SIGACCESS FY’04 Annual Report
SIGACCESS FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009 - June 2010
Submitted by: Andrew Sears, Chair
SIGACCESS continues to expand its membership and activities to meet member needs. This report highlights SIGACCESS Awards as well as the SIG’s conference, publication, and other activities.
Awards
ACM Student Research Competition (SRC)
SIGACCESS continues to conduct this competition in conjunction with the ASSETS conference. For ASSETS 2009, the winners are:
Undergraduate category:
1. First place: "Sensation Augmentation to Relieve Pressure Sore Formation in Wheelchair Users" (Raphael Rush, Queen's University, Canada)
2. Second place: "Designing AAC Interfaces for Commercial Brain-Computer Interaction Gaming Hardware" (Stephen Steward, University of Delaware, USA)
Graduate category:
1. First place: "iSET: Enabling in situ and post hoc video labeling" (Mish Madsen, MIT Media Lab, USA; Abdelrahman Mahmoud, American University in Cairo, Egypt; Youssef Kashef, American University in Cairo, Egypt)
2. Second place: "Defining Virtualization Based System Abstractions for an Indoor Assistive Living for Elderly Care" (Nova Ahmed, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
3. Third place: "MGuider: Mobile Guiding and Tracking System in Public Transit System for Individuals with Cognitive Impairments" (Wei-Hsun Chen, Chung Yuan Christian University, Taiwan)
ACM SIGACCESS AWARD for Outstanding Contributions to Computing and Accessibility
The inaugural ACM SIGACCESS AWARD for Outstanding Contributions to Computing and Accessibility was awarded in 2008. 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 2010 recipient is Dr. Albert Cook of the University of Alberta, Canada. He will receive the award, and will deliver a keynote address, at ASSETS 2010, in Orlando, Florida.
SIGACCESS Best Paper Award
Takagi, H., Kawanaka, S., Kobayashi, M., Sato, D., and Asakawa, C. 2009.
Collaborative web accessibility improvement: challenges and possibilities. In Proceedings of the 11th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, October 25 - 28, 2009). ASSETS '09. ACM, New York, NY, 195-202.
DOI=
SIGACCESS Best Student Paper Award
Cavender, A. C., Bigham, J. P., and Ladner, R. E. 2009. ClassInFocus:
enabling improved visual attention strategies for deaf and hard of hearing students. In Proceedings of the 11th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, October 25 - 28, 2009). ASSETS '09. ACM, New York, NY, 67-74. DOI=
SIGACCESS Scholarship in Computers and Accessibility
The SIGACCESS Scholarship Award aims to provide support for participation in the ASSETS conference for individuals who would not otherwise be able to attend. Practitioners, researchers, members of advocacy groups, or individuals with disabilities are eligible to apply.
Applicants must have a demonstrated interest in accessible computing. Awardees will have the opportunity to actively participate in the ASSETS conference and gain experience and knowledge from interacting with experts in the field. The scholarship award is in the amount of $2,000.
SIGACCESS will award up to two scholarships per year, pending availability of funds. We are in the process of awarding our first two scholarships under this program, which will support the participation of two individuals to the ASSETS 2010 conference.
ASSETS Conference
ASSETS’09 was held in Pittsburgh, PA. Once again, conference attendance exceeded projections, with a record 130 attendees. The technical program addressed a broad range of issues including cognitive accessibility, wayfinding, virtual environments, accessible gaming, accessibility for individuals with hearing impairments, text entry, web accessibility, and various other topics.
Once again, the conference featured an NSF sponsored Doctoral Consortium (see ).
This consortium allowed doctoral students to present their dissertation topics and receive feedback during formative stages of their work. The conference also hosted a Microsoft Student Research Competition (SRC) event (see information about the winners of the competition above).
The SIGACCESS Business Meeting, held at ASSETS, updated attendees on SIG activities and discussed ideas for new activities. The idea of holding ASSETS in another country was discussed and was well received. There was also discussion of supporting workshops or other smaller events that were more focused with regard to topic or geographical location.
Publications
The inaugural issue of the ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS) appeared in May, 2008. At this time, six issues have been published and the seventh issue is in preparation. The number of submissions continues to grow. 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:
see . After several years of service, Sri Kurniawan stepped down as the Editor-in-Chief. Jinjuan Feng (Towson University) assumed this position as of June, 2010.
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 2010 (W4A) at the WWW Conference in Raleigh, NC this past April (see ).
SIGACCESS Website
The SIGACCESS website was created and is maintained by the SIGACCESS webmaster, Darren Lunn of the University of Manchester.
In Memoriam
We note the passing on April 11, 2009 of our friend and colleague Noëlle 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. In recognition of Noëlle’s dedication to SIGACCESS and her contributions to the community, the 2010 SIGACCESS Scholarship in Computers and Accessibility have been dedicated in her memory.
SIGACT FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009 - June 2010
Submitted by: Lance Fortnow, Chair
1. Awards
▪ 2010 Gödel Prize: Sanjeev Arora. (1998). Polynomial-time approximation schemes for Euclidean TSP and other geometric problems, Journal ACM 45(5), 753-782 and Joseph S.B. Mitchell (1999). Guillotine subdivisions approximate polygonal subdivisions: A simple polynomial-time approximation scheme for geometric TSP, k-MST, and related problems, SIAM J. Computing 28(4), 1298-1309.
o The prize is awarded jointly with the EATCS and this year was awarded at the ICALP conference.
▪ Knuth Prize: David Johnson for seminal contributions to the theoretical and experimental analysis of combinatorial algorithms. The Knuth Prize is given jointly by SIGACT and IEEE TCMFCS and the Knuth Prize and Lecture was given this year at STOC.
▪ Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award: Mihir Bellare and Phil Rogaway for their development of the field of Practice-Oriented Provable-Security and its widespread impact on the theory and practice of cryptography and security. This award is an ACM award sponsored in part by SIGACT.
▪ Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing:
o 2010: Tushar D. Chandra, Vassos Hadzilacos, and Sam Toueg for:
▪ Tushar D. Chandra and Sam Toueg. Unreliable Failure Detectors for Reliable Distributed Systems, Journal of the ACM, 43(2):225-267, 1996.
▪ Tushar D. Chandra, Vassos Hadzilacos and Sam Toueg. The Weakest Failure Detector for Solving Consensus, Journal of the ACM, 43(4):685-722, 1996.
o 2009: Joseph Halpern and Yoram Moses for "Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment" in the Journal of the ACM, 37(3):549-587, July 1990.
o The Dijkstra Prize is given jointly by SIGACT and SIGOPS.
▪ SIGACT Distinguished Service Award: Hal Gabow
▪ STOC 2010 Best Paper Award: “QIP=PSPACE,” by Rahul Jain, Zhengfeng Ji, Sarvagya Upadhyay and John Watrous, and “An Improved LP-based Approximation for Steiner Tree,” by Jaroslaw Byrka, Fabrizio Grandoni, Thomas Rothvoss and Laura Sanita.
▪ Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award (STOC 2010): “Augmenting Undirected Node-Connectivity by One” by Laszlo A. Vegh
▪ SIGACT awarded approximately thirty student travel awards to allow these students to attend the 2010 STOC conference. Some of these awards were supported by NSF Grant CCF-0923716.
2. Significant papers on new areas published in proceedings
With help from PC Chairs Leonard Schulman (STOC), Moses Charikar (SODA) and Lorenzo Alvisi (PODC).
STOC 2010
The ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2009) covers much of computer science theory.
Rahul Jain, Zhengfeng Ji, Sarvagya Upadhyay and John Watrous resolved a long-standing open question in their paper aptly named “QIP=PSPACE.” In the classic theorem that IP=PSPACE, the containment of IP in PSPACE is easy, whereas the containment of PSPACE in IP is a celebrated result. In the quantum case, since QIP contains IP, we get the formerly-difficult direction “for free;” the formerly-easy direction, namely that QIP lies in PSPACE, has only now been concluded in this, the culminating paper in a sequence. The proof relies upon a parallelized form of the multiplicative weights update method, applied to a certain class of semidefinite programs.
Jaroslaw Byrka, Fabrizio Grandoni, Thomas Rothvoss and Laura Sanita, in their paper “An Improved LP-based Approximation for Steiner Tree,” answered in the positive the long-standing problem of whether the Steiner Tree problem has an LP relaxation with integrality gap less than 2 (providing one with gap 1.55). The approximation factor of their algorithm is even better, namely 1.39.
Laszlo A. Vegh won the Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award for his paper “Augmenting Undirected Node-Connectivity by One,” in which he provides a polynomial-time algorithm for determining the fewest number of edges that need to be added to an undirected graph to increment its node-connectivity by one. This was a long-standing problem, previously settled only in very special cases, whose sibling problems (undirected edge-connectivity as well as directed node- and edge-connectivity) were solved in a series of papers over the last quarter-century. The complexity of augmenting undirected node-connectivity by more than one remains a challenging question.
SODA 2010
SODA is a major conference that focuses on algorithms and combinatorics.
Arash Asadpour, Michel X. Goemans, Aleksander Madry, Shayan Oveis Gharan and Amin Saberi's Best Paper at SODA 2010, "An O(log n/log log n)-approximation algorithm for the asymmetric traveling salesman problem".
The traveling salesman problem is the classical combinatorial optimization problem of finding a minimum cost tour through a set of cities. This paper considers the asymmetric variant (ATSP) where the cost from going from A to B might be different from the cost from B to A. The paper presents a breakthrough in the approximation for ATSP, the first asymptotic improvement in the approximation factor of O(log n) (first established in 1982) to O(log n/ log log n). The algorithm is somewhat reminiscent of Christofides’ algorithm for the symmetric case. It first solves the classical Held-Karp linear programming relaxation of the problem, then generates a spanning tree T while disregarding the orientations of the arcs, and finally augments it into a directed Eulerian graph at minimum cost by solving a minimum cost flow problem. The cost of the final step depends on the "thinness" of the tree T. The authors use maximum entropy sampling to construct a suitable probability distribution on spanning trees which are sufficiently thin with high probability. This is an exciting development in approximation algorithms, and the wealth of ideas in the paper could lead to further progress on the problem.
Aaron Bernstein's Best Student Paper at SODA 2010, "A Nearly Optimal Algorithm for Approximating Replacement Paths and k Shortest Simple Paths in General Graphs".
A fundamental problem in graph algorithms is to find the shortest path between two given vertices. This paper studies generalizations of this question where some edges could fail. Given a directed graph with edge weights and two specified vertices s and t, the replacement-paths problem asks to determine, for each edge e, the length of the shortest s-t path that avoids e. The fastest algorithm for this problem takes roughly O(mn) time, where m is the number of edges and n is the number of vertices and there is a lower bound of Omega(m sqrt(n)). The main result shown in this paper is that approximate replacement paths can be computed much faster. The paper presents a (1+eps)-approximation for the replacement-paths problem that (ignoring some logarithmic factors) runs in time O(m/eps). This gives an O(mk/eps)-time (1+eps)-approximation for the problem of computing the k shortest simple paths. The approximation algorithms significantly improve upon the running times of the current best exact algorithms for these problems. An important component of the algorithm is running Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm multiple times on slightly modified versions of the graph, via a novel variant called Progressive Dijkstra which mitigates the cost of the multiple runs. The paper makes important contributions to very basic questions in graph algorithms.
Sungjin Im and Benjamin Moseley's Best Student Paper at SODA 2010, "An Online Scalable Algorithm for Average Flow Time in Broadcast Scheduling".
In broadcast scheduling, page requests arrive over time, and the server has to schedule broadcasts of pages online, i.e. without knowledge of future requests; a broadcast of a page satisfies all preceding unsatisfied requests for that page. The goal is to minimize the average flow time, i.e. the average wait time for requests. This problem and its variants have been studied extensively over the past 10-15 years. This paper obtains essentially the best possible result, a constant competitive algorithm with arbitrarily small speed augmentation, solving an outstanding problem in the area that had been open for a decade. The algorithm is a variant of the natural Longest-wait-first algorithm first proposed in the late 90s -- the next page to broadcast is the one that has incurred the largest flow time. This algorithm, however, does not work well for speeds close to 1. The authors propose a novel variant of this algorithm which tends to favor more recent requests and present an intricate analysis that employs a clever charging argument.
