers. An extra cycle was needed on this due to a submission date inconsistency for SA2009.
15% Longer term projects - moving Plone 2.5 from cluster setup to live on roll (secondary server), cleaning up and shutting down spam on old websites, alternate apache with php5 to host sites that need it, Plone configs and moves for various sections of the website.
Webmaster (contracted) - Front end, user interface, information architecture and skinning:
Average 30 hours per month
30% Content Creation - setup and support for e-quarterly, organization/conference committees, pioneers, and conference management.
20% Website Design - new Plone 3 skins, logos, CSS for Wiki.
20% Content Updates - migration and maintenance on existing Plone content against bit-rot.
15% New Development - new sections such as Community News and portlets
10% Plone 2.5 to Plone 3 migration - content audit of 16 SIGGRAPH Plone sites, skin redevelopment, migration plan, and Dev Plone 3 site setup.
5% Documentation - writing up policies, help pages, respond to webmaster questions.
Plone consultant - Plone migration:
Plone 3 migration had moved forward to 70-80% complete for education site. Plone 2.x instances were migrated to roll. New Plone 3.2 instance was created. Content was exported from old instance to new instance. Existing RichDocuments and themes were incompatible with Plone 3 and several workaround attempts were required. The Plone 3 migration team (Plone consultant, Webmaster, Sysadmin, Education Site developer) encountered many migration issues on the education site. This was holding up the process for getting other content migrated over. Therefore, it was decided to instead use the org section of the site as this was likely to contain more vanilla content and be more representative of the rest of the website. The main goal here is to get the main site moved over to the clean Plone3 install, so it can be vetted by a larger group of content contributors in preparation to go live (post-conference). ACM authentication (which is being successfully used by NYC SIGGRAPH chapter on a separate Plone3 install) will be used on the new Plone 3 site. Content ownership issues if someone was using an existing Plone 2.5 account, but has an ACM account with a different username can be worked around. Once the migration scripts are finalized and the site is done we can assist with the migration of other sites (individual chapters, education, etc.).
Current status of this latest migration attempt is that most contents of the org folder have been migrated via scripts written by Gustavo to a clean Plone3 install. This includes users and member data (excluding any personal pictures). There are still some issues with logging in with an existing Plone account, though. The migrated data includes RichDocuments which have been unpacked into pages, files and images content types in the destination server. There are still some outstanding issues with event content types, workflow status and custom content types, so these have not migrated. It may turn out to be easier to just move/recreate this content on the Plone3 site than to debug the issues with migrating these items via a script. The contents have been spot checked and a script was run to validate all objects were transferred. Viv added some ACM SIGGRAPH styling. Once we have fixed the login issues and added ACM authentication we will turn this over to the org content creators/managers, so they can do a more thorough vetting of the migrated content. If all this checks out then we can make the org site live and also duplicate the process on the rest of the sites. Much applause to Gustavo Orrillo, Ken Bauer, Viveka Wiley and Wobbe Koning for all the great work that they did to get us to this point - which is quite an accomplishment given the state of incompatibility between Plone3 and our existing site which was built on a really screwed up Plone install with numerous unsupported/unreleased plug-ins.
External Relations
Alain Chesnais, Chair
Affiliation agreements were signed with the following organizations:
Annecy
China National Center for Developing Animation, Cartoon, and Game Industry (NCACG)
Eurographics
IGDA
Laval Virtual
Imagina
Nominations
Alain Chesnais, Chair
There was an excellent slate of candidates selected including the following:
Treasurer: Jeff Jortner and Gary Paxinos
Director at Large: Tony Baylis, Rob Cook, Paul Debevec, Jim Kilmer
The election winners were: Jeff Jortner, Rob Cook, and Paul Debevec.
Publications Committee
Stephen Spencer, Chair
Publications Committee
The ACM SIGGRAPH Publications Committee has continued to produce high-quality print and electronic publications, documenting the content that is accepted (both juried and curated) for presentation at its sponsored events.
A record number of co-located events occurred in conjunction with the SIGGRAPH 2008 conference, with both print and electronic publications produced to document them.
The inaugural SIGGRAPH Asia event in late 2008, and a co-located event (VRCAI 2008) brought new challenges in producing our publications overseas, but the end results were professional and well-received.
The "SVR2DVD" project made further progress this year, with the conclusion of the digitizing and cleanup of all of the SVR (SIGGRAPH Video Review) content.
The inevitable trend away from print publication and toward electronic publication continues, with more of our events opting for CD-ROM or DVD-ROM publication, in place of print publication.
Small Conferences Committee
Brian Wyvill, Chair
A number of conferences have been processed including co-located conferences with SIGGRAPH 2009. All but one co-located conference chairs thought the co-location rates at the convention centre were too high and opted to go off-campus at local hotels.
I attended the Eurographics Executive Committee meeting and took part in the discussions for small conferences with the EG sub-committee. I sent the chair a list of EG/Siggraph co-sponsored conferences and contact information as requested. Relations with EG seem to be going well.
Policy.
We have been a little slow on the web pages and they should have been in place by SIGGRAPH 09 but now we are aiming for the Fall.
In-cooperation
Approval is given if the conference meets the ACM criteria, is a not-for-profit conference that deals with subject matter that falls within the ACM SIGGRAPH interest. Conferences that have not been approved have generally been commercial in nature or dealing with subjects other than computer graphics or HCI with no mutual interest content.
Co-Sponsored or Sponsored
The above applies plus the budget has to meet the approval of the SIGGRAPH SCC.
Use of Funds
When a conference has funds left over they may apply for the use of 50% of these funds, towards the cost of the next conference. ACM has a policy guideline that we follow to approve this use of funds.
Conferences Handled 2008/09
The list below shows the status of the conferences handled since August 08. We had one problem with IE08, where the requests was a little late (4 weeks before the conference) but unfortunately I did not get this processed in time, mea culpa, however in general we have been quite fast to respond as can be seen below. There are currently three outstanding requests being considered.
The SCC committee is as follows:
Brian Wyvill, chair
Marie-Paule Cani, EC liaison
Diego Gutierrez
Caroline Larboulette
Wolfgang Heidrich
Conferences Handled by ACM SIGGRAPH Small Conferences Committee 2008/09
“sent” indicates the request has been sent to the committee.
“Backlog” things happening before my time for which I don’t have the history
|Conference |Year |
| 0830-1200 | T1 |Multimedia Content Protection |
| | |Dulce Ponceleón and Nelly Fazio |
| | T3 |Music Recommendation |
| | |Òscar Celma and Paul Lamere |
| | T4 |A Glimpse of Multimedia Ambient Intelligence |
| | |Abdulmotaleb El Saddik and Rosa Iglesias |
| | T6 |Multimedia Power Management on a Platter: From Audio to Video & Games |
| | |Samarjit Chakraborty and Ye Wang |
| | T8 |Mobile Phone Programming for Multimedia |
| | |Jürgen Scheible |
| 1200-1330 | Lunch |
| 1330-1700 | T2 |Recent Developments in Content-based and Concept-based Image/Video Retrieval |
| | |Rong Yan and Winston Hsu |
| | T5 |Storage, Retrieval, and Communication of Body Sensor Network Data |
| | |Balakrishnan Prabhakaran |
| | T7 |Haptics Technologies: Theory and Applications from a Multimedia Perspective |
| | |Kanav Kahol and Abdulmotaleb El Saddik |
| | T9 |Authoring Educational Multimedia |
| | |Nalin Sharda |
Workshops: Workshops have always been an important part of the conference. In 2008, the following eight workshops have been organized as part of the conference:
a. Vision Networks for Behavior Analysis (VNBA) – Chairs: Hamid Aghajan, Andrea Prati
b. Semantic Ambient Media Experiences (SAME) – Chairs: Artur Lugmayr, Thomas Risse, Bjorn Stocklebel, Juha Kaario, Kari Laurila,
c. TRECVID BBC Rushes Summarization Workshop (TVS) – Chairs: Paul Over, Alan Smeaton
d. Story Representation, Mechanism and Context (SRMC) – Chairs: Kevin Brooks, Aisling Kelliher, Frank Nack
e. Analysis and Retrieval of Events/Actions and Workflows in Video Streams (AREA) – Chairs: Anastasios D. Doulamis, Luc Van Gool, Mark Nixon, Theodora A. Varvarigou, Nicolaos D. Doulamis
f. The Many Faces of Multimedia Semantics (MS) – Chairs: Farshad Fotouhi, William Grosky, Peter Stanchev,
g. Communicability Design and Evaluation in Cultural and Ecological Multimedia Systems (Communicability MS) – Chair: Francisco V.C. Ficarra
h. Human-Centered Computing (HCC) – Chairs: Alejandro James, Daniela Nicklas, Nicu Sebe.
The workshops were well attended with the smaller workshops being highly interactive. Note that MIR (Multimedia Information Retrieval) workshop for the first time did not happen as a workshop. This workshop became a sponsored conference by SIGMM, and it was co-located with ACM Multimedia 2008 in Vancouver.
Technical Program: The main conference had a rich three day program (October 28-30). All activities started at 8:30am and ended at 5:30pm. The conference covered a wide range of topics from foundation of multimedia, through multimedia system, networks, and multimedia interactions to multimedia content, applications, human-centered multimedia, and multimedia art. In addition, the interactive art program consisted of the art exhibit that was held at the Science World British Columbia, and the art conference track. The exhibition explored the theme “Border Zones”. Artworks used multimedia to shift, traverse, intersect and combine genres and modalities to provoke the emergence of new frameworks. The art conference track included long and short papers describing interactive multimedia artworks, tools, applications, and technical approaches for the creative use of multimedia content and technology and management of art-related media collections.
Main Technical Program: The main program sessions were divided into 4 technical tracks and one arts track. The four technical tracks were in the area of multimedia content, multimedia systems, multimedia applications and human-centered multimedia. Each of the tracks had long and short papers. We had brave new topics session covering areas: “Delivering Online Advertisements Inside Images”, “Social Signal Processing: State of the Art and Future Perspectives of an Emerging Domain”, and “Event Recognition: Viewing the World with a Third Eye”.
The Content, Applications, Systems, and Multimedia Interactions tracks received 280 long paper submissions (109 in Content, 84 in Applications, 50 in Systems, and 37 in Multimedia Interactions). Each paper was reviewed by at least three qualified reviewers in a single-blind review process. The program committee met on June 20, 2008 in Darmstadt, Germany to discuss the papers and make final selections for papers to be included as oral presentations in the conference program. This rigorous review process resulted in the acceptance of 56 long papers: 23 in the Content track, 16 in the Applications track, 9 in the Systems track, and 8 in the Multimedia Interactions track. This represents an acceptance rate of 20 percent.