PODC 2009
PODC is a major conference that focuses on the theory of distributed computing.
"Tight Bounds for Clock Synchronization, co-authored by Christoph Lenzen, Thomas Locher, and Roger Wattenhofer, was the winner of the Best Paper award at PODC 2009.
The paper presents a novel clock synchronization algorithm and proves tight upper and lower bounds on the worst-case clock skew that may occur between any two participants in any given distributed system. More importantly, the worst-case clock skew between neighboring nodes is (asymptotically) at most a factor of two larger than the best possible bound. The algorithm minimizes the number and size of messages that need to be exchanged in a given time period and ensures that the clock values remain in an affine linear envelope of real time: a better bound on the accuracy with respect to real time cannot be achieved in the absence of an external timer.
"Max Registers, Counters, and Monotone Circuits", coauthored by James Aspnes, Hagit Attiya, and Keren Censor, was the winner of the Best Student Paper award at PODC 2009.
The paper introduces a method for constructing a max register, a linearizable, wait-free concurrent data structure that supports a write operation and a read operation that returns the largest value previously written. For a fixed m, an m-valued max register can be constructed from one-bit multi-writer multi-reader registers with a number of atomic register operations per write or read. that is logarithmic in m, while an unbounded max register with cost O(min(log v, n)) to read or write a value v, where n is the number of processes. As an application, we obtain a simple, linearizable, wait-free counter implementation. For polynomially-many increments, this implementation yields an exponential improvement on the best previously known upper bounds for exact and approximate counting.
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 (STOC), Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), Symposium on Computational Geometry, Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), and Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (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 continues to be very active. 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 and other NSF officers on several matters including recruiting for positions within CISE and restructuring the organization. The committee has also had discussions with DARPA officials on finding opportunities for theorists in DARPA projects.
In 2008, 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. The final report is highlighted on the CRA CCC website () as well on the CATCS site ().
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. The NSF has helped support part of these efforts.
SIGACT has revamped its website and has added a Twitter and Facebook presence and a blog for theory announcements as well as continuing the theorynt listserv, and conference software through the SIGACT server.
5. Summary of key issues that the membership of the SIGACT will have to deal with in the next 2-3 years
The SIGACT executive committee has explored ways to have STOC return to its role as a place to bring the theoretical computer science community together. A website with a proposal and comments () was established to continue the discussion.
The academic job market remains a serious concern as there were few tenure-track positions available at major research institutions forcing many young researchers into multiple postdocs.
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. We are seeing a turnover at every level from NSF director to the theory program director. None of these positions have yet been officially filled and we need members of the theory community willing to take leadership roles at the NSF.
SIGAda FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009 - June 2010
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:
Pascal Obry – Pascal has been a long time user and promoter of Ada. He is an active member of Ada-France and has contributed many outstanding Ada components. These include AWS for web applications in Ada, template parsers for generating web pages and practically anything that needs be dynamically generated, Ada Posix binding for windows, and a multi-language style checker.
The Distinguished Service Award was awarded to Ricky E. “Ranger” Sward this year:
Ricky E. Sward – As the Vice Chair for Meetings and Conferences, Ranger was instrumental in organizing several highly technically and financially successful ACM SIGAda Conferences. He was elected as ACM SIGAda Chair due to his outstanding service to SIGAda. He has conducted state-of-the-art, popular tutorials at SIGAda conferences on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). He also presented important papers at SIGAda conferences on SOA and unmanned aircraft projects at the USAF Academy.
Significant Papers published in proceedings
This year’s conference included three outstanding keynote speeches. The keynote speakers presented on the following topics:
Richard Schmidt from Lockheed Martin – An Ada Retrospective: Developing Large, Mature, Reliable Systems
John Knight from the University of Virginia – Echo: A New Approach to Formal Verification Based on Ada
J. C. Smart from Raytheon – A Look at Ada from Both Sides Now
There were several outstanding papers in the conference this year with equally outstanding presentations. For example:
Use of SPARK in a Resource Constrained Embedded System by C. Loseby, P. C. Chapin, and C. Brandon from Vermont Technical College.
A Robotics API Dialect for Type-Safe Robots: Translating Myro to Ada by Alex S. Mentis from the US Military Academy at West Point.
Complementing Ada with Other Programming Languages by S. Tardieu and A. Polti from the Institut Télécom/Télécom ParisTech in Paris, France.
Distributed Container: A Design Pattern for Fault Tolerance and High Speed Data Exchange by T. Dinh from Northrop Grumman Corp. and S. Barkataki from California State University, Northridge.
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. 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 continued the decline in profits from the conference. We will continue to encourage our SIGAda members to participate in and to attend the conference.
In order to ensure the conference revenue is appropriate, the Chair and Treasurer have been examining the current fee structure and compensation policy for the SIGAda conference. We have established a clear policy that is fair and reasonable for attendees of the conference. The SIGAda 2010 conference registration chair has the responsibility to 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 continue to look for a replacement for the current Managing Editor because he has moved up to Vice Chair for Meetings and Conferences.
SIGAPP FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009- June 2010
Submitted by: Sung Shin, 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 - Sung Shin, South Dakota State University, USA
Vice Chair - Richard Chbeir, Bourgogne University, Dijon, France
Secretary – W. Eric Wong, University of Texas, USA
Treasurer - Lorie Liebrock, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, USA
Web Master - Hisham M. Haddad, Kennesaw State University, USA
ACM Program Coordinator, Irene Frawley, ACM HQ
Status of SIGAPP
The main event that took place within SIGAPP for this year was the Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) in Switzerland after taking place in Honolulu, Hawaii for 2009. 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.
SIGAPP’s website was redesigned in April 2010. This effort was supervised by Hisham Haddad, SIGAPP Webmaster, in April 2010. A logo design contest was announced in Fall 2009 for the design of a brand new SIGAPP logo. The contest resulted in a number of options, from which SIGAPP officers have selected the new logo that will be the official logo of SIGAPP. The logo will be integrated into the new website, and it will be used in other SIGAPP related materials such as the newsletter, SAC proceedings, and the Applied Computing Review.
I’m pleased to announce the reissuing of ACR (Applied Computing Review). ACR is the newsletter of ACM SIGAPP. It hasn’t been published since 2002 and has been strongly desired by the members of SIGAPP. We’re introducing it semi-annually in an electronic version. Once the format has stabilized, we’ll begin publishing quarterly electronically and in print. Ultimately, we want ACR to appear in the SCI (Science Citation Index). The first issue of ACR includes invited papers from world-renowned researchers and selected papers presented by prominent researchers and professionals from the Symposium on Applied Computing 2010 in Sierre, Switzerland. The selected papers have been extended, revised, and peer-reviewed again for publishing in ACR. ACR will serve as a platform for many new and promising ideas in the many fields of applied computing. The papers in this issue of ACR represent the current applied computing research trends.
The Student Travel Award Program continues to be successful in assisting SIGAPP student members in attending conferences sponsored by or in-cooperation with SIGAPP. 24 students were granted awards to attend SAC 2010, representing 14 countries. This was a bit less than last year, but we supported everyone who applied to the Travel Award Program. The allocated budget of these awards was increased compared to last year. We also implemented a Developing Countries Travel Award for researchers from developing countries who would otherwise have difficulty attending the SAC conference. For 2010, this award was used exclusively for students from developing countries but in 2011 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.
Status of SAC
The 25th Annual edition of SAC has marked another successful event for the Symposium on Applied Computing. This international gathering attracted over 490 attendees from over 70 countries. It was hosted and held on the campus of University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland (HES-SO) in Sierre, Switzerland, March 2010. The Monday Tutorial program offered 8 tutorials and attracted over 60 attendees. The program included coffee breaks and a social luncheon that took place in a nice historic restaurant located near the campus. The four-day technical program included over 340 presentations from forty tracks covering a wide range of topics on applied computing. The successful posters programs attracted over 80 posters that were presented over two sessions on Wednesday. Thanks to a great organizing committee, it was extremely successful. The number of SAC papers submitted was 1353, the highest ever, and the final acceptance rate for SAC 2010 is 26.9% for the overall track
For next year, SAC 2011 will be hosted on the campus of Tunghai University, located in Taichung, Taiwan, from March 21st to 25th, 2011. The website provides further details such as the symposium committee, technical tracks, and track chairs.
For the following year, SAC 2012 location has been decided. It will be held in Riva del Garda, conference center, Trento, Italy. The site was selected from three SAC host proposals received from Korea, Italy, and Portugal. There were no proposals for hosting SAC 2012 in the USA. SAC 2012 will be hosted by the Microsoft Research – University of Trento Centre for Computational and Systems Biology (CoSBi), in Trento, Italy.
Summary
1. Awards:
a. Distinguished Service to SAC – Sung Shin
b. Outstanding Service to SIGAPP - Barrett R. Bryant
c. Student Travel Awards - 24 awards granted, totaling $12,671.15
2. Significant papers on new areas in applied computing:
A number of new tracks were offered in SAC 2010. They include the tracks on Bioinformatics, Computer Forensics, Power-Aware Designed Optimization, Privacy on Web, and Applications of Evolutionary Computing.
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. SAC has always been wide open to new areas in applied computing.
4. Innovative programs which provide service to some part of your technical community:
Programs include the expansion of Student Travel Award Program for SIGAPP student members, and the initiation of Developing Countries Travel Award Program for students and faculty.
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:
Membership improvement, expansion of student travel awards, development of electronic newsletter, reissuing of ACR, and the development of a refereed journal in Applied Computing.
SIGARCH FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009- June 2010
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. Bill Dally of NVidia and Stanford University received the award in 2010, "For outstanding contributions to the architecture of interconnection networks and parallel computers.” 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 2010 award went to Andreas Moshovos of the University of Toronto, ‘for foundational contributions to the area of memory dependence prediction.’
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 sixth Influential ISCA Paper Award was presented to Dean Tullsen, Susan Eggers, and Hank Levy for their paper "Simultaneous Multithreading: Maximizing On-Chip Parallelism" which appeared in the proceedings of the 22nd ISCA (1995).
In 2009, SIGARCH and the ASPLOS co-sponsors (SIGPLAN and SIGOPS) approved the creation of an ASPLOS Best Paper Award, the first one of which was awarded in 2009. The Award is determined by a vote of the Program Committee, and announced at the conference. Starting in 2011, ASPLOS will also award an ‘Influential Paper Award,’ modeled after the award presented at ISCA.
In 2007 the ACM Awards Committee approved the establishment of the SIGARCH Distinguished Service Award, for ‘important service to the Computer Architecture community.’ The fourth recipient was Mary Jane Irwin of the Pennsylvania State University, who spent many years serving on the SIGARCH board/executive positions, and has represented SIGARCH's research community on national committees as well. Nominations each year are due February 15th, and can be sent to the SIGARCH Secretary/Treasurer at any time.
SIGARCH is a co-sponsor of the new Ken Kennedy Award. The ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award is awarded annually and recognizes substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and substantial community service or mentoring contributions. The award includes a $5,000 honorarium and the award recipient will be announced at the SC Conference. The recipient will give a presentation, normally technical, at the SC conference at which it is announced, or at an ACM or IEEE conference of the winner's choosing during the year following the announcement. The 2009 recipient of the Ken Kennedy Award was Francine Berman.
Four of the above awards, the Eckert-Mauchly Award, the Maurice Wilkes Award, the Influential ISCA Paper Award, and the SIGARCH Distinguished Service Award were presented at ISCA 2010 in St. Malo, France.
SIGARCH was fortunate to have its nominees selected for the ACM Athena Lecturer award in both 2009 and 2010. In 2009, Susan Eggers was nominated by SIGARCH, and received the award, giving her award lecture at PLDI 2010. In 2010, Mary Jane Irwin was nominated by SIGARCH, and received the award, giving her award lecture at ISCA 2010. This award is quite competitive and is a testament to the strength of the SIGARCH community that two of its members received the award in back-to-back years.