The short paper program received 236 submissions. After a thorough review process, we accepted 80 papers resulting in an acceptance rate of 33 percent. These short papers were presented during poster sessions at the conference. This year's fifth version of the Interactive Arts Program also consisted of long and short papers as well as an art exhibition which took place at Telus World of Science.
Panels: The main program also included two exciting panels:
a) Panel 1 on Wednesday, October 29, 2008
a. Topic: Connecting Artists and Scientists in Multimedia Research,
b. Organizers: A. Kerne, R. Wakkary, F, Nack; Panelists: A. Steggell, A. Jaimes, S. Candan, A. Del Bimbo, P. Jennings, A. Hulic;
b) Panel 2 on Thursday, October 30
a. Topic: Multimedia Education – Can we find unity in diversity?
b. Organizers: G. Friedland, W. Hurst, L. Knipping; Panelists: R. Jain, M. Muhlhauser, A. El Saddik, T. Darrell;
Keynote Speakers: We had two keynote speakers on Tuesday, October 28, 2009 and on Thursday, October 30, 2009. On Tuesday, Professor Raj Jain from Washington University, St. Louis, gave a talk “Internet 3.0: The Next Generation Internet”. On Thursday, Professor David Roberts from University of Salford, UK talked about “Face-to-Face: communicating appearance, attention and activity across a distance”.
Doctoral Symposium: This event was on Wednesday, October 29, 2009, organized and chaired by Prof. Hari Sundaram and Kiyoharu Aizawa. Six PhD students presented their PhD work and received extensive feedback from different attending faculty.
Technical Demonstrations: We had two major technical demonstration sessions on Wednesday, October 29 and Thursday, October 30. Both demonstration sessions were very well attended and discussed. Each demonstration session showed 12 very interesting demonstrations.
Open Source Competition: This competition became a very good tradition at ACM Multimedia conferences. We had open source competition on Thursday, October 30, 2008. Five open source demonstrations were selected for the final competition.
Interactive Arts Track: This track had three sessions with long papers and one session with short papers. In addition, the Interactive Arts Program consisted of an art exhibition at the Science World British Columbia Museum. This art exhibition showed artworks that explored Border Zones. The zone that uses multimedia to shift, traverse, intersect, and combine genres and modalities to provoke the emergence of new frameworks.
Awards: On Wednesday, October 29, 2008, during the conference banquet, best paper awards were given out for a long paper, short paper, best art contribution, best technical demonstration, best video demonstration, and the open source winner was announced, all funded by our industrial sponsors, e.g., the best art contribution was funded by Telefonica.
The best long paper award went to
"Streaming of Plants in Distributed Virtual Environments" by Sebastien Mondet (University of Toulouse), Wei Cheng (National University of Singapore), Geraldine Morin (University of Toulouse), Romulus Grigoras (University of Toulouse), Frederic Boudon (CIRAD), and Wei Tsang Ooi (National University of Singapore).
Four papers from the Best Paper Session were recommended to be included in the ACM TOMCCAP special issue.
Open source competition winner was "Network-Integrated Multimedia Middleware (NMM)" by Motama GmbH.
Best demo award: M. Hefeeda, C. Hsu, and Y. Liu, Testbed and Experiments for Mobile TV (DVB-H) Networks, ACM Multimedia'08 Technical Demonstration, pp. 995--996, Vancouver, Canada, October 2008.
The generous support of our sponsors made several key aspects of the conference possible, including the various prizes, student travel, and the Interactive Arts Program. Organizing this event would be difficult without the generous support of our sponsors. The following awards were presented during the conference banquet under various categories using sponsored or self-generated conference funds.
1. Best full technical paper - $700
2. Best short technical paper - $500
3. Best Art Contribution - $700
4. Best Demonstration - $500
5. Open Source Winner - $500
6. Best Video Program - $500
7. Student Travel Award - $4000
We have included the presentation session at the conference where four best paper nominees competed for the best full technical paper. This year we have not differentiated between student and non-student best papers. An awards committee made up of senior researchers in the field met afterwards to select the winner and announced him/her at the banquet.
Video Preservation Efforts at ACM Multimedia 2008: Both keynote speeches were taped as well as the session with the four competing best papers on Tuesday, October 28, 2008. Matthias Hollick was the preservation chair and worked with ACM to bring these taped sessions to the Digital Library.
General Impressions and Feedback: The conference was very successful as the record attendance is showing. The attendees give a very positive feedback about the conference. There were several reasons:
a) Participants liked the conference site since all sessions were close to each other and participants met at coffee breaks from different areas for various discussions. Lunches were together hence people could again meet and talk. Conference service was very good and personnel was very responsive to any glitches that occurred.
b) The food was outstanding, we provided everyday different kind of food to reflect the diversity of Canada as a Nation and to leave good memories about our culture and raison-d’être: Tuesday (Mediterranean), Wednesday (Pacific Rim), Thursday (Italiano Classico), and Friday (Taste of the Orient).
c) The conference organizing committee was excellent .The program chairs both in technical program and interactive arts program did very well and the main program was very strong. We heard very positive comments about the overall program including the workshops, which had all plenty of room for their participants and could stay in the conference space. In summary, all members of the organization committee pulled their weight and contributed in each event category to a great success with respect to selection of tutorials, conference events and workshops.
d) The technical committee met with the general chair, Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, during the TPC meeting at Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany in June 2007 where various organizational issues were discussed. This discussion helped the chairs tremendously in the final preparation of the program and conference. Also, we would like to thank Prof. Ralf Steinmetz for hosting and sponsoring the event.
Sponsors: We had an incredible support from the following sponsors: Google, FXPal, Yahoo!, Microsoft Research, IBM, RICOH California Research Center, Telefonica, LG Electronics Mobile Research; Emily Carr University of Art & Design, Nokia Products Ltd., Technical University Darmstadt Multimedia Communications Laboratory (KOM ), the Hessischen Telemedia Technologie Kompetenz-Center (HTTC), University of Ottawa, The University of British Columbia, School of Interactive Arts and Technology. The sponsors together supported us with more than $40K.
Outlook: The next ACM Multimedia 2009 will be in October 19-24, 2009 in Beijing, China.
1. ACM NOSSDAV 2008
The 18th Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV) 2008 was held at the Institute of Operating Systems and Computer Networks (IBR) at Technische Universität Braunschweig (TU Braunschweig) on May 29 and 30, 2008. The motto of NOSSDAV 2008 was "interactivity". This was meant to underline the workshop feeling of NOSSDAV, which should inspire attendees to interact with each other, and also cover the scientific program, where system and networking support for interactive multimedia should play a major role. Also under this motto, we had included an extended demonstration session into the workshop that should allow attendees to interact with their colleagues’ experimental multimedia systems.
Attendees’ expressed that they liked the workshop program and that they were very satisfied with the IBR staff who guaranteed the smooth running of the workshop and who took immediate care of all attendees’ needs. The demonstration session was introduced following discussions about the future direction of NOSSDAV at ACM Multimedia 2007, and the feedback on including such a session that we received from participants was very positive as well. The program included also a keynote speech by Jörg Liebeherr of the University of Toronto, who gave a talk titled "Overlays can do more ... if not everything" and an invited talk by Paulo Mendes of INESC, Porto, on "Cooperative Networking as Boosting Tool for Internet Interactivity". The two talks presented quite different views of one of the currently hottest topics in our research, the potential of distributed systems with end-user involvement, and generated a lot of discussion.
The workshop was sponsored by ACM SIG Multimedia, with co-sponsorship by TU Braunschweig and Simula Research Laboratory AS (Simula). NEC and Ericsson were further sponsors of the workshop. TU Braunschweig and Simula took the financial risk of the workshop, which allowed a much more optimistic cost-estimate than would otherwise have been possible.
Paper Submission & Review Process: We used EDAS for paper submission, paper review and discussion (but not for the submission of camera ready), and it worked pretty well. The charge was 6 USD per paper. Basic statistics on submissions: 62 papers registered, abstract received; 50 papers were actually submitted (from 20 different countries); and 17 papers were accepted (34% acceptance rate, from 11 different countries).
We solicited also demo submissions, which were handled outside EDAS because reviewing requirements were supposed to be much less strict and costs could be cut in this manner. We received 20 submissions and accepted 12 two-page abstracts (from 10 different countries) for inclusion into the proceedings. Two more demos were presented without including an abstract in the proceedings; one of those was a demo that was well-represented by a full paper. The other involved the collection of user feedback for a video quality investigation, and we wanted to give the author the opportunity to meet candidate users at NOSSDAV.
The accepted papers were arranged into six sessions, entitled "networking for virtual worlds", "networking and operating system support", "digital audio and video", "video streaming in wireless environments", "analyses and conclusions", and "streaming with P2P support".
All papers were reviewed by at least 3 reviewers (most by 4), followed by an online discussion period. All reviewers completed their assignments, and nearly all reviews were received on time. The workshop chairs made the final decision. Most of the accepted papers were clearly accepted by the reviewers, two were proposed for acceptance by the reviewers after the discussion phase, while the final two papers were ranked accept-if-room with an inconclusive outcome of the discussion.
Proceedings: We requested and received an ISBN number from ACM after collecting final papers and the authors’ copyright forms. We created the proceedings manually from the authors’ final versions of the full and demo contributions, and had them printed at a local printer in Braunschweig. We created a single PDF from the front matter including copyright statement, index and keynote abstracts, from the full and demo papers and made sure to follow the new ACM style guide for the cover. The cooperation with the local printer worked very well, we delivered the entire proceedings in one PDF but separately from the cover, and had it printed successfully in the second try. We produced 100 copies of the proceedings.
Venue: We followed the example of NOSSDAV 2007 and held the workshop at TU Braunschweig, one of the chairs’ home institutions. We had also considered a conference hotel in the Harz mountains outside the city, but several reasons favored the university. It is easy to travel by train to and from Braunschweig from major cities and airports. The city itself has a long history, it does itself attract tourists and the university is located right in its center. Furthermore, the university infrastructure is excellent, and for the demonstration session in particular, a good networking infrastructure was vital. The easy reach did also attract several other researchers from Braunschweig and close-by universities. Last but not least the location at Technische Universität Braunschweig did also reduce costs. Travel-wise, Germany was a reasonable choice. Visas were apparently granted without any difficulties except for the German embassy in China, which was not satisfied with scanned letters but needed courier-delivered originals. We didn’t hear of any troubles with border controls.