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 37th annual ISCA (ISCA 2010) was held in St. Malo, France. Andre Seznec was the General Chair and Uri Weiser and Ronny Ronen were Program Co-Chairs. ISCA 2011 will be held in San Jose, CA as a part of FCRC, with Qing Yang and Ravi Iyer as General Co-Chairs, and Antonio Gonzalez as Program Chair. The location of ISCA 2012 has not yet been finalized, but a site bid exists for Portland, OR.
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 2009 was in Portland, OR. SC 2010 will be held in New Orleans, LA.
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 2010 was held in Pittsburgh, PA, with Vikram Adve of Illinois serving as Program Chair and James Hoe of CMU serving as General Chairs. ASPLOS 2011 will be held in southern California with Rajiv Gupta serving as General Chair and Todd Mowry serving as Program Chair. ASPLOS 2012 will be held in London, UK with Tim Harris serving as General Chair and Michael Scott serving as Program Chair.
SIGARCH sponsors the International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS). ICS 2010 took place in Tsukuba, Japan. Taisuke Boku was the General Chair, and Hiroshi Nakashima and Avi Mendelson were the Program Co-Chairs. ICS 2011 will be held in Tucson, AZ, with David Lowenthal as General Chair and Sally McKee and Bronis R. de Supinski as Program Co-Chairs.
The nineteenth Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA 2010), jointly sponsored by SIGARCH and SIGACT, was held in Santorini, Greece in June. Friedham Meyer auf der Heide was General Chair and Cynthia Phillips was Program Chair. SPAA 2011 will be held in San Jose, CA as a part of FCRC.
SIGARCH is one-half co-sponsor of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing. Grid '09 was held in Banff, Colorado. Dieter Kranzimueller of LRU and LRZ, Germany, and Jill Kowalchuk of Cybera, Canada, were the General Co-Chairs, and Paul Lu of the University of Alberta was the Program Chair. Grid'10 will be held in Brussels, Belgium, with Neil P Chue Hong as General Chair and Laurent Lefevre as Program Chair.
SIGARCH is one-half cosponsor of the International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing. HPDC'10 was held in Chicago, IL in June. Kate Keahey and Salim Hariri were the General Co-Chairs, and Peter Dinda was the Program Chair. HPDC'11 will be held in San Jose, CA as part of FCRC, with Arthur Maccabe as General Chair and Douglas Thain as Program Chair.
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 took place in Raleigh, North Carolina in September. Sally McKee of Chalmers University and Martin Schulz of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory were the General Co-Chairs. Bronis R. de Supinski and Frank Mueller of North Carolina State University were the Program Co-Chairs. PACT 2010 will be held in Vienna, Austria, in September 2010 with Valentina Salapura as General Chair and Michael Gschwind and Jens Knoop as Program Co-Chairs.
SIGARCH is one-fourth co-sponsor of the Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems (ANCS). The fifth ANCS was held in Princeton, NJ in October of 2009. Peter Onufryk of IDT and K.K. Ramakrishnan of AT&T Labs were the General Co-Chairs, and Patrick Crowley of Washington University and John Wroclawski of USC were the Program Co-Chairs. ANCS 2010 will be held in La Jolla, CA, with Bill Lin as General Chair and Ravi Iyer and Jeffrey Mogul as Program Co-Chairs.
In 2007 SIGARCH was a founding co-sponsor of the International Symposium on Networks-on-Chips (NOCS). NoCS 2010 was held in May in Grenoble, France, with Luca Benini and Luca Carloni as Program Co-Chairs and Fabien Clermidy and Marcello Coppola as General Co-Chairs. NOCS 2011 will be held in Pittsburgh, PA in May, with Radu Marculescu and Mike Kishinevsky as General Co-Chairs, and Ran Ginosar and Karam Chatha as Program Co-Chairs.
SIGARCH also became a cosponsor of the International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC) in 2007. ICAC 2010 was held in Washington, DC in June. Manish Parashar of Rutgers was the General Chair and Renato Figueiredo and Emre Kiciman were the Program Co-Chairs. ICAC 2011 will be held in Karlsruhe, Germany, with Hartmut Schmeck and Wolfgang Rosenstiel as General Co-Chairs, and Tarek Abdelzaher and Joe Hellerstein as 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 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. 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 2010, SIGARCH matched NSF funding of $20K with matching funding from IEEE TCCA ($4.8K), and used these funds to support 79 applications for student travel grants. SIGARCH has now broadened travel grants to other SIGARCH-sponsored conferences, and has finalized the allocation to each conference, based on revenue increases to SIGARCH and the percentage sponsorship of the conference. The grants are restricted to student members of SIGARCH, following several votes of the SIGARCH membership. The allocation to each conference is set by dividing the travel grant budget by number of attendees, giving an extra 33%
allocation to international conferences, and a small additional budget (~10%) to ISCA as the flagship conference.
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 2009, the SC leadership requested $448,051 in funds for special projects related to the SC community. At final budgeting, $278,509 was spent on SC'09 special projects. For FY'10, $273,528 has been budgeted for SC special projects.
Publications
CAN (Computer Architecture News), SIGARCH's newsletter, is published 5 times a year. Of those five, the ISCA Proceedings form a special issue, and the ASPLOS Proceedings is likewise distributed as a special issue. The regular issues of the newsletter consist 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 based principally on workshops. Proceedings of SC, SPAA and ICS are available through the Member Plus program. In 2009, SIGARCH began offering a new electronic membership for regular members and students, at reduced cost with no proceedings mailed. Currently, 270 of SIGARCH's members have registered under the electronic membership option.
Finances
SIGARCH enjoys a healthy fund balance that is currently larger than the $2.2M fund balance required by the ACM for sponsorship of SIGARCH conferences for FY'11. The projected SIGARCH fund balance for FY'10 is $3,187,060. SIGARCH 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 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.
Bylaws
In 2008 the SIGARCH Chair submitted proposed changes to the SIGARCH Bylaws, making leadership positions gender-neutral, and adding the role and title of the SIGARCH Information Director. The Bylaw changes were approved in 2009.
Membership
SIGARCH membership was declining gradually since 1999, dropping from 1452 in 2005 to 1344 in 2009, but has started to recover, increasing by 45 to 1389 in 2010. SIGARCH's membership retention rate was the highest among all of ACM's SIGs in 2007, at 80%, with all three of the membership categories (SIG-only members, student, and professional members) all gradually increasing last year. The new electronic-only membership, available at reduced cost, will likely help to grow membership. Last year, 270 of SIGARCH's members became electronic-only members. ISCA, SIGARCH's flagship conference, continues to be healthy and show attendance near the top of historical levels.
Innovative Programs
SIGARCH supports child care and companion support travel programs to conferences, although participation since approval of these programs has been low. Reimbursement for child care is capped at $1000 per conference. SIGARCH has also formalized funding levels for its travel grant program, and now provides a level of support to all conferences that SIGARCH sponsors at a 33% level or higher, which previously was only provided to the ISCA and ASPLOS conferences. At ISCA 2010, SIGARCH partnered with the National Science Foundation and IEEE to provide $44,500 total in student travel grants ($20,000 of which came from SIGARCH), providing 79 total awards to students. SIGARCH awarded a total of $70K in student travel across all conferences in 2010. Also in 2010, SIGARCH co-sponsored (with Microsoft Research) the ACM Turing Lecture held at ISCA 2010, with each institution contributing $20K for the lecture and banquet.
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’10 Annual Report
July 2009 - June 2010
Submitted by: Maria Gini, Past 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.
Activities during 2009/2010:
1. Elections
SIGART's elections were held in 2010, with the following candidates:
Chair:
Yolanda Gil (USC/ISI)
Subbarao Kambhampati (Arizona State University)
Vice Chair:
Kevin Daimi (University of Detroit Mercy)
Qiang Yang (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
Secretary/Treasurer:
Gautam Biswas (Vanderbilt University)
Christopher H. Brooks (University of San Francisco)
The officers elected (Yolanda Gil, Qiang Yang, and Gautam Biswas) have plans for expanding the visibility and reach of SIGART, in particular in the Far East. Having the Vice-Chair from that region will greatly improve the ability of SIGART to reach the growing community there.
2. Awards
The ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award is an annual award for excellence in research in the area of autonomous agents.
The 2010 ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award recipients are Prof. Jonathan Gratch and Prof. Stacy Marsella from the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies, who share the award for their significant and sustained contributions to autonomous agents and multiagent systems in the area of virtual agents, in particular in emotion modeling and social simulation. Their agent models have vastly contributed to the field of embodied conversational agents. Their work balances theoretical and engineering achievements, allowing the understanding of the factors and processes underlying how emotion affects behaviors. They have also proposed a novel way to validate computational models of human emotions. Their work has been applied to large projects in multiple application domains such as interactive drama and serious games.
3. Conferences
SIGART co-sponsored the following conferences:
ASE (Automated Software Engineering, November 2009, Auckland, New Zealand), IUI (Intelligent User Interfaces, February 2010, Hong Kong) HRI (Human Robot Interaction, March 2010, Osaka, Japan), IAT (Intelligent Agent Technology, September 2009, Milan, Italy), and KCAP (Knowledge Capture, September 2009, Redondo Beach, California)
In addition, SIGART cooperated with many international conferences, such as:
AAMAS (Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, May 2010, Toronto, Canada), BIOSTEC (Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies, January 2010, Valencia, Spain), FDG (Foundations of Digital Games, June 2010, Monterey, California), ICAART (Agents and Artificial Intelligence, January 2010, Valencia, Spain), ICEC (Electronic Commerce, August 2009, Taipei, Taiwan), IEA/AIE (Industrial & Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence & Expert Systems, June 2010, Cordoba, Spain), IVA (Intelligent Virtual Agents, September 2009, Amsterdam, Netherlands), LCTES (Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems, April 2010, Stockholm, Sweden) PerMIS (Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems, September 2009, Gaithersburg, MD), RuleML (RuleML Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications, November 2009, Las Vegas, Nevada), SASO (Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, September 2009, San Francisco, California), SMART GRAPHICS (June 2010, Banff, Canada)
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 $10,000 per conference, depending on the conference size. Funding students is a good way of ensuring long term growth and vitality of the AI community and a good investment for the future.
b. SIGART co-sponsored, with AAAI, the annual SIGART/AAAI Doctoral Consortium. The Doctoral Consortium, held in conjunction with the 2009 IJCAI conference, provided 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 IJCAI conference. Notice that there was no AAAI conference in 2009, since IJCAI was held in the USA.
5. Plans for the future
* Increase services for members, specifically adding contents to the Web page and expanding the activities and visibility of SIGART in particular in the Far East.
* Continue supporting communities related to AI in a broad sense. SIGART will continue 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 will increase the visibility of SIGART and help the growth of new communities.
* Improve connections with the AI societies in other countries.
SIGBED FY’10 ANNUAL REPORT
July 2009 - June 2010
Submitted by: Marilyn Wolf, Chair
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 2009, the recipient of the Frank Anger Memorial ACM SIGBED/SIGSOFT Student Award was Timothy Hnat (University of Virginia).
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 2009 award went to Kai Lampka, Simon Perathoner, and Lothar Thiele for “Analytic real-time analysis and timed automata: a hybrid method for analyzing embedded real-time systems.”
Significant papers on new areas that were published in proceedings
We consider the EMSOFT best paper 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: Prabhal Dutta, Thomas Schmid, and Mani Srivastava, “High-resolution, low-power time synchronization an oxymoron no more.”
Innovative programs which provide service to some part of your technical community
We used the fall 2009 SGB meeting to discuss closer collaboration between SIGSOFT and SIGBED. The two SIGs are working to have a leading researcher from each field speak at the conference of the other field. Software engineering and embedded computing have strong common technical interests but are largely distinct communities with different bodies of knowledge.