The workshop included a reception on May 28 and a social event at May 29. The reception was held at IBR in TU Braunschweig in the same facilities that were used for coffee breaks and lunches during the workshop. The participants felt well cared-for during the workshop days. The social event started out with a river tour on the river Oker through the city, which ended at the Oker Terrassen, where the conference dinner was held outdoors on the terraces. The dinner buffet was good and plentiful, and people did stay for long discussions. Most attendees’ hotels were in easy reach from the restaurant, so the event faded out slowly.
Registration: We considered using ACM’s recommended online registration service for registrations. This appeared impractical since RegOnline doesn’t offer an integration with bank accounts in the Euro zone, let alone in Germany. Instead, we used the local service Booqtic that is specialized on Internet tickets sales. While fairly cheap, able to operate with German bank accounts and responsive to our needs, the differences between a ticket ordering service and a registration service became obvious for attendees who registered more than one person.
There were 62 registered participants. The number of registrations was higher than expected, and we were able to support the keynote speaker and the invited speaker beyond waiving their registration by paying them 500 EUR each.
Program: After longer considerations concerning attendees possible travel plans, we decided to arrange NOSSDAV in a reception evening, followed by two full days (Thursday and Friday), rather than arranging two half and one full days. As intended, the schedule motivated nearly everybody to arrive on Wednesday and stay until Saturday and it avoided late arrivals and (nearly all) early departures. The downside was that of a somewhat less flexible schedule.
We observed last year that the panel-style final discussion of papers didn’t lead to the desirable broad questions, but mainly to more questions for the last or the most controversial speaker. We tried to improve this by keeping presenters’ main theses on a blackboard, and it may have helped to spread the questions more widely. It didn’t inspire the broad questions, or even if it did, it was usually only one presenter who answered. Furthermore, even though the schedule did give a lot of room for questions, the two days appeared rather packed and intense, and the schedule was kept rather strictly. All presentations were captured on video and will be made available through the conference web page.
Budget: The total actual revenue was Euro 15,188.10.
Feedback: The participants liked the conveniences of the location at the university; The helpfulness and efficiency of the local organizers was frequently complimented; Participants enjoyed easy access to the network. Those coming from institutions participating in Eduroam did not even need guest logins; The inclusion of an extended demo session was very welcome and inspired a lot of interaction. Many of the demos were based on NOSSDAV articles of the last few years.
Outlook: ACM NOSSDAV 2009 was held in early June (June 3-5) 2009 in Williamsburg, Virginia, with general chair Prof. Ketan Mayer-Patel. The final report and financial closure are not ready at the time of the SIGMM July 2009 final report, hence we will report the final status of NOSSDAV 2009 in 2010 SIGMM final report.
The ACM NOSSDAV 2010 will be held early June 2010 in Amsterdam, Netherland. The general chair will be Prof. Dick Bulterman.
1.3 ACM MIR 2008
The 1st International ACM Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR2008) was held in Vancouver, Canada from October 30-31st, 2008. The goal of MIR was to illuminate new paradigms, theories, and insights in the area of multimedia information retrieval. Topics of special interest included exploration of media archives; interfaces for multimedia exploration; indexing and search of multimedia data: digital life experience analysis and retrieval; video surveillance browsing and retrieval; learning and relevance feedback in multimedia retrieval; and diverse applications in culture, society, and science.
In the past decade there have been a wide variety of relatively small workshop activities from several ACM Special Interest Groups (SIGs) which were related to multimedia retrieval. The workshops delved into diverse questions involving digital life and lifebits, video surveillance and analysis of human activity, exploration of media archives, etc.
In 2008, we have attempted to cluster the disparate activities to create this conference. Last year, the combined MIR related workshop activities from ACM SIGs had less than 120 full paper submissions. However, this year we received 308 unique full paper submissions of which 262 papers were selected by the organizing committee for the double-blind peer review process. Based upon the peer reviews of the program committee, 56 papers were accepted for the scientific research track including both oral and poster presentations. The number of attendees was 150.
From surveying the participants, the technical program including both oral and poster sessions were rated as high quality. Overall, the keynotes talks were considered excellent, even the best that many participants had ever heard. Participants remarked specifically that the combination of Prof. Huang and Prof. Jain was particularly interesting because they actively referred to each other's talks which created a more engaging and energetic atmosphere. The ACM MIR-FLICKR evaluation/benchmarking session was also frequently noted by the participants and was considered to be a very positive direction for the community. In particular, they noted that the field has a significant need for more carefully annotated scientific test sets.
Organizers and community members of the previous MIR, CARPE, and VSSN related workshops did ground breaking work and support for preparing MIR conference. Research communities and conferences require strong foundations and in our case we could draw from a rich history of related activities. The support and involvement of Kiyo Aizawa, Mark Zhang, and Alberto del Bimbo contributed significantly to the international and cross-community appeal of this meeting.
We are also grateful to all of the members of the program committee and the additional reviewers. Their reviews of the submissions played a pivotal role in the quality of the conference. Moreover, Erwin Bakker and Alberto del Bimbo did an excellent job in organizing the enormous double-blind peer review and paper selection process. The paper review and decisions tasks were distributed between the program chairs to ensure no conflicts of interest. Mark Huiskes and Mark Zhang did excellent work in the critical mission of having the conference run smoothly.
1. Summary of SIGMM Sponsored and In-Cooperation Conferences and Workshops
In 2008, SIG MM had 17 in-cooperation conferences (at 0% financial sponsorship), and 3 sponsored conferences at varying degrees of financial sponsorship. We sponsored our main ACM Multimedia conference at 100% and NOSSDAV at 33.4%. In 2008, CIVR was added as a sponsored event at 50% sponsorship. Note, that although ACM MIR was a separate conference, it was budgeted jointly with ACM Multimedia 2008, since it was co-located with ACM Multimedia 2008. In 2011 CIVR and ACM MIR will merge as a strong International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval, ICMR2011.
|List of SIGMM In-cooperation conferences: |
| |
|E-Forensics08: First International Conference on Forensic Applications and Techniques in Telecommunications, Information and Multimedia |
|January 2008, Adelaide, Australia |
|MMM08: MultiMedia Modeling (MMM) International Conference January, 2008, Kyoto, Japan |
|MMCN'08: Multimedia Computing and Networking, January 2008, San Jose CA USA |
|AVI 2008: The International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, May 2008, Naples, Italy |
|INFOSCALE08: The Third International ICST Conference on Scalable Information June 2008, Vico Equense, Italy |
|EuroITV08: European Conference on Interactive Television July 2008, Salzburg, Austria |
|EuroITV08: European Conference on Interactive Television July 2008, Salzburg, Austria |
| |
|MobiMedia08: Fourth International Mobile Multimedia Communications, July 2008, Oulu, Finland |
|QShine08: 5th International ICST Conference on Heterogeneous Networking for Quality, Reliability, Security and Robustness, July 2008, |
|Hong Kong |
|ICDSC '08: International Conference on Distributed Smart Cameras, September 2008, Palo Alto, USA |
|EATIS08:Euro American Conference on Telematics and Information Systems , September, 2008, Aracaju, Brazil |
|MM&Sec'08:Multimedia and Security Workshop, September 2008, Oxford, UK |
|MindTrek08, October2008, Tampere, Finland |
|NetGames08: Network and Systems Support for Games, October 2008, Worcester, USA |
| |
|WebMedia08: 14th Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and Web Systems, October2008,VilaVelha,Brazil |
|MoMM08: 6th International Conference on Mobile Computing and Multimedia, November 2008, Linz, Austria |
|SAMT08: 3rd International Conference on Semantics and Digital Media Technology,December2008,Koblenz,Germany |
List of SIGMM Sponsored conferences:
- NOSSDAV'08: The 18th International Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video, May 2008, Braunschweig Germany (SIGMM is 33.4%)
- CIVR'08 - International Conference on Content-based Image and Video Retrieval, July 2008, Niagara Falls, Canada (SIGMM is 50%)
- MM '08: International Conference on Multimedia 2008, October 2008, Vancouver, Canada (SIGMM is 100%)
- MIR’08: Multimedia Information Retrieval 2008, October 2008, Vancouver, Canada (budgeted together with MM’08).
2. Election of SIGMM Leadership
Until June 2009, the elected leadership of SIGMM was SIGMM Chair Klara Nahrstedt, SIGMM Vice Chair Wolfgang Effelsberg, SIGMM Conference Coordinator Nevenka Dimitrova. In Spring 2009, Prof. Ramesh Jain (former SIGMM chair) organized new elections of SIGMM executive committee. In June 2009, a new SIGMM leadership was elected by the SIGMM members for the 2009-2011 period and started its work in July 2009. The executive committee consists now of SIGMM Chair Klara Nahrstedt, SIGMM Vice Chair Rainer Lienhart, and SIGMM Conference Coordinator, Mohan Kankanhalli.
3. SIGMM Retreat
One and half days (October 26-27) prior to ACM Multimedia 2008, SIGMM leadership organized a retreat inviting leading multimedia researchers (40 researchers) to Vancouver to discuss the future of SIGMM, new initiatives, organization of the SIGMM, research, education efforts and industry/academic relationships and how SIGMM can support these initiatives.
During the first day (Sunday – half day) we discussed general issues of SIGMM such as (a) if we need to change bylaws and move from two years to three years election cycle for SIGMM leadership, (b) what new awards we should introduce in SIMM, (c) how one should best include arts track and exhibition, i.e., synchronize it with the technical program, (d) what new conferences should we start and go into sponsorship relationship, (e) how our SIGMM venues (SIGMM Records, TOMCCAP, MMSJ, SIGMM Web portal (magazine)) can best serve the community and what improvements can be make, and other issues.
In the afternoon of the first day, split into three break-out sessions (1) research directions in multimedia – Chairs: Nicolas Georganas and Wolfgang Effelsberg, (2) educational efforts in multimedia area – Chairs: Ralf Steinmetz and Mohan Kankanhalli, (3) industry/academia inter-relationship and what impact does academia has on industry and vice versa – Chairs: Larry Rowe and Wu-Chi Feng.
The second half day of the retreat, we met all together and discussed the outcomes of the break-out sessions. Several recommendations came out the break-out sessions and the previous discussions such as (a) establishment of a committee to study impact of academic results on industry and make recommendations how the inter-relation and impact can be improved/increased. (b) establishment of the educational director-at-large who will start collecting educational material on our SIGMM website and provide extensive educational material to the SIGMM community in the form of, e.g., survey of textbooks in multimedia area, survey of educational program in multimedia area, and other useful information for multimedia educators; (c) establishment of the art director-at large who will aim to better coordinate the art program and exhibition within ACM Multimedia Conference together with the technical organizational committee; (d) establishment of broader advisory SIGMM committee that would have advisory role to the SIGMM leadership. The advisory committee consists of the editors-in-chiefs of SIGMM venues (TOMCCAP, MMSJ, SIGMM Records, SIGMM Web portal (magazine)), the previous SIGMM chair, one general co-chair of the currently in preparation of our premier ACM Multimedia conference, and the ACM program manager.
4. SIGMM Awards
In 2008, SIGMM Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications was approved by ACM and established to be given out once a year at the premier SIGMM Conference, the ACM Multimedia. The awards committee was setup, consisting of Prof. Nicolas Georganas, Prof. Wolfgang Effelsberg (EC Member), and Dr. Hong-Jiang Zhang. The first winner of this award was Prof. Ralf Steinmetz from Technical University Darmstadt, Germany for his seminal achievements in the area of multimedia synchronization and networks. The award was awarded at the ACM Multimedia 2008 in Vancouver. Our second winner chosen by the awards committee in 2009 is Dr. Lawrence Rowe and he will awarded this SIGMM award in October 2009 in Beijing, China at the ACM Multimedia 2009.
In 2009, the SIGMM Executive Committee (EC) applied for a new SIGMM Award for Best PhD Thesis in the area of Multimedia. The award was approved by ACM in June 2009. The first award will be given out in 2010 at the ACM Multimedia 2010. We are in process of establishing an award process and awards committee to be put in place by January 1, 2010 when the deadline for nominations is coming. The award was already advertised at NOSSDAV 2009 and will be broadly advertised at ACM Multimedia 2009 as well as in SIGMM venues.
5. SIGMM Records
In January 2008, we have started a new service, the SIGMM e-newsletter for SIGMM members only. This e-newsletter was discussed at the SIGMM retreat and it was recommended that (a) we rename the e-newsletter to SIGMM Records publication, and (b) we aim to make it a citable/searchable publication to be placed in the ACM Digital Library (DL). Starting January 2009, Prof. Carsten Griwodz (Editor-in-Chief) has achieved the goal and the SIGMM Records is now in the ACM DL and citable/searchable/available to other researchers. This was very much approved by the SIGMM community. The SIGMM Records is very successful due to the high quality management of the EiC and the editorial team. The SIGMM Records are also archived at the SIGMM Web Site .
6. SIGMM Website/Web-Magazine
In 2008-2009, the went through further changes and SIGMM supported a staff person to assist Prof. Balakrishnan Prabhakaran (editor-in-chief of the SIGMM Web Magazine) in maintenance of the SIGMM webserver. Several changes happen:
• we have a new logo that is much more appropriate to the SIG Multimedia community including multimedia symbols;
• new look-and-feel of the website was provided,
• blogging is possible;
• information about awards, SIGMM records, status reports, SIGMM retreat slides have been posted and shared with the SIGMM community.
Prof. Prabhakaran established a small editorial board where each editorial member has the responsibility for content at his/her webpage, jointly composing then the SIGMM Web Portal/Magazine. The SIGMM web magazine is a vibrant web portal and a valued resource for the SIGMM community.
7. Other SIGMM Services
a) ACM TOMCCAP (Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications Processing): This journal is becoming the premier multimedia journal as various statistics show where high quality research results are being published. Prof. Nicolas Georganas, the Editor-in-Chief, has truly brought this young journal to very high quality in a very short time of its existence. At this point, we have put together a search committee, led by Prof. Wolfgang Effelsberg, to search for a new editor-in-chief since Prof. Georganas term (5 years) is expiring in December 2009. The Call for Nominations is going into various SIGMM venues to advertise for this new position.
b) SIGMM Conference Presentation Efforts: At ACM Multimedia 2008, we have recorded keynote speakers as well as presentations of the four long papers that competed for the best paper award. We have established a position inside of the ACM Multimedia organization committee, the preservation chair. In ACM Multimedia 2008, Dr. Matthias Hollick was the presentation chair. All videos have been submitted to ACM Digital Library.
c) Preservation Efforts for SIGMM Conference Websites: We have asked the ACM Multimedia 2009 web-master to use the SIGMM webserver to host the website so that we can start with a systematic preservation. Other websites of previous ACM Multimedia conference are being ported currently to SIGMM web portal for presentation purposes.
d) CACM Efforts: We have established a committee, consisting of the program chairs of SIGMM sponsored conferences in 2008 to come up with a best paper in our conferences to be submitted to CACM for selection. By the end of the year 2008, we have submitted one paper. The same process will be repeated this year.
8. Future Plans
During 2009-2010, we are/will be implementing recommendations from the SIGMM retreat 2008 and anticipate a lively educational initiatives as well as a much stronger understanding of the impact of academia on industry in 2009-2010.
In 2010, we will give out the first “Best PhD Thesis” award, hence new committee will be established to determine the winner.
In February 2010, we are starting a new SIGMM-sponsored conference MMSys in multimedia computing and networking, where the general chairs are going to be Prof. Ketan Mayer-Patel and Prof. Wu-chi Feng. This conference is replacing a SPIE MMCN (Multimedia Computing and networking) conference that used to attract SIGMM multimedia systems and networking community. MMCN ceased to exist in 2009 and will be replaced by ACM MMSys which should have a much higher quality and recognition by the SIGMM community and the general systems and networking community.
Our SIGMM Web Portal will be further revised and improved including the presentation efforts of former ACM Multimedia Conference web pages.
We will move to three year cycle to determine the location of our premier ACM Multimedia conference. In 2010 we will invite bids not only for 2012 but also for 2013 and from there on, we will accept conference location bids in three-year cycle.
We are planning to revise our SIG bylaws and install three year cycle for the SIGMM EC members with maximum of two terms serving in each position.
9. Summary
June 2008-June 2009 has been a very strong year for ACM SIGMM. SIGMM has strengthened its mission to assist the multimedia community in their visibility and services. The 2008 SIGMM Retreat was extremely productive with very interactive and interesting recommendations that we have partially implemented in 2009 and are aiming with the new SIGMM leadership to implement in the coming year. We have sponsored exciting conferences such as the ACM Multimedia 2008, MIR 2008, NOSSDAV 2008 and CIVR 2008 which all were profitable and brought surplus to the SIGMM organization. The surplus is again returned back to the multimedia community via sponsoring the 2008 SIGMM Retreat and other SIGMM professional meetings benefiting SIGMM community, SIGMM Web Service, and SIGMM Award (2008, 2009 Outstanding Technical Achievement Award). We have established processes for the awards committees, established editorial board for SIGMM Web Magazine, strengthen the preservation process of our premier talks and also old ACM Multimedia web pages. We are bringing to the community a new award, the “Best PhD Thesis” that will be given first time 2010 during the ACM Multimedia 2010. We are also bringing a new conference, the SIGMM-sponsored MMSys conference, to bring together multimedia system and networking researchers in 2010.
Appendix A: Organizing Committee of ACM Multimedia 2008
|General Co-Chairs Abdulmotaleb EL Saddik (Univ. of Ottawa); Son Vuong (Univ. of British Colombia) |
|Program Co-Chairs Carsten Griwodz (Univ. of Oslo) Alberto Del Bimbo (Univ. degli Studi di Firenze); K. Selcuk Candan (Arizona State |
|Univ.); Alejandro Jaimes (Telefonica R&D, Madrid, Spain) |
|Short Paper Co-Chairs Gopal S Pingali (IBM, Watson) Changsheng Xu (CAS, China) |
|Shervin Shirmohammadi (Univ. of Ottawa) |
|Workshop Co-Chairs Max Mühlhäuser (TUD, Germany) Dulce Ponceleon (IBM, Almaden) |
|Tutorial Chair Roger Zimmerman (NUS, Singapore) |
|Publicity Co-Chairs Yong Rui (Microsoft, China); Markus Kampmann (Ericsson, Sweden); Jiebo Luo (Kodak Research Lab, USA); Wolfgang |
|Effelsberg (Univ. of Mannheim) |
|Technical Demo Co-Chairs PålHalvorsen (Univ.of Oslo); Anup Basu (Univ. of Alberta) |
|Proceedings Chair Balakrishnan Prabhakaran (Univ. of Texas at Dallas) |
|Panel Co-Chairs Suzanne Boll (Univ.of Oldenburg); Tanveer Syeda-Mahmood (IBM, Almaden) |
|Finance Chair Azzedine Boukerche (Univ. of Ottawa) |
|Doctorial Symposium Co-Chairs Hari Sundaram (Arizona State Univ); Kiyoharu Aizawa (University of Tokyo) |
|Sponsoring Co-Chairs Panos Nasiopoulos (Univ. of British Columbia); Victor Leung (Univ. of British Columbia) |
|Brave New Topics Co-Chairs Ling Guan Ryerson University); Zhengyou Zhang (Microsoft Research) |
|Travel Grant Co-Chairs Christoph Rensing (HTTC); Shueng-Han Gary Chan (Hong Kong Univ. of Science and Technology) |
|Interactive Art Program Co-Chairs FrankNack (Univ. Claude Bernard Lyon); Andruid Kerne (Texas A&M University); Ron Wakarry (Simon Fraser |
|University) |