SIGBED now has two major federated conferences: CPS Week in the spring [HSCC, ICCPS, IPSN, LCTES, RTAS] and ES Week [EMSOFT, CODES+ISSS, CASES] in the fall. These conferences together cover the waterfront of embedded computing and give members world-class venues in which to discuss their work. CPS Week initiated a new conference, the International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS). SIGBED also co-sponsors other more specialized conferences such as the International Conference on Distributed Smart Cameras.
The SIGBED review, edited by Oleg Sokolsky of University of Pennsylvania, provides a forum for technical contributions by members as well as lists of upcoming events.
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
We introduced low student membership fees to the SIG to encourage student members. We started a diversity workshop at ES Week 2010 to help nurture a more diverse set of researchers and practitioners in the field.
SIGCAS FY’10 ANNUAL REPORT
July 2009 - June 2010
Submitted by: Flo Appel, SIGCAS Chair
1. Awards
SIGCAS’ 2009 award recipients were Cem Kaner, “Making A Difference”, presented at ACM’s Computers, Freedom & Privacy Conference; and Flo Appel “Outstanding Service”, presented at her
home institution of Saint Xavier University. The nomination process for the 2010 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 does not sponsor our 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: Our very popular Birds of a Feather (BOF) session, held at the past 3-4 SIGCSE Symposia, provides us with a formal and visible presence for a population that is interested in the work of SIGCAS. And, we continue to present SIGCAS panels, workshops and tutorials at CCSC conferences (Consortium for Computer Science in Colleges).
SIGCAS has also continued its collegial relationship with the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology (INSEIT), and has again published (in the December 2009 Computers & Society) a collection of INSEIT (CEPE) conference papers. The issue was guest-edited by SIGCAS-INSEIT member Herman Tavani. We will also be publishing a special issue of Computers & Society this coming September (2010) in which we highlight a collection of papers from the 2010 Ethicomp Conference, an international computer ethics biennial.
Additionally, two promising collaborations are in process:
• This past year, we have been involved in discussions with the ACM’s Committee on Professional Ethics (CPE) about the possibility of collaborating on a pre-conference mini-conference at the March 2011 SIGCSE Symposium. We have been in contact with the SIGCSE Symposium leadership regarding space availability for this event. SIGCAS members Don Gotterbarn & Keith Miller are already committed to delivering a computer ethics pedagogy workshop through CPE as part of this effort.
• We have been approached by IEEE’S Society for the Social Impact of Technology (SSIT) to collaborate with them on their 2011 ISTAS conference, currently scheduled for May 2011 in Chicago. We would like to take our relationship with SSIT to a higher level, and see this as an important opportunity. However, we understand that the ACM-IEEE relationship is a bit complex, so we will be consulting with SIG services to ensure that we proceed in accordance with ACM protocol.
Carol Spradling from Northwest Missouri University continues in the capacity of SIGCAS representative to the ACM Education Council, while Alan Rea from the University of Minnesota represents SIGCAS on the USACM. SIGCAS member Don Gotterbarn serves as the ACM representative to IFIP’s TC9 Group on computers and society. All of these dedicated SIGCAS members provide reports to the SIGCAS community through our Computers & Society newsletter.
5. Brief summary of key issues that the SIG membership will have to deal with in the next 2-3 years.
July 2011 will signal the arrival of new SIGCAS leadership, resulting from the 2011 election. Flo Appel will be stepping down from her position of Chair and will not seek re-election, and it is unclear at this time whether the other Executive Committee members will seek re-election. Diana Burley, George Washington University, will be completing her first 3-year term as Vice-Chair; Mark Perry, University of Western Ontario, will be completing his second 3-year term as Executive Committee Member-at-large. Therefore, it is essential that new leadership continue to be nurtured and that the new officers are able to “hit the ground running.”
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 a sustained way in these liaisons.
We have been successful in recruiting and retaining a talented and effective editorial board, whose members work well together and continue to work on the content, format and character of the newsletter. Timely publication of the newsletter has been achieved. However, we do not have an editorial board member yet willing to step forward as editor-in-chief, and this puts an undue burden on the SIG leadership to edit and produce the newsletter every quarter. Our newsletter, online since 2002, must be stabilized from the perspective of both its editorial board and its publication. We continue to discuss plans to leverage the online character of the newsletter.
Our website requires ongoing work to become more interactive, and has proven to be a valuable resource. It has been 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.
SIGCHI FY’10 ANNUAL REPORT
July 2009 - June 2010
Submitted by Gerrit C. van der Veer, President
1. Awards
1.1 SIGCHI made the following awards in 2009-2010:
• Lifetime Achievement Award: Lucy Suchman
• Lifetime Achievement in Practice: Karen Holtzblatt
• CHI Academy: Susanne Bodker, Mary Czerwinski, Austin Henderson, David Kieras, Arnie Lund, Larry Tesler, Shumin Zhai
• Social Impact: Award: Ben Bederson, Allison Druin
• Lifetime Service Award: Mary Czerwinski
1.2 SIGCHI Conference awards:
• "Best of CHI Awards for Papers":
How does search behavior change as search becomes more difficult?
Anne Aula, Rehan M. Khan, Zhiwei Guan, Google, USA
The Tower of Babel Meets Web 2.0: User-Generated Content and its Applications in a Multilingual Context
Brent Hecht, Northwestern University, USA
Darren Gergle, Northwestern University, USA
Occlusion-Aware Interfaces
Daniel Vogel, University of Toronto, Mount Allison University, Canada
Ravin Balakrishnan, University of Toronto, Canada
Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface
Chris Harrison, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Desney Tan, Dan Morris, Microsoft Research, USA
Avaaj Otalo | A Field Study of an Interactive Voice Forum for Small Farmers in Rural India
Neil Patel, Stanford University, USA
Deepti Chittamuru, University of California at Berkeley, USA
Anupam Jain, IBM India Research Laboratory, India
Paresh Dave, Development Support Center, India
Tapan S. Parikh, University of California at Berkeley, USA
Lumino: Tangible Blocks for Tabletop Computers Based on Glass Fiber Bundles
Patrick Baudisch, Torsten Becker, Frederik Rudeck, Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany
Feminist HCI: Taking Stock and Outlining an Agenda for Design
Shaowen Bardzell, Indiana University, USA
Prefab: Implementing Advanced Behaviors Using Pixel-Based Reverse Engineering of Interface Structure
Morgan Dixon, James Fogarty, University of Washington, USA
Mobilizing Health Workers in Rural India
Divya Ramachandran, John Canny, University of California, at Berkeley, USA
Prabhu Dutta Das, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communications Technology, India
Edward Cutrell, Microsoft Research India, India
Mapping the Landscape of Sustainable HCI
Carl DiSalvo, Georgia Tech, USA
Phoebe Sengers, Hrönn Brynjarsdóttir, Cornell University, USA
The Design of Eco-Feedback Technology
Jon Froehlich, Leah Findlater, James Landay, University of Washington, USA
Useful Junk? The Effects of Visual Embellishment on Comprehension and Memorability of Charts
Scott Bateman, Regan L. Mandryk, Carl Gutwin,
Aaron Genest, David McDine, Christopher Brooks, University of Saskatchewan, Canada
• Best of CHI Awards for Notes:
Note | A Longitudinal Study of How Highlighting Web Content Change Affects People’s Web Interactions
Jaime Teevan, Susan T. Dumais, Daniel J. Liebling, Microsoft Research, USA
Note | Social Network Activity and Social Well-Being
Moira Burke, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Cameron Marlow, Thomas Lento, Facebook, USA
2. Significant Papers on new areas that were published in proceedings
See 1.2
3. Significant programs that provided a springboard for further technical efforts
3.1. Starting work on a SIGCHI Sponsored Regional Workshop for CHI Asia
Purposes
In order to better anticipate the possibility of SIGCHI events (including the CHI conference) in Asia, we need to have a clearer understanding of the actuality of HCI development in Asian countries. Capturing an understanding of HCI knowledge and practice that exists in Asia would be useful in formulating a strategy for using SIGCHI resources with clear targets to help Asian HCI communities mature and in building/strengthening ties with them.
Aiming at this, we are organizing a SIGCHI sponsored Workshop on HCI in Asia (a three-day event to be held in Beijing, China) which will attempt to better know about the HCI situations in Asian countries in the following aspects:
• The current status of HCI development in academia, industry, education, organizations etc.
• The problems and challenges faced in HCI development in Asian communities.
• Where help from external bodies like SIGCHI can make a difference and how
• How SIGCHI can better involve local HCI communities in the global SIGCHI community and help them mature in Asia - specifically what are the areas SIGCHI needs to work on with priority and what are the feasible approaches and achievable goals?
The results of this workshop will also help SIGCHI leadership to have a direct contact with the Asian HCI communities and their leaders and get familiar with them, so that better and close working relationships could be developed with ease later on.
Workshop Participants
This is not an open conference, but a targeted workshop. We will invite representatives from Asian countries/regions (21) and from the SIGCHI committee (6), totaling 27, to attend the workshop. The following represents our current thinking about the distribution of the invited participants:
• 1 for each country/region, 2 for countries/regions with bigger HCI community, 5 for the host country China
• Representing local SIGCHI chapters or HCI organizations if possible
• Representing different disciplines: computer science, design, psychology, ergonomics etc.
Logistics and Venue
The workshop will be held in Beijing, China, March 25-27th, 2011. This is shortly after the ACM SIGCHI Sponsored CSCW 2011 conference in Hangzhou, and will attempt to incorporate lessons learned from that event. SIGCHI has budgeted approximately $50K for this event to cover travel and meeting expenses for the participants.
Expected Outcome
• A report on the state of the HCI field in the Asian region.
• Key areas identified to be worked on by SIGCHI towards staging future SIGCHI events in Asia and the initial action plans for such events.
Sponsorship
ACM SIGCHI is the primary sponsor. Additional support is being solicited from CCF (Chinese Computer Federation), and from the local chapter SIGCHI China.
3.2 CHI Communities
What are they?
Communities are collections of people that are associated with SIGCHI who share a common interest. Communities may be geographic (many local SIGs would want to become a community) or they may be topical (UIST, CSCW, design, games, health care etc.) A community is a collection of people who, by banding together, can speak with a common voice within SIGCHI; can more effectively organize the activities that are of interest to them; and can obtain services that support their activities.
How are the communities benefited?
Identity and organization
The first thing that a community provides is an identity and an organizational structure. This structure may be very lightweight but it allows the community to elect leaders who can help direct activities, rally involvement and speak for the community.
Infrastructure
SIGCHI can provide a wide range of infrastructure services to communities that can simplify their organization and activities. Potentially these services could include mailing/membership list management, elections, dues collection, room scheduling at CHI, badge ribbons, activities into conference program, web hosting, blogs, wikis, conference organization assistance and budgetary/financial services.
Influence
Communities can also be a way of exerting influence on SIGCHI so that their voices do not get drowned out in the larger organization. A community may have a leader who can speak for that community. As communities become larger they could potentially have additional influence such as: nomination of CHI conference associate chairs, special conference venues targeted to particular interests, nominations of TOCHI editors, and adjunct chairs who serve on the SIGCHI on the executive committee.
How is SIGCHI benefited?
SIGCHI would be better able to serve its increasingly diverse membership. Communities and their membership would help SIGCHI recognize, adapt too and facilitate new trends spawned from the grass-roots of our membership. Communities can also serve as a great place to groom the next generation of leadership for the larger organization.
How are communities formed?
Communities are formed by ordinary members of SIGCHI banding together around an issue, interest, or location and then inviting others to join them. As a community grows, the infrastructure and influence of that community can grow with it.
Procedures
Forming a Community
• Web-based mechanism for groups of SIGCHI members to form new communities
• 5 SIGCHI members are required to form a community with one of these designated as temporary chair
• Membership is not limited to SIGCHI members, but only SIGCHI members can vote.
• New communities specify a name and a one paragraph mission statement.
• Final approval for new communities rests with the SIGCHI Executive Committee in negotiation with the organizers.
Community Governance
• In general, communities are responsible for their own functions and interests; however, ultimate fiscal and procedural authority rests with the SIGCHI Executive Committee.
• At minimum a community should have a chair who is elected (after a short term under the temporary chair designated at community creation). A community can then define its own officer structure including additional elected and/or appointed positions.