|Web Co-Chairs Pradeep K. Atrey(Univ. of Winnipeg); Atif Alamri (Univ. of Ottawa) |
|Video Program Co-Chairs Thomas Haenselmann (Univ. of Mannheim)Michael Smith |
|History Preservation Chair Matthias Hollick (TU Darmstadt) |
|Open Source Competition Co-Chairs OliverHeckman (Google) Arnd Steinmetz (Fachhochschule Darmstadt) |
|Registration Chair Rosa Iglesias (Ikerlan Research Centre) |
|Local Arrangement Chair Charles Buck Krasic (Univ. of British Colombia) |
|SIGMM Chair Klara Nahrstedt (Univ. of Illinois) |
|SIGMM Director of Conferences Nevenka Dimitrova (Philips) |
Appendix B: ACM Multimedia 2008 Program
|Monday, October 27, 2008|Tutorials day |
| |Oceanview 3 |Oceanview 4 |Cazebo 1 |Cazebo 2 |Pacific Rim 2 |
|8:00 - 17:00 |Registration (Pavillion Foyer) |
|8:30 - 12:00 |T1 |T3 |T4 |T6 |T8 |
|12:00 - 13:30 |Lunch (Oceanview suites 5-8) |
|13:30 - 17:00 |T2 |T5 |T7 |T9 | |
|Tuesday, October |1st Conference day |
|28, 2008 | |
| |Crystal Pavilion |Crystal Pavilion |Crystal Pavilion |Pacific Rim Suite 1 |Cazebo 1&2 |
| |Ballroom A |Ballroom B |Ballroom C | | |
|8:00 - 17:00 |Registration (Pavillion Foyer) |
|8:45 - 9:00 |Opening Remark (Christal Pavilion) |
|9:00 - 10:00 |Keynote (Christal Pavilion) |
|10:00 - 10:30 |Coffee Break (Crystal Pavillion Foyer) |
|10:30 - 12:30 |Best Papers Session (Christal Pavilion) |
|12:30 - 14:00 |Lunch (Oceanview suites 5-8) |
|14:00 - 15:30 |Content Track C1: |Application Track A1: |Systems Track S1: Video|TOMCCAP Meeting |Content Track Short |
| |Duplicate Detection |Tracing |Streaming | |Papers Session 1: |
| | | | | |Content Analysis |
|15:30 - 16:00 |Coffee Break (Crystal Pavillion Foyer) |
|16:00 - 17:30 |Content Track C2: |Applications Track A2: |HCM Track H1: |Introduce the |Content Track Short |
| |Semantic Video |Watch |Application |exhibition artists to |Papers Session 2: |
| |Annotation | | |the conference |Content Analysis and |
| | | | | |Applications |
|18:30 - 22:00 |Conference Reception & Live Arts Exhibition (TELUS World of Science) |
|Wednesday, October 29, |2nd Conference day |
|2008 | |
| |Crystal Pavilion |Crystal Pavilion |Crystal Pavilion |Pacific Rim Suite 1 |Cazebo 1&2 |
| |Ballroom A |Ballroom B |Ballroom C | | |
|8:00 - 17:00 |Registration (Pavillion Foyer) |
|9:00 - 10:00 |Panel: Connecting Artists and Scientists in Multimedia Rese (Christal Pavilion) |
|10:00 - 10:30 |Coffee break (Crystal Pavillion Foyer) |
|10:30 - 12:30 |Content Track C3: Image| |Doctoral Symposium |Art Track A1: |Demo Session 1 |
| |Annotation and Tagging | | |Adaptation | |
|12:30 - 14:00 |Lunch & ACM MM Business Meeting (Oceanview suites 5-8) |
|14:00 - 15:30 |Content Track C4: Video|Applications Track A3: |HCM Track H2: | |Systems Track Short |
| |Search |Photo |Experience | |Papers |
|15:30 - 16:00 |Coffee Break (Crystal Pavillion Foyer) |
|16:00 - 17:30 |Content Track C5: |Brave New Topics |Systems Track S2: |Art Track A2: Dancing |Applications Track |
| |Multimedia Content | |Beyond 2D |With . . . |Short Papers Session 1 |
| |Analysis and | | | | |
| |Applications | | | | |
|19:00 - 22:00 |Conference Banquet (Crystal Pavilion Ballroom) |
|Thursday, October 30, |3rd Conference day |
|2008 | |
| |Crystal Pavilion Ballroom A |Crystal Pavilion |
| | |Ballroom B |
|9:00 - 10:00 |Keynote (Christal Pavilion) |MIR |
|10:00 - 10:30 |Coffee Break (Crystal Pavillion Foyer) | |
|10:30 - 12:30 |Content Track C6: |Applications Track | |Art Track A3: A |Demo Session 2 |MIR |
| |Image Retrieval |A4: Context | |Space . . . | | |
|12:30 - 14:00 |Lunch (Oceanview suites 5-8) | |
|14:00 - 15:30 |Content Track C7: Video Analysis |Applications Track |
| | |A5/H3: Browsing |
|16:00 - 17:30 |Panel: Multimedia Education — Can we find unity in diversity? (Christal |Art Track Short |MIR |
| |Pavilion) |Papers | |
|19:00 - 22:00 | |MIR Dinner |
|Friday, October |Workshops day |
|31, 2008 | |
| |Pacific Rim Suite 1 |
|9:00 - 10:00 |Workshop 1 |
|10:30 - 12:30 |Workshop 1 |
|14:00 - 15:30 |Workshop 1 |
|16:00 - 17:30 |Workshop 1 |Workshop 2 |Workshop 3 |Workshop 4 |Workshop 5 |
|Revenue | | | | | |
|SIG Dues |9217.18 |8133.98 |7811.15 |9138.00 |7784.00 |
|Subscription Revenue |4289.25 |18433.84 |1677.72 |1701.00 |1149.00 |
|Publication Sales |1439.25 |858.60 |824.40 |200.00 |81.00 |
|Digital Library |10000.00 |10000.00 |10000.00 |10000.00 |12548.00 |
|Other Revenue |716.01 |1245.31 |1372.99 |1613.00 |4206.00 |
|Total Organizational Revenue |25661.69 |23903.68 |21686.26 |22652.00 |26069.00 |
|Conference Revenue |39430.00 |60334.83 |64567.00 |0.00 |0.00 |
|Total Revenue |65091.69 |84238.51 |86253.26 |22652.00 |26069.00 |
|Expenses | | | | | |
|Publication Expenses |18797.94 |7548.97 |3633.69 |5380.00 |2847.00 |
|Allocations |10439.88 |10000.00 |10000.00 |10000.00 |10000.00 |
|Service Charge to Conferences |-6421.70 |-6637.91 |-7994.00 |0.00 |0.00 |
|Other expense |2516.26 |1414.90 |1839.74 |1983.00 |2260.00 |
|Total Organizational Expenses |25332.38 |12291.03 |7479.43 |17363.00 |15107.00 |
|Conference Expenses |44196.44 |57928.40 |53727.01 |0.00 |0.00 |
|Total Expenses |69528.82 |70254.32 |61206.44 |17363.00 |15107.00 |
|Initial Fund Balance |8886.78 |4449.65 |18433.84 |43480.66 |40134.00 |
|Net Surplus |-4437.13 |14019.08 |25046.82 |5289.00 |10962.00 |
|Ending Fund Balance |4449.65 |18433.84 |43480.66 |48769.66 |51096.00 |
Figure 1: Fund Balance and Projections: 2005–9
Explanation of Categories
Revenue. SIG Dues include membership dues that have been transferred to SIGSAM. Subscription Revenue includes revenue from subscriptions to SIGSAM publications by non-members and other miscellaneous subscription revenue. Publication Sales includes revenue from the sales of newsletters and bulletins, journals and conference proceedings. Digital Library revenue has been transferred by ACM to SIGSAM in compensation for the SIGSAM material provided through this online service. Conference Revenue includes revenue from SIGSAM-sponsored meetings –the ISSAC conference held during the reporting period. Since ISSAC 2008 was not sponsored by ISSAC, this is zero. Other Revenue includes the voluntary payment of revenue from the organizers of ISSAC 2008, as well as interest payments as well as income from service charges that has been transferred to SIGSAM.
Expenses. Publication Expenses includes the cost to produce, store and distribute the ACM Communications in Computer Algebra as well as proceedings that are delivered to ACM instead of the conference site. Conference Expenses includes expenses of SIGSAM-sponsored meetings. Allocations include charges to SIGSAM for services provided by ACM staff. Service Charges to Conferences are paid by SIGSAM-sponsored meetings (and appear as an expense with a negative value on financial statements). Since ISSAC was not sponsored by ACM in 2008, this is zero. Other Expenses include the costs of volunteer travel, elections, special meetings, promotions and projects, and miscellaneous fund transfers and service charges.
Source of Information.
This is a summary of data from the ACM Financial Management Reporting System prepared by the SIGSAM Treasurer. Please send electronic mail to treasurer_SIGSAM@ for additional information.
SIGSIM FY’09 Annual Report
July 2008- June 2009
Submitted by: Osman Balci, Chair
1
Highlights
1.1 Establishment of M&S Knowledge Repository
A Modeling and Simulation (M&S) Knowledge Repository (MSKR) has been created under the domain name of
Introductory content with hyperlinks has been added for 17 different areas of M&S. Some M&S resources are provided. The entire content is searchable and password protected for use only by SIGSIM members. The objective is to provide valuable content to SIGSIM members, by which to increase SIGSIM membership.
The site currently runs on a Virginia Tech server computer. It will be ported to an ACM server soon so that SIGSIM members can use their ACM logon information to access the MSKR site.
1.2 Bylaws Change
SIGSIM Bylaws Article 1.a is changed from
“…Special Interest Group on Simulation (SIGSIM)…” to
“…Special Interest Group on SImulation and Modeling (SIGSIM)…”; and
SIGSIM Bylaws Article 1.b is changed from
“… computer-based models.” to “… modeling and simulation.”
1.3 Establishment of SIGSIM Advisory Board
An Advisory Board is established with the following Chair and members:
Richard E. Nance, Chair
ACM Fellow
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, Virginia, USA
Paul Fishwick
Professor
Department of Computer & Information Science and Engineering
University of Florida
Gainesville, Florida, USA
Richard M. Fujimoto
Professor
Computational Science and Engineering Division
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
David M. Nicol
Professor, ACM Fellow
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, Illinois, USA
Ernest H. Page, Jr.
Senior Principal Scientist
The MITRE Corporation
McLean, Virginia, USA
Simon J.E. Taylor
Reader / Senior Lecturer
Department of Information Systems and Computing
Brunel University
West London, England
Alexander Verbraeck
Professor
Department of Systems Engineering
Delft University of Technology
Delft, The Netherlands
1.4 New SIGSIM Membership Dues Adopted
2 Mission
ACM SIGSIM mission is to promote and disseminate the advancement of high quality state-of-the-art in Modeling and Simulation (M&S) across a broad range of interests and disciplines.
3 Member Benefits
• SIGSIM-members-only access to ACM SIGSIM M&S Knowledge Repository
• Proceedings (CD) of each Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) mailed to each SIGSIM member
• Proceedings (hard copy) of each International Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed
Simulation (PADS) mailed to each SIGSIM member
• Discounted conference attendance fees for many conferences including WSC and PADS.
• SIGSIM members are granted full on-line access to the proceedings of the SIGSIM sponsored /
supported conferences in the ACM Digital Library.
4 Journal - TOMACS
SIGSIM’s journal is the ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS).
5 Membership
Membership from 2005 to 2009:
Membership Retention from 2005 to 2009:
6 Management
Current Officers Elected for the Term 2008-2011:
Chairman: Osman Balci
Vice Chairman: Drew Hamilton
Secretary/Treasurer: Margaret Loper
Webmaster & Listserv Moderator:
• Simon J.E. Taylor
M&S Knowledge Repository Editor-in-Chief
• Osman Balci
Advisory Board
• Richard E. Nance, Chair
• Paul Fishwick
• Richard M. Fujimoto
• David M. Nicol
• Ernest H. Page, Jr.
• Simon J.E. Taylor
• Alexander Verbraeck
SIGSIM Distinguished Contributions Award Committee:
• Richard E. Nance, Chair
• David M. Nicol
• George F. Riley
• Stewart Robinson
7 Awards
1. SIGSIM Distinguished Contributions Award
The SIGSIM Distinguished Contributions Award recognizes individuals based on their overall contributions to the field of modeling and simulation, including technical innovations, publications, leadership, teaching, mentoring, and service to the community. It is given annually at each Winter Simulation Conference. The 2008 award was given to Prof. Ray J. Paul at Brunel University, UK.
2. ACM SIGSIM Best Ph.D. Student Paper Award
The SIGSIM Best Ph.D. Student Paper Award is given as part of the Ph.D. Colloquium and Poster Session at each Winter Simulation Conference.
The 2008 award was given to Volkan Üstün at Auburn University.
8 Conferences
8.1 SIGSIM Sponsored Conferences
Acronym Conference / Workshop Proceedings Published in ACM Digital Library
WSC Winter Simulation Conference 1971-2008
PADS Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (a.k.a. Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Simulation) 1993-2008
MSWiM ACM International Conference on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems 1999-2008
8.2 Conferences with SIGSIM In-Cooperation Agreements
Acronym Conference / Workshop Proceedings Published in ACM Digital Library
MASCOTS 2009 17th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Modelling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (Sept 21-23, 2009, London, England)
to appear
SW10
Operational Research Society 5th Simulation Workshop (March 23-24, 2010, Worcestershire, England)
to appear
SIMUTools
International Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques: 2009, 2010
to appear
SpringSim
Spring Simulation Multiconference 2009 (March 22-27, 2009, San Diego, CA):
• Agent-Directed Simulation (ADS)
• 42nd Annual Simulation Symposium (ANSS)
• Business and Industry Symposium (BIS)
• 12th Communications and Networking Simulation Symposium (CNS)
• DEVS Integrative M&S Symposium (DEVS)
• High Performance Computing Symposium (HPC)
• Military Modeling and Simulation Symposium (MMS)
• Modeling & Simulation in Education (MSE)
• Modeling & Simulation in Engineering (MSEng)
to appear
EOMAS 5th International Workshop on Enterprise & Organizational Modeling and Simulation (June 8-9, 2009, Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
to appear
MSI 2009 The IASTED International Conference on Modelling, Simulation and Identification (Oct. 12-14, 2009, Beijing, China)
to appear
DS-RT 2009 13th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (Oct. 25-28, 2009 Singapore)
to appear
ANSS
Annual Simulation Symposium
1978-1992, 2003-2007
IPS-MoMe
4th International Workshop on Internet Performance, Simulation, Monitoring and Measurement
2006
SCSC
2007 Summer Computer Simulation Conference
2007
BIONETICS
1st International Conference on Bio inspired Models of Network, Information and Computing Systems
2006
Symposium on the Simulation of Computer Networks
1973-1976, 1987
SIGMETRICS
Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems
1973-2008
9 Financials
Fund Balance as of June 30, 2009:
10 SIGSIM’s 40th Birthday
SIGSIM was first created as a Special Interest Committee on Simulation in 1967. It was founded as a Special Interest Group (SIG) in April 1969.
We will be celebrating SIGSIM’s 40th birthday throughout 2009.
SIGSOFT FY’09 Annual Report
July 2008 - June 2009
Submitted by: William G. Griswold, Past Chair
SIGSOFT had an excellent year, maintaining the success of its conferences during difficult economic times, while continuing to reach out to the community in many dimensions.
Our major conferences continue to be strong – in attendance, sound finances, and intellectual vibrancy. FSE 2008 was held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA in November, with Gail Murphy serving as Program Chair and Mary Jean Harrold serving as General Chair. ICSE 2009 was held in Vancouver, Canada, with Stephen Fickas as General Chair, and Paola Inverardi and Joanne Atlee as Program co-Chairs. Both events featured SIGSOFT’s successful “Town Hall Meeting” format whereby we open the floor to an open discussion on the issues of the day, while those present relax with refreshments.
FSE 2009 will be held jointly with ESEC 2009 (the European Software Engineering Conference) in Amsterdam, Netherlands, held in late August. Hans van Vliet will be the General Chair and Valerie Issarny the Program Chair. FSE 2010 will be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, with Catalin Roman as General Chair and Andre van der Hoek as Program Chair. ICSE 2010 will be held in Cape Town, South Africa. Jeff Kramer and Judith Bishop are the General Chairs, with Premukar Devanbu and Sebastian Uchitel as the Program Chairs. ICSE 2011 will be held in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, with Richard Taylor as General Chair, and Harald Gall and Nenad Medvidovic as Program co-Chairs.
On the awards front, we continued to make our annual service and research awards. This year's ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award was presented to Stuart Zweben of The University of Ohio. We awarded the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award to Richard Taylor of UC Irvine. The awards were presented to the recipients at ICSE 2009 in Vancouver. Dr. Taylor will also give a keynote address at the upcoming ESEC/FSE 2009 in Amsterdam. We made a number of ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper awards across our many sponsored conferences.
In mid-2008 ACM approved the new SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award to recognize papers published in SIGSOFT conferences at least 10 years earlier that have had exceptional impact on research or practice. Last year we made our first round of awards. The 2008 SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award committee, led by ACM Fellow Carlo Ghezzi, recognized “A Design Framework for Internet-Scale Event Observation and Notification” from the 5th ESEC/FSE (1997), co-authored by Alex Wolf and David Rosenblum. ACM Fellow Richard Adrion headed up the 2008 Retrospective Impact Award committee, which is looking far beyond 10 years to the early days of SIGSOFT in search of up to 23 early high-impact papers over the next five years. His committee recognized these papers:
Harel, D., Lachover, H., Naamad, A., Pnueli, A., Politi, M., Sherman, R., and Shtul-Trauring, A. STATEMATE: a working environment for the development of complex reactive systems. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Software Engineering (Singapore, April 11 - 15, 1988).
Ungar, D. Generation Scavenging: A non-disruptive high performance storage reclamation algorithm. SIGPLAN Not. 19, 5 -- ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN software engineering symposium on Practical software development environments, (May. 1984), 157-167.
Parnas, D. L., Clements, P. C., and Weiss, D. M. The modular structure of complex systems. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Software Engineering (Orlando, Florida, United States, March 26 - 29, 1984).
Weiser, M. Program slicing. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Software Engineering (San Diego, California, United States, March 09 - 12, 1981).
Liskov, B., Snyder, A., Atkinson, R., and Schaffert, C. Abstraction mechanisms in CLU. In Proceedings of An ACM Conference on Language Design For Reliable Software (Raleigh, North Carolina, March 28 - 30, 1977). D. B. Wortman, Ed., 140.
We continue to expand our conference attendance awards, both in budget and scope. The joint SIGSOFT-SIGBED Frank Anger student travel award’s most recent award from the SIGSOFT side went to Basil Becker of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering (HPI) at the University of Potsdam. We made dozens of awards to students for travel support to SIGSOFT-sponsored conferences, under our CAPS (Conference Attendance Program for Students), for which our budget approached $40,000, increasing the size of the awards to reflect increasing travel costs, as well as focusing on first-time attendees, those in need. This year we expanded CAPS to include undergraduates as well. This year we also extended our conference attendance programs to childcare at conferences. At FSE we contracted with KiddieCorp to provide onsite care, but in general we provide for the travel of a caregiver to accompany the conference attendee and his/her child. This program is open to all attendees.
New for this year was our SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award. The 2009 award was made to Laurie Williams of North Carolina State University for her work on the use of pair programming in programming pedagogy, among other contributions. We also made a one-time posthumous award to A. Nico Habermann for his contributions in graduating so many influential Ph.D. students, including many who have gone on to continue his legacy as an inspiring Ph.D. advisor.
As part of our international outreach efforts, we co-supported a special session at the annual India Software Engineering Conference. This session features presentations of ICSE and FSE from the previous year that won ACM Distinguished Paper Awards. The authors of the winning papers are flown to India to re-present their papers. This has been highly successful, being lauded by both the ISEC organizers as well as the ICSE and FSE authors who have flown to the conference. We plan to continue supporting this effort in the future.
Will Tracz has continued to make our newsletter, SEN, stronger and better as we move into the digital era. Because the SEN is produced in two versions, online and a print “tip of the iceberg” summary (including RISKS), production is complicated and time consuming. To this end, Will has been working with a group of undergraduates at the Rochester Institute of Technology to develop a content management system that can handle the unique work flow to produce these two documents. The system is expected to be ready in the coming year.
SIGSOFT adopted revised updated bylaws this year. The most significant changes are that (a) the term of the elected executive committee has been increased from two to three years, and (b) the number of at-large members has been increased by one and the Secretary/Treasurer position is now appointed from the at-large members.
SIGSOFT is working to help our conferences more, especially as we see conference costs rising. In the coming year we will be showing more flexibility in budgeting for those sponsored conferences that minimize the risks of a financial loss, while at the same time striving to meet the goals of SIGSOFT, such as holding down student registration fees. Our plan is to help our sponsored conferences subsidizing student registration fees from our budget, rather than the traditional method of increasing registration fees for regular registrants, which has proven unsustainable.
SIGSOFT has a new incoming committee this year, chaired by David Rosenblum. For the coming year, among other initiatives, he has stated a specific interest in reaching out to practitioners, and he plans to appoint a practitioner liaison as well as a practitioner advisory board, to be chaired by the new liaison. Another goal is to institute a dissertation award to recognize the great research of our graduating PhDs.