• Elections are web-based among SIGCHI members of the community and are held every two years.
• An individual can only be a voting member of at most 5 communities. However, any individual can be an affiliate member of as many communities as they want. The purpose of the voting member limit is to ensure that voting members are actively engaged in the community.
• A community is dissolved when it goes for more than 12 months with fewer than 5 voting members.
• Non-SIGCHI members of a community can be removed with cause by the community chair or other body of community officers.
Potential Services to Communities
• At minimum communities are provided with web-based elections, an email list to all members (optionally moderated), and a web site for posting community-based information.
• Future services may include o Social media resources such as: wiki, blog, twitter feed . . .
o Resources for organizing conferences and workshops
o Easy surveys of members
• Future services to large communities may include o Influence over CHI conference events
o Influence over SIGCHI related publications such as interactions and TOCHI
o Budgetary assistance from SIGCHI
o Membership on the SIGCHI Executive Committee
Relationship between Communities and Specialized Conferences
• It is hoped that the specialized conferences sponsored by SIGCHI will be each be backed by a CHI Community.
• The associated community will provide the year-to-year oversight of the conference and its finances and policies. This will give SIGCHI an ongoing point of contact for conferences.
• The associated community will also give its members election and discussion opportunities as part of the governance of their conference.
Relationship between Communities and Local Chapters
• Local chapters can become communities but need not do so.
• For many local chapters it is hoped that the communities mechanism will provide services and infrastructure that will assist in community activities.
• However, local chapters that have independent organization and infrastructure may decide that the communities mechanism is not helpful to them.
Relationship between CHI Conference Communities and SIGCHI Communities
• CHI Conference communities have offered subgroups of attendees with opportunities to influence the conference.
• The current model for CHI Conference communities provides little year-to-year organizational structure to maintain the vibrancy of their initiatives.
• It is hoped that SIGCHI Communities will provide the ongoing volunteer structure behind the role currently played by CHI Conference communities.
• Potentially, new CHI Conference communities will emerge from highly successful SIGCHI communities.
4. Innovative programs which provide service to some part of our technical community
We started this year with a systematic focus on HCI aspects in relation to public policy. To this end we appointed an Adjunct Chair for Public Policy, Jonathan Lazar, with who we developed our task vision:
Public policy increasingly plays a role in influencing the work that we do as HCI researchers, interaction designers, and practitioners. Public policy is a broad term that includes both government policy but also policy coming from non-governmental organizations such as standards bodies. While the government policies are sometimes limited to a single country, and sometimes concern more complex structures (e.g. the European Union), the community of researchers and designers who inform policy makers is worldwide, creating interface and interaction standards that are adopted by governments around the world. Two examples of well-known CHI policy topics are (1) how to facilitate fair and accurate voting (what types of interfaces, what types of voting machines), and (2) what types of web-based information should be legally required to be accessible for people with disabilities. The two examples provide a stark contrast: HCI experts were involved in accessibility policies from the beginning, driving the development of international standards which were then adopted (in modified form) by most governments around the world. HCI experts were not greatly involved in voting machine usability until after the topic came to the forefront of public policy discussions, and the HCI community has still not gotten the attention of policymakers, or made an impact in the same way that those who study voting machine security have gotten. Other potential topics related to public policy and interaction design include the use of interfaces that cause distracted driving, government requirements for multi-lingual web sites, end-user licensing agreements, privacy controls in interfaces, interfaces (and guidelines and processes) for usable e-government information, and interfaces on e-books used in education.
Good design and good research should be the driving force behind these decisions, not just commercial values and local politics. Members of the SIGCHI community are perfectly positioned to offer grounded advice to public policymakers about how people interact with technology, and thus directly affect how people interact with devices, applications and services in the future. The goals of SIGCHI related to public policy are to increase awareness, dissemination of information, and involvement of community members in policy-related activities.
In this first year our VC has been in place only for the final period. So far the following actions were taken:
• Approve short statement about CHI public policy and add to SIGCHI web site
• Create list server for CHI Public Policy (request submitted, thanks to Fred)
• Plan on holding 3 public policy-related events at CHI 2011
• Started to form a committee of international representatives related to CHI policy issues
• Responded with suggestions to the USACM request for comments on the National Academies Report
5 Summary of key issue that the membership of SIGCHI will deal with in the next 2-3 years
We have decided to develop a consistent SIGCHI vision on HCI Education issues, and we recently appointed a Vice Chair for Education, Jenifer Preece.
At this moment we are drafting our vision statement:
Developing and promoting the teaching of HCI is an important endeavour, and one that the SIGCHI EC is deeply committed to. We construct education broadly: from school, undergraduate and graduate education to continued learning for practitioners and researchers who are already established in careers. We also see the development of networks of information and people who can promote, share and contribute to the education of HCI as a field as central to our mission.
We propose the formation of an Education Committee associated with the SIGCHI Executive Committee. The SIGCHI Education Committee shall comprise committee members from across the world who have a proven record for innovative contributions to HCI education. These could include: leadership of a group, writing an influential text or paper, innovative teaching, supervision of exemplary student work, voluntary service to HCI education at university, school, company or non-profit organization, and more.
The aim of the committee will be to promote innovative HCI education practices by sharing ideas, collaborating on projects, holding workshops etc. We recognize that there have been several previous attempts hosted by SIGCHI to promote HCI Education, which have faltered through lack of interest among researchers. Since these are people who often have the most creative ideas we will try to draw them in to creative discussion and brain storming. We also note that it is not only SGCHI that has struggled to foster HCI Education. Similar groups have been hosted by INTERACT, UPA and national societies. Experience suggests that efforts which have focused on creating repositories of educational material have floundered; we suggest that this is because material has been hard to collect, difficult to curate effectively and suffers from being quickly out-dated in our fast-moving discipline.
We propose that this committee will not focus on developing repositories of syllabi, but will focus on providing social venues for leading researchers and practitioners to share ideas. Initially we will focus on sharing ideas through dynamic brainstorming, the collection of the most exemplary student projects as models for others, and develop insights from interviews with the faculty and students that developed them. Brainstorming to identify exemplary work and inspire the SIGCHI to place more value on HCI Education will be the sole short-term aim of the committee. We will also investigate the potential for social media infrastructures to be a method for reaching out to our constituencies for input. This will likely take two to three years.
Once we have engaged the SIGCHI Community will we then start to think about longer term goals that might include national and international projects, supported by collaborative funding between agencies in different countries. Exactly how we will proceed will depend on the ideas provided by the SIGCHI community.
The SIGCHI Adjunct Chair for HCI Education will work on developing a committee of international representatives familiar with issues related to HCI Education, to be called the SIGCHI HCI Education Committee. We acknowledge that local representatives are most qualified to deal with local issues in their own countries, states and institutions. Therefore, for countries with already-existing groups, the chair of the existing group will be considered as a potential
invitee to serve on this international committee. This process will start immediately with the help of the SIGCHI VP.
Much of the committee’s activities will be conducted using new communications technologies but we suggest that there should be an annual meeting, hosted and sponsored partly by ACM and partly by the funding body of the host country. The first of these meetings would be in the USA partially hosted by NSF funding.
SIGCOMM FY’10 ANNUAL REPORT
July 2009 - June 2010
Submitted by: Bruce Davie, Chair
SIGCOMM continues to be a healthy and vibrant SIG. There are a number of highlights in the past year.
SIGCOMM held elections in June 2009, leading to the election of Bruce Davie as the new chair, and re-election of Henning Schulzrinne as Vice-Chair and Tilman Wolf as Secretary/Treasurer. There were no changes to the appointed members of the EC, but an effort was undertaken to fill the position of Education Director, which had been vacant for some time. After an open call, the position was filled by Olivier Bonaventure, who has been quick to start assembling a group of advisors and putting together web resources for educators teaching networking-related courses.
The EC has received considerable feedback on the organization of the SIGCOMM conference in the last 2 years, and this prompted a series of discussions on how conference oversight may be improved. As a result, this year a new Technical Steering Committee (TSC) was created after extensive discussion with the community. The TSC has responsibility for selecting PC chairs, crafting policies related to the PC operation and technical program, and providing a repository of knowledge about the technical aspects of the conference. Administrative and fiscal responsibility for the conference continues to reside with the SIGCOMM EC. Six members have been appointed to the TSC, including three past PC chairs, and the TSC has selected PC chairs for the 2011 conference.
The SIGCOMM newsletter, Computer Communications Review, continues to thrive as a journal with high quality and timely articles under S. Keshav's editorial guidance. An online submission and review system has been established, allowing authors and reviewers to interact with each other anonymously before a paper acceptance decision is made. This has substantially improved authors' perception of the review process and simultaneously improved the paper quality. Acceptance rates for the newsletter are around 20%, on par with top-tier conferences. Turnaround time is quite a lot better than many journals.
SIGCOMM became an approved nominating organization for the Research Highlights section of CACM. We are asking PC chairs from all of our sponsored conferences to submit the most suitable papers for consideration, and at this point we have submitted two nominations to the CACM editors.
With respect to awards, SIGCOMM has recognized Radia Perlman with the SIGCOMM award for lifetime achievement; she will receive the award and present a keynote talk at the annual SIGCOMM conference in August 2010 in New Delhi. SIGCOMM also has recognized Binbin Chen, Ziling Zhou, Yuda Zhao and Haifeng Yu from the National University of Singapore for the best paper in that conference, "Efficient Error Estimating Coding: Feasibility and Applications". Two "Test of Time" awards will also be given at the conference for the best papers with long-lasting impact from 10-12 years ago. Those papers are both from the SIGCOMM conference of 1999: Griffin, T. G. and Wilfong, G., "An analysis of BGP convergence properties" and Faloutsos, M., Faloutsos, P., and Faloutsos, C., "On power-law relationships of the Internet topology."
SIGCOMM has also recognized Ratul Mahajan with its Rising Star award; he received his award and delivered a keynote address at the CoNEXT conference held in December 2009 in Rome.
Further, four SIGCOMM members were recognized as ACM Fellows: Bruce Davie, Jeffrey A. Dean, Farnam Jahanian, and John Chi-Shing Lui. Five SIGCOMM members were made Distinguished Members of ACM: Mark Crovella, Richard P. Draves, Venkata N. Padmanabhan, Ramon C. Puigjaner and Prashant Shenoy.
In the prior year, the SIG had decided to add its support to ACM-W's scholarship program, and the first recipient of this award, Mariyam Mirza from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, attended the 2009 SIGCOMM conference in Barcelona. SIGCOMM's support augments the ACM-W scholarship for any recipient who chooses to attend a SIGCOMM-sponsored or in-cooperation conference or workshop, covering full costs of travel, lodging, and conference registration. In addition, SIGCOMM helps find informal mentors for ACM-W award winners to interact with at the conference.
SIGCOMM continues its geodiversity travel grants: for five years now 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), enabling them to travel to New Delhi for the 2010 SIGCOMM conference. The SIG has also increased its financial support for student travel grants to both the flagship conference and to CoNEXT.
The CoNEXT conference is growing into a high-quality, general networking conference of comparable quality to the SIGCOMM conference. With a smaller audience than SIGCOMM, it can be a little more interactive, and has had successful panel sessions and student workshops. CoNEXT 2010 will be held in December in Philadelphia. We are planning an industry session at the conference as part of the SIG's efforts to improve the level of interaction among industrial and academic participants in our community.
With fairly stable membership and a solid financial position, the largest problem faced by the SIG in the next few years may well be the extreme selectivity of the flagship conference (which has an acceptance rate around 10%). Our approach to tackling that problem has several components:
- attempting to build CoNext up to a level that it as seen as a peer conference to the Sigcomm conference
- ensuring high quality program committees and transparency in their operation, something we hope the TSC can facilitate
- fostering journal publication as an alternative to the flagship conference.
To the latter point, the SIG has committed to provide financial support to the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking to defray some of the page costs of longer papers.
Finally, the SIGCOMM main conference continues to thrive. In keeping with ACM's mission of becoming a more truly global organization, we are holding our flagship conference outside North America two years out of three. After a successful 2009 edition in Barcelona, SIGCOMM 2010 will take place in New Delhi, India. SIGCOMM 2011 returns to North America, with Toronto being the host city.
SIGCSE FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009- June 2010
Submitted by: Barbara Boucher Owens, Past Chair
ACM assigns the responsibility for each SIG’s Annual Chair’s Report to the immediate past chair when a new Chair has just assumed the office. Renée McCauley as the new chair has only to read this one!
First of all, let me express my deepest appreciation to the 2007-2010 SIGCSE Board. Each and every one of the members performed with exceptional energy, skill and thoughtfulness. The members of that Board were the Executive Committee consisting of Vice-Chair Alison Young (Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology, New Zealand), Secretary Dan Joyce (Villanova University), Treasurer Renée McCauley (College of Charleston), and Immediate Past Chair Henry Walker (Grinnell College). The At-Large Members were Doug Baldwin (SUNY Geneseo), Wanda Dann (Carnegie Mellon) and Ingrid Russell (University of Hartford). Without their energy, and the countless hours they and other volunteers have given to the organization none of the work would have been possible.
Unlike my previous Chair’s Reports, this is a three-part report. Part I consists largely of a lengthy excerpt from my report on the Viability Study published in the June 2010 SIGCSE Bulletin. Part II resembles a standard Chair’s Report and looks at the highlights of 2009-2010. Part III addresses the challenges faced by the 2010-2013 SIGCSE Board as I see them.
Part I – SIGCSE Viability
Each SIG must undergo a Viability Study every four years, and the SGB (SIG Governing Board which is comprised of the chairs of each ACM Special Interest Group) votes on whether to deem the SIG viable for the next four years. This was the year for SIGCSE to be assessed and we are now assessed as viable until the next review in 2014.
The SGB asked each SIG to reflect on its goals and how well the SIG met those goals.
Begin quote: “What did I say?
Let me first point out that the downturn in the economy did affect SIGCSE. Our financial report wasn’t as rosy as the one Henry gave in 2006. But listening to the reports of other SIGs and reflecting on all that SIGCSE does we are a very healthy SIG and we have much to be proud of.
SLIDE 1: FINANCES. SIGCSE has a basically healthy $470,000 fund balance that is comfortably better than the minimum required by ACM. However, it was down almost $50,000 from the year before.
Some of the specific reasons for our shortfall were due to quirks in accounting and the timing of when income and expenses from conferences were posted. SIGCSE incurred one-time large production costs by moving from its old Bulletin, inroads, to the new high quality ACM magazine, Inroads. The electronic version of the newsletter as the Bulletin, and the shorted page count of the new magazine with electronic conference proceedings will reduce our mailing costs in the future. A third area contributing to the decrease in our fund balance was the expense of volunteer travel. SIGCSE’s growing international presence will make this a continuing need.
SLIDE 2: MEMBER BENEFITS – briefly tons of them!
We have 2600 members who receive the proceedings of our 3 annual conferences on CD. Those conferences are the 1200-attendee US hosted Symposium, the ~200 attendee non-US ITiCSE Conference and the ~50 attendee research conference (ICER workshop)
Through 2009, we had a quarterly newsletter (which included 1 issue Symposium proceedings, 3 magazine style including columns, edited articles, etc. and peer reviewed papers from ITiCSE working groups) SIGCSE received income from the ACM digital library based on the number of its articles that were accessed. In 2009 SIGCSE received $56,000 income from the DL. SIGCSE members are eligible to apply for small research grants in learning and teaching. Our able volunteers oversee our very active member list servs – e.g. members. has 1200 members who have opted in for discussions on all aspects of CS Ed
SLIDES 3-5: GOALS Our mission states that SIGCSE is a “forum for educators to discuss issues related to the development, implementation, and/or evaluation of computing programs, curricula, and courses, as well as syllabi, laboratories, and other elements of teaching and pedagogy."
We believe that SIGCSE continues to be perceived as the premier organization for computing education. SIGCSE primarily serves post-secondary Computer Science teaching faculty and Computer Science education research faculty with many of its activities focused on making CS1 and CS2 effective. SIGCSE secondarily serves pre-college faculty through our relationship with the Computer Science Teachers Association, CSTA and with other post-secondary teaching faculty in related computing disciplines
SIGCSE has a goal to extend the reach and influence of Computing Education. A majority of the members on ACM Education committees are or have been SIGCSE officers or large conference leadership. SIGCSE also aims to extend its influence beyond US Computer Science through international conferences including ITiCSE and the ICER workshop which alternated being held abroad with the US. SIGCSE received an NSF grant in conjunction with CSTA.
SIGCSE holds in cooperation status with many conferences, in the US and internationally including the CCSC conferences, the Australasian, New Zealand, Koli Calling, AAAI.
SIGCSE funds SIGCSE presenters to take conference presentations to regional conferences, especially CCSC. SIGCSE was and continues to be a major player in the NSF funded Computing Education Summit. There continues to be a Broadening Participation in Computing thread at SIGCSE Conferences, with the goal to increase interest in computing. Some of those activities include a Kids Camp at Symposium, and a Doctoral Symposium. Our members have leadership roles in NCWIT, NSF BPC projects, CPATH
SIGCSE provides continuing education members at Symposia where the number of workshops continues to grow, with 39 offered in 2010. SIGCSE also sponsors workshops for both new faculty and for department chairs.
Bottom line – SIGCSE is not only viable, it is vibrant.” End quote SIGCSE Bulletin, Vol.42, issue 2, p.4.
Part II – 2009-2010 Highlights
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, 2010. Sally Fincher, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, received the Outstanding Contribution award and gave the opening keynote address. The SIGCSE Award for Lifetime Service was presented to Peter Denning, Naval Postgraduate School, who addressed partakers of the first-timers luncheon.
Conference Highlights
=========
In 2009-2010, SIGCSE sponsored three main conferences: the Technical Symposium, the summer (Northern Hemisphere) ITiCSE conference and the 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.
SIGCSE 2010 in Milwaukee was remarkably successful, with very strong attendance in spite of a struggling world economy. This year’s Co-Chairs, Gary Lewandowski (University of Cincinnati) and Steve Wolfman (University of British Columbia) were incredible. Special thanks are due the 2010 Program Committee, led by Program co-chairs Tom Cortina and Ellen Walker who will be chairs of the 2011 Technical Symposium in Dallas, Texas. Additional keynote speakers at the conference were Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman and Michael Wrinn of Intel’s Intel's Innovative Software Education Team.
ICER 2009
========
The International Computing Education Conference (ICER) 2009 conference was at UC Berkeley, hosted by Mike Clancy with strong attendance. The number of participants in the co-located doctoral consortium was down significantly. We will watch 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.
ITiCSE 2010 was held in Ankara, Turkey. Over 200 attendees from every continent except Antarctica made for a vibrant conference under the leadership of co-chairs Reyyan Ayfer of Bilkent University and John Impagliazzo (Qatar University) and program chair Cary Laxer (Rose Hulman). Keynotes by Nüket Yetiş, head of TÜBİTAK (similar to US NSF), Ali Ekrem Özkul from The Council of Higher Education (Turkey) and Jane Prey (Microsoft Research) set the tone for the meeting. Next year’s conference will be in Darmstadt, Germany under the leadership of Guido Roessling.
Publications
===========
John Impagliazzo became Editor-in-Chief of the new SIGCSE supported ACM magazine, Inroads, as 2010 also saw the unbundling of the conference proceedings from our newsletter. Curt M. White took the helm as editor of the SIGCSE Corner in that publication. The SIGCSE Bulletin was revamped and launched as an electronic newsletter under the editorial leadership of Z Sweedyk and Henry Walker.
The SIGCSE website has been completely revised under the capable management of Dan Joyce.
Other Activities
============
SIGCSE undertook a multitude of other projects, all of which have been documented in a detailed spreadsheet. Among these activities were funding for outreach projects, a doctoral consortium, a workshop for department chairs, and a workshop for new faculty.
Part III Challenges
The following is a brief outline of the challenges facing the 2010-2013 SIGCSE Board and the membership it represents.
A critical challenge is returning the budget to a positive bottom line for the organization. The SIGCSE conferences continue to be well-attended, but have ceased to be making enough profit to sustain the ambitious goals of the organization. The new board must consider ways to reverse the trend. The registration fees may need to be increased to match rising costs, waived registrations for volunteers may need to be controlled, funding for good works such as outreach and special projects may need to be reduced, the recently increased monetary awards for award winners may need to be re-evaluated, and Board travel costs need to be examined.
The SIGCSE By-laws are in need of a few small tweaks. For example, the recent changes in Inroads and the Bulletin have highlighted the need for a re-definition of the Publications chair, and the role of the past chair is ambiguous in the current version.
SIGCSE has been faced with issues that may need thoughtful responses. For example, the Board recently took a stand on Academic Freedom and supported the AAUP and UNESCO statements. SIGCSE is faced with the need to address the National Research Council’s standards on education that omits Computer Science from those K-12 suggestions.
There has been a possible infringement of SIGCSE conference name by one called ITCSE and that conference's procurement of the domain name
SIGCSE needs to assess its continuing involvement in the formation of CECC (Computing Education Coordinating Council), and to maintain the SIGCSE voice within the ACM Ed Board, Ed Council (where we now have an appointed representative), the Education Policy Committee, and the Computer Science Teacher Association (CSTA).
With respect to conferences, SIGCSE needs to review its criteria for approving in-cooperation with conferences and to improve mechanisms for including in-cooperation with conference proceedings in the DL. For its own conferences it needs to look forward to site selection and consider the role and place of the Doctoral Consortium.
Member benefits are changing. The Board needs to tackle such issues as the availability of the Bulletin to members only and the possibility of inclusion of the Transactions on Computing Education as a benefit. Where should the reports of the ITiCSE working groups appear?
The new Board will need to assess its duties. New members entail new roles. The Board will need to consider the frequency and costs of both its face-to-face and teleconference meetings.
An urgent challenge is that of SIGCSE’s role in Computer Science Education Week in early December. What activities can the Board encourage or sponsor?
The opportunities and challenges are many. SIGCSE is vibrant and we are up to those challenges. I thank the membership of SIGCSE and all its volunteers for the opportunity to have served as Chair for the past three years and look forward to my more advisory role as past chair. I wish the new Board all the best!
SIGDA FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009 - June 2010
Submitted by: Patrick Madden, Chair
----------- Awards Given Out:
SIGDA Distinguished Service Awards
Prof. Matthew Guthaus, for service to the SIGDA CADathlon, and the SIGDA Newsletter
Prof. Diana Marculescu, for work as SIGDA chair
Prof. Alex K. Jones, for service to the SIGDA University Booth, and the SIGDA Board
ACM Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award in EDA
to Himanshu Jain, Carnegie Mellon University
SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award
to Prof. Deming Chen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and
to Prof. Puneet Gupta, UCLA
TODAES Best Paper Award to
Hao Yu from NTU Singapore, Joanna Ho from Notre Dame, and Lei He from UCLA, for the paper titled “Allocating Power Ground Vias in 3-DI ICs for Simultaneous Power and Thermal Integrity”
ACM/IEEE A. R. Newton Award to
Randy Bryant, Carnegie Mellon University
Pioneering Achievement Award to
Martin Davis
SIGDA Technical Leadership Award
Cliff Sze from IBM Research, Austin, for service to the community through benchmarks, and administering the ISPD Placement and Routing contests.
--------- Significant Papers
Each of our major conferences and symposia have had best paper awards.
The major award for a related transaction is:
Hao Yu from NTU Singapore, Joanna Ho from Notre Dame, and Lei He from UCLA, for the paper titled “Allocating Power Ground Vias in 3-DI ICs for Simultaneous Power and Thermal Integrity”
--------- 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 5000 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. This year, the University Booth went through a major change, integrating on-line video demonstrations. Fewer groups participated, allowing for increased travel support – and for the demonstrations to have wider visibility through the web.
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. The DASS is held in alternate years; planning for next year is under way.