SIGSPATIAL FY'09 Annual Report
July 2008-June 2009
Submitted by: Hanan Samet, Chair
1. SIGSPATIAL CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS
SIGSPATIAL's mission is to address issues related to the acquisition, management, and processing of spatially-related information with a focus on algorithmic, geometric, and visual considerations. The scope includes, but is not limited to, geographic information systems (GIS). These issues have become increasingly important in terms of public awareness with the growing interest and use of online mapping
systems such as Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google Maps and Google Earth as well as the integration of GPS into applications and devices such as, but not limited to, the iPhone. Presently, SIGSPATIAL is
fulfilling this mission by sponsoring high quality research conferences and workshops. As indicated by its mission, SIGSPATIAL's domain is much more than just geographic information systems and with
this in mind it tries to differentiate its conferences and workshop from others by focusing on the computer science aspects of the field rather than on the available commercial products. In addition, a major concern and focus of the SIGSPATIAL leadership is keeping its flagship conference, the ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS), affordable so that it can continue to be of good value to its attendees and be
competitive price-wise with related conferences which are priced at considerably lower levels than most ACM SIG conferences. SIGSPATIAL has been able to achieve this goal by being very active in soliciting sponsor contributions as well as being vigilant at minimizing SIGSPATIAL's financial exposure in terms of contractual obligations when planning the conference by building reserves that can be used in years when the financial climate is not so healthy.
2008 was the first year of SIGSPATIAL and its main activity was its flagship conference (ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS) that was held in Irvine, California, USA, on November 5-7, 2008. ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2008 was the sixteenth event of an annual series of symposia and workshops with the mission to bring together researchers, developers, users, and practitioners carrying out research and development in novel systems based on geo-spatial data and knowledge. The conference fosters interdisciplinary discussions and research in all aspects of Geographic Information Systems and Science (GIS) and provides a forum for original research contributions covering all conceptual, design, and implementation aspects of GIS and ranging from applications, user interface considerations, and visualization down to storage management and indexing issues. This year’s conference was the first time that the conference was held under the auspices of SIGSPATIAL. What was new this year was the introduction of two new conference tracks, namely a demonstration track and a Ph.D. showcase track. A program committee
of 93 members reviewed the submissions.
The call for papers led to 232 paper submissions over all three tracks. The research paper track attracted 193 research paper submissions, of which 38 were accepted as full papers (an acceptance rate of slightly below 20%) and another 37 papers were accepted as poster papers. The Ph.D. Showcase track attracted 19 Ph.D. showcase submissions, of which 8 were accepted, while the demonstrations track attracted 20 demonstration paper submissions, of which 13 were accepted. These numbers indicate the continued health, interest, and growth of the research field of geographic information systems, and the need to bring its researchers, students, and industrial practitioners together.
The conference was attended by 190 people and had a single track. The program featured two outstanding invited speakers:
1. Vinton Cerf, VP of Google, USA and 2004 ACM Turing Award Winner
2. Jack Dangermond, Founder and President of ESRI, USA
The conference was run in a single track with one of the highlights being a fast forward poster session in the first afternoon where each poster author was given 2 minutes to present the highlights of their
work to the audience. This was followed by a poster reception in the evening where the conference participants had an opportunity to interact with the poster authors. Poster paper authors were
encouraged to do a good job by having two awards: one for best fast forward presentation and one for the actual poster. The poster component of the conference proved to be very popular with both the
conference audience and the poster authors.
The conference was also the site of the first open business meeting for SIGSPATIAL which was held in the evening of the first day of the conference just before the poster session. The meeting was open
to all SIGSPATIAL members as well as to all conference attendees. In addition to discussing budgetary issues, plans for next year's conference, and soliciting member's feedback, the business meeting
featured a presentation by Dr. Maria Zemankova of the National Science Foundation (NSF) about potential funding opportunities at the NSF that are available to members of the ACM SIGSPATIAL community.
The conference was preceded by the First Workshop on Security and Privacy in GIS and LBS (SPRINGL08). The goal of the SPRINGL workshop series is to provide a forum for researchers working in the area of geospatial data security and privacy. Both security and privacy are critical for geospatial applications because of the dramatic increase and dissemination of geospatial data in several application contexts including homeland security, environmental crises, and natural and industrial disasters. Furthermore, geospatial infrastructures are being leveraged by companies to provide a large variety of location-based services (LBS) able to tailor services to users. However, despite the increase of publicly accessible geospatial information only little attention is being paid to how to secure geospatial information systems (GIS) and LBS. Privacy is also of increasing concern given the sensitivity of personally-identifiable location information. This is despite major advancements that have been made in secure computing infrastructures and the secure and privacy preserving management of traditional (relational) data in particular. The workshop spanned across security and privacy aspects, as they relate to the management of geospatial data and to the development of emerging LBS. Eight papers were selected for presentation at the workshop and inclusion in the workshop proceedings. The workshop was well-received and it is intended to hold it again in 2009.
The SIGSPATIAL leadership is currently planning for the 2009 ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS Conference which will be held in Seattle on November 4-6, 2009 with a number of workshops on November 3.
SIGSPATIAL is also participating in the 2nd International Workshop on Similarity Search and Applications (SISAP) on August 29-30, 2009 in Prague, Czech Republic on an in cooperation basis.
In addition, SIGSPATIAL is exploring sponsoring other conferences in the field as well as cooperating with other SIGs and professional organization in the GIS area.
2. SIGSPATIAL PUBLICATION INITIATIVES
SIGSPATIAL is exploring the idea of starting an ACM Transactions on Spatial Systems and Algorithms or some mutually acceptable variant of this title, but this is still a year or two away as the current focus of the SIG is on maintaining the quality of the flagship conference, and getting the workshops organized. The model is based on the anticipation that the papers published in the workshops and conferences would be expanded upon and submitted to the Transactions for consideration for possible publication.
3. AWARDS
In 2008, SIGSPATIAL offered for the first time a best paper award which was chosen by the program committee from the accepted submissions to the 2008 ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS Conference. This award was shared by the following three papers:
1. David Eppstein and Michael Goodrich: Studying (Non-Planar) Road Networks Through an Algorithmic Lens.
2. Benjamin Teitler, Michael Lieberman, Daniele Panozzo, Jagan Sankaranarayanan, Hanan Samet, and Jon Sperling, NewsStand: A New View on News.
3. Kenneth Weiss and Leila De Floriani, Sparse Terrain Pyramids.
4. ACM DIGITAL LIBRARY
SIGSPATIAL plans to expand its presence in the ACM Digital Library by soliciting workshop proposals both in its role as a sponsor and on an in cooperation status. This can be seen by the increased number of workshop that it will sponsor in 2009. These workshops were proposed independently to SIGSPATIAL. In 2010, SIGSPATIAL will actively solicit workshop proposals and will also designate a Workshops Chair for the ACM GIS Conference as well as delegate such duties to one of its officers who will be tasked with creating a uniform framework for them.
5. PLANS FOR THE 2010 FISCAL YEAR
SIGSPATIAL is working hard to fulfill its mission of sponsoring high quality research conferences and workshops. It will start to be more proactive in soliciting workshops and will also continue to seek out
sponsors and try to devise activities that will increase its attractiveness to the potential sponsors. It will try to continue to maintain the momentum of its first year of existence and build on it.
SIGUCCS FY’08 Annual Report
July 2008- June 2009
Submitted by: Robert Haring-Smith, Chair
SIGUCCS (Special Interest Group for University and College Computing Services) continued to serve the community of professionals who provide computer support at institutions of higher education during 2008-2009 by sponsoring two successful conferences with nine associated workshops, maintaining active mailing lists for discussion of issues of common concern, and generally facilitating networking among this group of individuals.
The Executive Committee members for 2008-2009 were: Chair, Bob Haring-Smith; Vice Chair/Fall Conference Liaison, Kelly Wainwright; Secretary/Spring Conference Liaison, Tim Foley; Treasurer, Alex Nagorski; Information Director, Patti Mitch; and Past Chair Leila Lyons. This group completed the first year of a three-year term of office to which they were elected in the spring of 2008. Aside from the chair and past chair, all members are new to the Executive Committee.
Several volunteers in Executive Committee-appointed positions headed specific operational areas: Karen McRitchie served as Tutorial Chair; Greg Hanek coordinated the Communication Awards program; and Christine Vucinich chaired the Membership and Marketing committee. These volunteers contributed significantly to the ongoing success of the organization and conferences, and are continuing to do so.
Awards Program
The SIGUCCS Awards Programs have been in place for several years. The Penny Crane Award recognizes significant multiple contributions to SIGUCCS from individuals over an extended period of time. The Hall of Fame awards recognize the many individuals who have contributed their time and energies to benefit SIGUCCS. For descriptions of the awards programs, please go to: .
Penny Crane Award – Jerry Smith was the recipient of the 2008 Penny Crane Award. For more information please go to: .
Hall of Fame – There were three people inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2008. They were: John Lateulere, Jack McCredie, and Rob Paterson. For more information about the recipients please go to: .
Travel grants – Early in 2008, the Awards Committee proposed and the Executive Committee approved a new program, the SIGUCCS Grant Program, to provide partial support for students and employees in institutions of higher education to participate in the annual SIGUCCS Fall Conferences and Spring Management Symposia. This support is funded by SIGUCCS and consists of a complimentary conference registration and hotel room accommodations. Grants were made for each of our conferences for the first time in 2008-2009.
From 20 applicants for Fall Conference grants, the following five people received grants:
Raymond Cheung (Kansas University), Andrew Cunningham (Kenyon College), Chris Koerner (St. Louis University), Lisa McKinney (Linfield College), Ray Jeremiah (Valparaiso University).
From 18 applicants for SIGUCCS Management Symposium grants, the following five people received grants:
Robert Campbell (CUNY Graduate Center), Allan Chen (Santa Clara University School of Law), Gail Farally-Semerad (Widener University), Kirk Klaphaak (Indiana University Southeast), Tom McMurtry (Montreat College).
In selecting grant recipients, we favor applicants from institutions that have not been represented at recent SIGUCCS conferences. This approach is intended to make the conferences more widely known and build future attendance.
On January 1, 2009, John Bucher became Chair of the SIGUCCS Awards Selection Committee and Jennifer Fajman became Past Chair, following the rotation of the committee’s membership described at . Two new members, Chris Jones and Dennis Mar, replaced Jack Esbin and Linda Hutchison, who retired from the committee at the end of 2008.
2008 Communications Awards - As we have done for many years, we held our Communications Awards competition in conjunction with the Fall Conference. A description of these awards and the 2008 winners can be found at: . Judging for this competition is led by Greg Hanek who has overseen the Communications Awards competition for several years. The Communications Awards Committee is formed each year from the previous year’s top award winners in each category.
Conferences
The thirty-sixth Fall Conference was held October 19-22, 2008 in Portland, Oregon with the theme of “Moving Mountains, Blazing Trails.” While papers on topics like managing student employees and overseeing computer labs remain perennial favorites, this year’s conference saw a lot of discussion of information management (through content management systems, wikis, and other means) and of new technologies for enhancing the on-line learning experience. The keynote speakers were Dr. Laurence Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium, and Dr. Bryan Alexander, Director of Research for NITLE (National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education). For the complete program, see .