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.
SIGDA has organized a number of technical committees (comprised of a chair, vice chair, and members), to help the SIG focus on more narrow research fields, while still allowing a good connection to the board. Our TCs selected new officers, and are beginning to do useful work.
A “liaison” program has also been started, as a way to improve connections between the SIGDA board and the various sponsored and co-sponsored conferences.
--------- Brief Summary
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; the final numbers for the most recent DAC are not in, but it appears that this year will be roughly break-even.
DAC is jointly sponsored by IEEE, and EDAC (and industry consortium). The sponsors coordinating committee of DAC is now chaired by Patrick H. Madden, the SIGDA chair. During the next few years, the SCC will work aggressively to make DAC more profitable, and to address a disparity in administrative burdens (EDAC is a small organization compared to IEEE and ACM). All conferences and workshops encountered difficulty due to the economy, but DAC is the most significant problem.
Relationships with IEEE counterpart organizations appear to have stabilized, with most design automation related conferences working through IEEE’s CEDA group. In prior years, the IEEE subgroups involved in any given co-sponsored conference were continually changing.
After discussions with ACM staff, and in particular the SIGGRAPH leaders, SIGDA will shift its web site to be based on Drupal. We are hoping to have the transition done before Fall 2010.
SIGDOC FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009 – June 2010
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 (effective July 1st, 2009)
• Brad Mehlenbacher, NC State University, USA Chair
Awards Chair
2009 General Co-Chair
• Rob Pierce, IBM Rational Software, USA Vice-Chair
2009 Local Arrangements
• Liza Potts, Old Dominion University, USA Secretary/Treasurer
Newsletter Editor
• 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
• Scott Tilley, Florida Institute of Technology, USA Past Chair
• Aristidis Protopsaltis, City University, UK 2009 General Co-Chair
• Shaun Slattery, DePaul University, USA 2009 Program Co-Chair
• 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 and 2010, SIGDOC was found viable for two years to evaluate its decrease in membership and conference participation. The next viability review is in 2012.
_SIGDOC Conference Updates
The ACM SIGDOC 2009 International Conference was supported by Old Dominion University and hosted and supported by the School of Informatics and the Kelley School of Business at the Indiana University at Bloomington, Indiana, from October 5th-7th, 2009. Brad Mehlenbacher and Aristidis Protopsaltis served as General Co-Chairs and Ashley Williams and Shaun Slattery served as Program Co-Chairs. Rob Pierce served as Local Arrangements Chair. The program committee had 37 members, the majority of which represented academic institutions from the United States. The conference cost was approximately $2500.00.
The conference call for papers attracted 84 submissions from Asia, Europe, and North and South America, and the conference program included 43 papers, experience reports, workshops, and posters. The acceptance rate was 51 percent, an increase from 45 percent the previous year and a decrease from 71 percent the year before that. Highlights included papers on alternative design methods, on sensory, semiotic, semantic, and value-based methods for designing and evaluating websites, help systems, and user assistance, on rhetorical and cultural analyses of technical artifacts, on collaborative and peer-to-peer community formation and meaning making, and on the relationship between informatics and communication design. The conference papers were published in the Proceedings of the 27th Conference on Design of Communication (ACM Press).
The invited speakers included Jason Melton, Michael Priestly, Dr. Karen Schnakenberg, Jim Shea, and Dr. Ramesh Venkataraman. Jason Melton is a Data Management Sales Specialist with IBM Software Group. Michael Priestly is a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM, and its lead DITA architect. He was one of the original developers of DITA, and co-editor of the OASIS DITA 1.0 and 1.1 specification. Dr. Karen Schnakenberg, a Teaching Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Writing in the English Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Jim Shea is Director of Planning for the School of Informatics and Dr. Ramesh Venkataraman is an Associate Professor of Information Systems and Whirlpool Faculty Fellow at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business.
The 2009 Diana Award was awarded to Apple for its long-term contribution to the field of communication design. Apple was recognized for its outstanding achievements in the history of personal computing (the Lisa), in laptops (the Powerbook) and handheld devices (the Newton) and, recently, in telecommunications and music appliances (the iPhone and the iPod). Accepting the award on behalf of Apple was Dr. Sandy Korzenny, Director of Apple Product Documentation. Dr. Korzenny received her BA in Education (Spanish) from Indiana University, and an MS and PhD in Instructional Technology from Michigan State University.
We are fast approaching our 28th International Conference on Design of Communication, ACM SIGDOC 2010, being held from September 26th-29th in São Carlos-São Paulo, Brazil (). The General Co-Chairs are Dr. Junia Anacleto and Dr. Renata Fortes, and the Program Chair is Dr. Carlos Costa. The international conference committee of 43 members is made up of 33 academic and 10 industry representatives. Twenty-six committee members are from the USA, 10 are from Brazil, and single members represent Portugal, the UK, Germany, France, Canada, and Mozambique.
Discussions have also begun for SIGDOC’11 which the SIGDOC Board is planning to hold in Pisa, Italy. Discussions are also in process for Boston, MA, for 2012, and Seattle, WA, for 2013. Contact has been initiated with colleagues in India about a potential conference there. These efforts to plan further in advance for conference sites are related to our goals of increasing membership involvement and conference attendance.
_Publications
Liza Potts has taken over the position as General Editor of SIGDOC’s Quarterly Newsletter from Rob Pierce who served as editor for 9 years. Release of the newsletter is announced each quarter via the SIGDOC members’ listserv and is available in general via the ACM SIGDOC website (). 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.
In addition, ACM SIGDOC has expanded its membership communications by creating a print brochure for distribution at related conference events and initiating social media efforts (via Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, Slideshare, Twitter, and Wikipedia).
_Partnerships
This year, SIGDOC committed to the following in cooperation agreements:
• CNSR’09: Communications Networks and Services Research Conference
• DPPI 11: Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces
• DocEng 09: ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
• IWCMC’09: International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference
• WebSci 10: Web Science 2010
_Membership
SIGDOC had 217 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 (). 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. Our activities forming chapters and engaging new members at the local and regional level are certainly connected to this goal. As well, 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 2010-2011
Key issues for SIGDOC in the coming year include
• Establishing a better understanding of our current members (including serving their needs more effectively) and finding ways to increase our membership by attracting new members, volunteers, and board officers.
• Supporting our new SIG chapters (Europe, NC State, Old Dominion, and ECU), and developing policies for managing them effectively and for increasing SIG chapter activities.
SIGecom FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009 – June 2010
Submitted by: David Pennock, Chair
SIGecom's two primary activities are its annual Conference on Electronic Commerce and its electronic newsletter SIGecom Exchanges.
The Eleventh ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'10) was held June 7-11 2010 in Cambridge, MA. Over 220 people attended, breaking the previous record (2009) by over 40 and marking the first time the conference eclipsed 200 attendees. The healthy attendance combined with substantial corporate support, including from CombineNet, Facebook (a first-time supporter), Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!, made this a financial as well as a technical success. The conference attracted 136 submissions. The 33 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.
Topics covered included areas of typical strength for the conference like economic computations, mechanism design, traffic pricing, online advertising, and auctions, including a fascinating analysis of pay-per-bid auctions, a non-standard auction format popularized by web sites like . Other topics included voting, platforms for innovation, peer-to-peer systems, vaccination strategies, crowdsourcing, recommender systems, and a record six papers on prediction markets. Moshe Babaioff (Microsoft), Robert Kleinberg (Cornell), and Aleksandrs Slivkins (Microsoft) won the best paper award for their paper "Truthful Mechanisms with Implicit Payment Computation".
Over 100 people attended the two associated workshops: the Sixth Workshop on Ad Auctions and the Trading Agent Design and Analysis workshop (TADA'10). Four tutorials and two fascinating keynote speeches by Erik Brynjolfsson (MIT) and Ron Kohavi (Microsoft), both prominent scholars with strong business ties, rounded out the program.
Next year's Program co-Chairs, Yan Chen (University of Michigan) and Tim Roughgarden (Stanford), will aim to continue the momentum, in conjunction with Yoav Shoham (Stanford) as General Chair. EC'11 will be held June 5-9 2011 in San Jose, CA in conjunction with the ACM Federated Computing Research Conference.
Our newsletter, "SIGecom Exchanges", is published twice per year as a free online resource for members and others. Under the stewardship of Editor-in-Chief Vincent Conitzer (Duke), 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.
We've announced Yiling Chen (Harvard) as the new Editor-in-Chief for SIGecom Exchanges, with Daniel Reeves serving as puzzle editor. Felix Fischer (Harvard) is the new Information Director for SIGecom.
In an effort to serve as a hub for the growing number of researchers and venues at the intersection of computer science and economics, we've made a concerted effort to establish in-cooperation agreements with high quality related conferences and workshops. Joan Feigenbaum (Yale) and David Parkes (Harvard) have led this effort. We now have in-cooperation agreements with ACM Recommender Systems, the Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory, the Behavioral and Quantitative Game Theory Conference on Future Directions, the Workshop on the Economics of Networks, Systems, and Computation, and the Web Science Conference.
In the next year, Vincent Conitzer, Joan Feigenbaum, and David Pennock (Yahoo!) are preparing a proposal for a new ACM journal on Computation and Economics. We plan to initiate an award for best Ph.D. dissertation at the intersection of computer science and economics. 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.
SIGEVO FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009- June 2010
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 Portland at the GECCO conference on July 7, 2010.
The 2009 GECCO conference in Montreal had excellent 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 2010 GECCO conference in Portland was of high quality, with attendance of approximately 375 individuals. The GECCO conference usually attracts about 500 people, so this was lower than normal. We attribute this to three reasons. More than 40% of our attendees are usually from Europe. The poor exchange rate for the Euro was a factor. Also, Portland is more difficult to reach for Europeans. The third reason is that there were many completing conferences this year in enticing venues. The 2011 conference will be held in Dublin, Ireland. We expect attendance to return to normal next year. Early planning is underway for 2012 which we plan to hold on the east coast of the US (or Canada). The General Chair for 2011 will be Pier Luca Lanzi and the editor-in-chief will be Natalio Krasnogor. The General Chair for 2011 will be Jason Moore and the editor-in-chief will be Terry Soule.
Last year 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. This year attendance from Europe dropped to 35 percent, but we saw a modest increase in attendance from Latin America.
The next Foundations of Genetic Algorithms (FOGA) workshop 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 are now happy to report that the journal Evolutionary Computation is part of the ACM digital library, including both back issues as well as the most recent issue of the journal.
Another issue of concern to our community is that there are virtually no keywords in the ACM list of keywords to describe research in our field. Thus, every paper more or less uses the keywords AI and Search. We have raised this issue twice with ACM, but it is still an issue of concern to us.
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.
AWARDS:
We have been working on a 10 year “Impact Award” for more than 1 year. We hope to have final approval from ACM in the next few weeks. The award will recognize 1 to 3 papers a year that were published in the GECCO conference 10 years earlier 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 11, 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 the Communication of the ACM for possible publication. The following paper from GECCO appeared in CACM (Vol. 53 N. 5, pp: 109-116) this year. It also received the 2009 Humie Gold Medal award.
Automatic Program Repair With Evolutionary Computation
Westley Weimer (University of New Mexico)
Stephanie Forrest (University of New Mexico)
C. Le Goues (University of New Mexico)
T.V. Nguyen (University of New Mexico)
The 2010 “Humie” Gold Medal Award
GP Challenge: Evolving the energy function for protein structure prediction.
Journal of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines, 11(1):61-88, 2010.
P. Widera (University of Nottingham)
J.M. Garibaldi (University of Nottingham)
N. Krasnogor (University of Nottingham)
Condensed Abstract
One of the key elements in protein structure prediction is the ability to distinguish between good and bad candidate structures. The energy function used in the best state-of-the-art automatic predictors is defined as a weighted sum of a set of energy terms designed by experts. We hypothesized that combining these terms more freely will improve the prediction quality. We designed a genetic programming algorithm to evolve the protein energy function. We compared the predictive power of the best evolved function and the linear combination of energy terms featuring weights optimized by the Nelder-Mead algorithm. The GP based energy function yields superior predictions compared to the traditional linear energy function.