The thirty-sixth spring symposium, now known as the SIGUCCS Management Symposium, was held from March 29-April 1, 2009 in Nashville, Tennessee. The theme was “Fine-Tuning IT Solutions.” The program featured discussions of deploying enterprise systems, enhancing information security, and nurturing staff and future IT leaders. Brian Voss, Vice Chancellor for Information Technology at Louisiana State University, and Kelly Gaither, Associate Director, Research & Development Visualization and Data Analysis, University of Texas at Austin, delivered the keynote addresses. The complete program is available at .
Special Projects
As we reported last year, a narrative history of SIGUCCS was completed by long-time SIG member and leader Jack Esbin in response to the call by ACM’s History Committee to document the history of the SIG. This year, through the efforts of Information Director Patti Mitch, Past Chair Leila Lyons, and a graduate student in history from the University of Delaware, we have augmented the narrative with a nearly complete listing of all volunteers who served on the SIG’s Executive Committee, on the many conference committees, or in other significant roles.
We have established a closer relationship with ResNet, an organization that supports those who manage residential networks and associated IT services in higher education. We have many concerns in common with ResNet, which serves a subgroup of the community to which SIGUCCS is devoted. By the end of June, 2009, a memorandum of understanding that had the approval of ACM, the ResNet board, and the SIGUCCS board needed only to be signed. The memorandum envisions that each group will be represented at the other’s main conference and that a specially selected paper from each conference will be presented at the other conference. In June, 2009, Karen McRitchie, a member of the SIGUCCS board, attended the ResNet conference to promote SIGUCCS.
The current SIGUCCS web site () has been in place in its current form (albeit with updated content) for many years. During the past year, the SIGUCCS board embarked on an effort to redesign the web site completely to give it a fresh look and, above all, to serve better the needs of SIGUCCS members and others interested in SIGUCCS activities. We hope that the new site will go live within the next few months.
Issues
The most important influence on SIGUCCS activities, especially its conferences, over the next two years is likely to be the economic downturn and its consequences. Participation in our conferences, from submission of papers through attendance at the conference, depends on college and university support for staff travel and professional development—support which has been greatly curtailed over the past year. In the months preceding the Fall Conference in Portland, an unusually large number of authors of accepted papers were forced to withdraw their papers because their institutions had frozen or cut travel budgets. For the SIGUCCS Management Symposium in the spring, we had an adequate number of session proposals, but conference attendance was down more than 20% from the levels maintained in recent years. To judge by post-conference evaluations, both conferences were valuable experiences for those able to attend, but we cannot help but be concerned by reduced participation.
SIGUCCS is fortunate to have a substantial reserve fund, which we hope will enable us to weather the economic situation without significant loss of organizational momentum. We also have an invaluable asset in the form of a sizeable membership of people who are professionally helpful and have been unstinting volunteers on behalf of SIGUCCS. We should be able to use data from recent conference registration as well as from paper submissions and participation in our awards programs to focus our marketing of the conferences.
In addition to a more intensive marketing effort to ensure that institutions of higher education throughout the country are aware of the services we offer, we are contemplating two substantial changes in those services. First, the board has initiated a discussion throughout the SIG of a proposal to combine the two conferences into a single annual event. Our mission to provide professional development for our members would be the primary reason for doing so. The Fall Conference is targeted at front-line computer support personnel, while the Management Symposium, as the name implies, focuses on managerial issues. A combined conference could provide a better opportunity for front-line staff interested in moving into management to prepare themselves for such a move. Combining the two conferences would almost surely reduce our costs, but the effect on net revenue is less clear, in part because SIG members are divided on when during the year that the combined conference should occur. There may also be ways to enhance professional development without abandoning the two-conference format that has served us for the past thirty-six years.
A second significant change would be to start a series of on-line events devoted to selected topics that
are of particular interest to the membership. We might draw on the most successful topics at the conferences, or issues being actively discussed on our mailing lists, or recent technological developments in higher education to determine the focus of the event, which would take the form of a webinar or facilitated discussion. Our intention is to have the first such event in November 2009, and perhaps quarterly thereafter, depending on the response we get.
SIGWEB FY’09 Annual Report
July 2008 - June 2009
Submitted by: Ethan Munson, Chair
Fiscal Year 2009 was the second year of a two-year term for SIGWEB’s officers, who were elected in June 2007 and completed their terms in June 2009.
BACKGROUND
SIGWEB represents a unique and interdisciplinary research community centered on augmenting the human intellect, a vision articulated by the legendary computing pioneer Douglas Engelbart nearly half a century ago. Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and other early researchers realized this vision through hypermedia systems, which are still of interest to the SIGWEB community today, including the World Wide Web, the largest hypermedia system ever built. Modern researchers have found a host of other realizations of this vision, ranging from digital libraries to knowledge management systems. SIGWEB includes more than just computer researchers and professionals, though. From cognitive psychologists to ethnographers to anthropologists to hypertext writers, SIGWEB embraces those researchers and practitioners that address how people use computers, so that better tools for augmenting the human intellect can be built. SIGWEB also balances the findings of the research world with the experiences of the practical world, in which our ideas and theories are tested daily.
SIGWEB (originally SIGLINK) was founded 18 years ago to provide a home for the hypertext community and the ACM Hypertext conference. Over the years, SIGWEB has changed its name and has begun to sponsor a wide range of conferences encompassing hypertext, the Web, digital libraries, and document engineering.
ELECTIONS
In 2009, with the support of the entire Executive Committee, the SIGWEB elected officers asked to have their terms extended by 2 years. The SGB approved this request. The membership of the Executive Committee for the 2009-11 term is:
Ethan Munson (Chair)
Maria de Graça C. Pimentel (Vice-Chair)
Simon Harper (Secretary/Treasurer)
Yeliz Yesilada (Information Director)
Darren Lunn (Newsletter Editor)
Claus Atzenbeck (Interviews Associate Editor)
Peter Brusilovsky (Member-at-large)
FY 2009 TECHNICAL MEETINGS AND AWARDS
The technical meetings sponsored by SIGWEB were:
• ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng) 2008
(held in September 2008 in São Paulo, Brazil)
• ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management 2008
(held in November 2008 in Napa, California, USA)
• ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2009)
(held February 2009 in Barcelona, Spain)
• ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2009
(held June 2009 in Austin, Texas, USA)
• ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (HT) 2009
(held June 2009 in Torino, Italy)
The awards presented by SIGWEB in FY 2009 were:
• The Douglas C. Engelbart Award for 2009 (HT 2009)
“Hyperincident Connected Components in Tagging Networks”
Nicolas Neubauer and Klaus Obermayer
• The Theodor Holm Nelson Award for 2009 (HT 2009)
“The Dynamics of Personal Territories on the Web”
Thomas Beauvisage
PARTNERSHIPS
As recently as 2002, SIGWEB was sponsoring only two conferences, HT (100%) and JCDL (34%). About this time, SIGWEB’s leaders embarked on a plan to expand the SIG’s scope via a wider range of sponsorships. SIGWEB now sponsors five conferences regularly and is in discussions with other conference and workshop organizing committees about further sponsorships.
FINANCES
SIGWEB’s finances have strengthened considerably over the past few years. The SIG’s fund balance stands at over $430,000, which is an increase of about $90,000 over June 2008.
SIGWEB’s conferences have generally been making profits and in some cases have made large profits. This has been the primary reason for the increasing fund balance. However, in 2007, SIGWEB’s executive committee also examined non-conference operating expenses closely and decided to end the annual conference proceedings distribution in order to cut costs. This action combined with growing revenue from the ACM Digital Library has allowed the SIG to show a modest operating surplus.
MEMBERSHIP
In June 2009, SIGWEB had 699 members (506 professional, 68 student, and 125 affiliate). This is a substantial increase from June 2007 (535 total) and June 2008 (644 total).
GOALS
Like many ACM SIGs, SIGWEB had seen falling membership in recent years. While the declines were not precipitous, they were a real cause for concern and the Executive Committee has taken several actions to successfully reverse this trend:
• SIGWEB has been giving complimentary SIGWEB memberships to attendees at our two 100% sponsored conferences (Hypertext and DocEng). The hope is that members will continue their memberships in years that they do not attend. More importantly, we hope that more of them will be willing to be volunteers. Predictably, first year retention has dropped from about 47% to 40%, but overall retention looks acceptable. The Executive Committee continues to monitor this initiative.
• SIGWEB has restarted its newsletter. The primary distribution medium is the Internet, but a one-page color flyer containing abbreviated articles with URLs is mailed to all members. This is done in the belief that a physical document is easier to share and provides a tangible reminder of membership.
• SIGWEB has initiated a Student Travel Award program, modeled on those of SIGIR and SIGAPP, for its 100%-sponsored conferences.
• SIGWEB has worked to strengthen its traditional flagship conference by broadening its scope to include Social Linking and Networking. The meeting saw a dramatic increase in attendance in 2009 (from 90 to 150) and SIGWEB is optimistic for its future.
• SIGWEB has initiated a new Advisory Committee, which has a broader membership than the Executive Committee. The Advisory Committee is used to sound out policy decisions in front of a broader audience than the 7 members of the Executive Committee. It also serves to expose a larger set of volunteers to the issues that SIG leadership is confronted with.
Volunteer development has been another challenge for SIGWEB. It has become particularly acute as the SIG’s sponsorships have become more diffuse and our flagship conference (Hypertext) has seen falling attendance. Starting in FY 2008, SIGWEB formed a SIGWEB Advisory Committee that is a proper superset of the Executive Committee. This Advisory Committee discusses policy issues and plans for SIGWEB via an online group. Formal policy decisions continue to rest with the Executive Committee. The Advisory Committee’s membership includes representatives from each sponsored conference, past officers, past candidates for office, and others who are active in SIGWEB projects. The goals of the Advisory Committee are multiple. It broadens the pool of people who are discussing SIGWEB policy and activities and can be prepared to serve as officers in the future. It should strengthen the connection between SIGWEB and the conferences that it sponsors. Finally, it helps ensure that SIGWEB listens to its constituents.
SIGWEB continues to explore other conference sponsorships. There have been ongoing discussions with the International World Wide Web Conference (IWWWC), but we are not optimistic about them, because the business model of the IWWWC is quite different from ACM’s. More promising discussions are underway with the organizers of the new Web Science conference.
CONCLUSION
SIGWEB has successfully expanded its range of conference sponsorships and hopes to continue this trend. SIGWEB is also working hard on membership and volunteer development. SIGWEB is financially healthy and has solid leadership.
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