Select Best Papers from the GECCO Conference
From the “Genetic Algorithms” Track
NK-Landscapes, Problem Difficulty and Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithms;
Martin Pelikan
From the “Genetic Programming” Track
The Estimation of Hölderian Regularity using Genetic Programming;
L. Trujillo,
P. Legrand,
J. Lévy-Véhel
SIGGRAPH FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009 – June 2010
Submitted by: G. Scott Owen, President
Awards Committee (Jim Foley)
In 2009 the following awards were given:
Steven A. Coons – Robert L. Cook
Computer Graphics Achievement Award – Michael Kass
Significant New Researcher Award – Wojciech Matusik
Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art -
Lynn Hershman Leeson and Roman Verostko
Finance Committee (Jeff Jortner)
SIGGRAPH FY10 Budget Report
Opening Fund Balance: $5,059,388
Closing Fund Balance: $2,366,956
Major Income Areas
-------------------------
Dues: $226K
Publications (includes DL): $307K
Interest: $13K
SVR Sales: $83K
Contributions: $4K
Major Committee Expenses
--------------------------
Executive Committee
(Includes EC Travel, Project Manager, and Special Projects (Siggraph ASIA)): $185K
Publications: $190K
Education: $15K
Information Services: $36K
Chapters: $35K
Arts: $3K
Communications (includes Village and SOMA costs): $68K
SVR: $132K
Conferences
--------------------------
SIGGRAPH 2009: - $1,970K (loss)
All small conferences: + $22K profit
SIGGRAPH Asia 2009: - $501K loss
Conference Advisory Group for SIGGRAPH Conference (Jackie White)
New Orleans, LA) - SIGGRAPH 2009, the world's premier conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, welcomed 11,000 artists, research scientists, gaming experts and developers, filmmakers, students, and academics from 69 countries around the globe to New Orleans this week. In addition, more than 140 industry organizations exhibited at SIGGRAPH 2009. In fact, exhibits experienced the largest percentage of international participation in more than 10 years.
"We are thrilled with the high-quality of the content and the high-energy buzz amongst conference attendees as well as the diverse, creative vibe of this fabulous city," said Ronen Barzel, SIGGRAPH 2009 Conference Chair. "Not unlike other technology-based conferences this year, we were impacted by the current economy. However, the feedback from those that came was awesome and in watching the chatter on our social media channels this week, those that could not make the trip this year are vowing to find a way to make it to SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles."
In all, more than 965 speakers participated in the conference, which featured more than 150 talks, sessions, panels, papers, presentations, and screenings.
Highlights from SIGGRAPH 2009 included:
Keynote presentations from industry experts representing this year's additional content focuses on Music and Audio, Games, and Information Aesthetics:
Randy Thom, pioneer in sound and two-time Academy Award® winner with Skywalker Sound
Will Wright, video game designer, creator of Spore™ and The Sims series
Steve Duenes, Graphics Director, The New York Times Company
The renowned SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival, highlighting juried and curated animation content from around the globe. Winners in several categories included:
Best in Show Award Winner: French Roast, Fabrice O. Joubert, The Pumpkin Factory, France
Jury Award Winner: Dix, BIF Production, The Mill, United States
Jury Honorable Mention: Alma, Rodrigo Blaas, Cecile Hokes, Spain Student Prize Winner: Project: Alpha, Matthias Bjarnason, Christian Munk Sorensen, Nicolai Slothus, The Animation Workshop, Denmark
Well Told Fable Prize: Unbelievable Four, Sukwon Shin, In Pyo Hong, United States
A newly expanded focus on video games brought a mass of exciting gaming and real-time rendering content to SIGGRAPH 2009 including content exploring Real-Time Rendering as part of the Computer Animation Festival, Game Papers, and SIGGRAPH's first game development competition, GameJam!.
Technical Papers, the premier global forum for presenting ground-breaking research from today's leading experts, covered the core topics of computer graphics, such as modeling, animation, rendering, imaging, and human-computer interaction, and also explored related fields of audio, robotics, visualization, and perception by presenters from all around the globe - from the Czech Republic to Japan.
Art Paper presentations on topics exploring the creation of art and its place in society, helping people understand the changing roles of artists and art creation in the increasingly computerized, online world. SIGGRAPH 2009 collaborated with Leonardo, (The Journal of the International Society of the Arts, Sciences and Technology) to publish the SIGGRAPH 2009 Art Papers in a special issue.
Conference Advisory Group for SIGGRAPH Asia Conference (Thierry Frey)
SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 – a kaleidoscope of digital media experiences
Yokohama, Japan, 19 December 2009 – The city of Yokohama became the focal point for the digital media, computer graphics and interactive techniques community in Asia and the world this week.
As the four-day SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 drew to a close, approximately 6,500 visitors from more than 50 countries all across Asia and globally made their way to Pacifico Yokohama to participate in the region’s largest display of the latest in computer graphics, interactive techniques, and digital media and content. More than 500 artists, academics, and industry experts presented a vibrant array of thought-provoking works, breakthrough ideas and radical innovations at SIGGRAPH Asia 2009.
“We are thrilled with the success of SIGGRAPH Asia 2009. Since its debut in Singapore last year, SIGGRAPH Asia has become a highly anticipated digital media and content show for enthusiasts and digital media professionals throughout Asia. The increased enthusiasm we see this year is also an endorsement of the quality of works presented at SIGGRAPH Asia,” said Masa Inakage, Conference Chair, SIGGRAPH Asia 2009.
Accelerating knowledge-sharing and transfer
Leading experts in the field of animation, computer graphics, digital media production, robotics and interactive techniques were also on hand at SIGGRAPH Asia. Through more than 200 talks, workshops and panels including three Featured Speaker sessions, SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 successfully connected enthusiasts and future talents in the digital media industry with established professionals and academics in the computer graphics and interactive techniques field. A total of 400 experts from universities such as Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Stanford University, Tsinghua University and The University of Tokyo as well as corporations including Pixar Animation Studios, Imagica and Sony Pictures Imageworks offered their insights, experiences and speculative ideas at SIGGRAPH Asia 2009.
Computer Animation Festival honors the finest works
Always a highpoint at SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia, the winners of the Computer Animation Festival Best of Show Award and Best Technical Award received their prizes on 17 December 2009. The winning pieces were chosen by a panel of industry experts based on their commendable use of computer-generated imagery, animation and storytelling. A total of 79 animation pieces, from 16 countries were screened at the Festival.
The award winners are:
Best of Show Award: Anchored by Lindsey Olivares, Ringling College of Art and Design
This production truly deserves the Best of Show title for its innovative and creative expressions of emotions. The skillful integration of sound, character design, art direction and typography creates a beautiful, heartfelt piece that captured the judges’ attention and won their commendation.
Best Technical Award: Assassin’s Creed 2, by Istvan Zorkoczy, Digic Pictures
This work was selected for its distinct mastery of the finer points in 3D computer graphics production. Incredibly detailed and realistic main characters, clear cinematography, amazing surfacing, and world-class rendering made this a standout piece.
Japanese works well-represented
Leveraging on its presence in Japan, the second largest computer gaming market in the world, SIGGRAPH Asia included many well-known names in the gaming industry such as Sega Corporation, Square Enix Co., and Namco Bandai Games Inc.
On the exhibition floor, the Advanced Robotics Lab pavilion showcased a dazzling display of robotics. A special program to market the Japan debut of SIGGRAPH Asia, the Advanced Robotics Lab invited visitors to glean from the cutting-edge technologies that Japan has to offer in the field of robotics, such as human-like robots with the appearance and performance similar to humans, home-assistant or domestic help robots, and guide robots for the visually impaired. In addition, household Japanese brands Sony, NEC and JVC also showcased 3D displays and high-end screens for both industry as well as future use by consumers.
Japanese works were also well-represented in the Emerging Technologies
program, representing nearly half of the 27 installations. Among the notable displays from Japan are
* Kaidan: Japanese horror experience in Interactive Mixed Reality
from Ritsumeikan University
* Another Shadow, a collaboration between Takeo Igarashi of The
University of Tokyo and Hisato Ogata of Leading Edge Design
* SCHEMA, a multi-party interaction-oriented humanoid robot by Waseda
University.
“There is great variety and creativity demonstrated in this year’s Emerging Technologies program – from display technologies and virtual reality, to gestural interface innovations and robotics. Pointing towards future applications that will be cheaper and simpler to use, you can see the momentum is building for the digital do-it-yourself revolution. For instance, there are displays showcasing instant broadcasting through live video mixing, toolkits that make it easy to assemble your own electronic devices, and new forms of music jamming,” said Lars Erik Holmquist, Chair, Emerging Technologies program, SIGGRAPH Asia 2009.
Converging Diversity
A hot-pot of the best and latest in computer graphics and interactive techniques, SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 offered participants a mind-blowing array of the best ideas and possibilities in the digital media field.
The Art Gallery program drew both interest and curiosity with innovative installations such as Artificial Nature, a bio-inspired, immersive art installation; Swiss-Japanese collaboration Happy Wear that brought a tee-shirt or a bag to ‘life’ through animation; A Head of View, a new approach to player navigation and manipulation of game space through video tracking of body movements; and the sensual Light and Shadows display by WOW from Japan.
Said ACM SIGGRAPH President Scott Owen, “Asia is fast becoming a focal
point for the digital media industry. SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 expands opportunities for the computer graphics and interactive techniques community from within and out of Asia to network and experience the
vibrancy of the industry in this region. Through these interactions, we hope to spark new ideas and breakthroughs that will further seal Asia’s spot as a hub for the world’s most creative talents.”
The next edition of SIGGRAPH Asia will take place in Seoul, Korea, on 15-18 December 2010. SIGGRAPH Asia 2010 will be chaired by Ko Hyeong-Seok, Professor at the School of Electrical Engineering in Seoul National University, Korea. Professor Ko’s research focus is in the reproduction of clothes, hair, fluids, and deformable solids. His new fluid simulation method was presented at this year's SIGGRAPH Asia Technical Papers program and as part of the Electronic Theater program.
Professional and Student Chapters (Scott Lang)
The ACM SIGGRAPH Professional and Student Chapters continue to be the largest network of SIG Chapters within the ACM organization. Fifty chapters exist in over fifteen countries around the world. During the last year, we chartered new Professional Chapters in Rio Grande (New Mexico / US), Bangalore (India) and Austin (Texas, USA), We also have several chapters In-Formation, including one which is very close to being chartered in Taipei, Taiwan.
Professional and Student Chapters Committee (PSCC)
We have continued to focus the duties of those on the Chapters Committee over the last year. In addition to the positions outlined last year, we have added the following during 2009 – 2010:
Student Chapters Sub-Committee
At SIGGRAPH 2009, two recent Student Chapter leaders, AJ Christensen and Madelin Woods, stepped forward to take charge of this sub-committee. Over the last year, they have worked to contact all of our existing and probationary Student Chapters. With this information, we are developing a sub-network to encourage a greater exchange of information and collaboration between our Student Chapters.
European Chapters Council
Mashhuda Glencross is heading up this effort and organized our first meeting at SIGGRAPH 2009. One of the products of this gathering was the SIGGRAPH 2009 CAF Tour which Carlye Archibeque organized in the fall of 2009.
Web Site Guidelines
For the first time since web sites became the primary means of communications for our chapters, we now have a set of guidelines for the ACM SIGGRAPH Chapters. Eric Paquette, chair of the Web Site Committee, has worked with his committee and the chapters network to finalize this document. We will now work through the 2010 – 2011 year to make sure that all chapter web sites adhere to these guidelines.
SIGGRAPH 2009 Podcasting / SCOOP Collaboration
For the last four years, a team of chapters’ volunteers has attended the conference and helped in the production of a variety of video segments. Last year was our most successful venture yet, as we partnered with the SIGGRAPH 2009 Podcasting Director, Jim Hillin. We were able to produce and upload 20 podcasts on site with another six longer-form SCOOP venue overviews finalized post-conference. All our segments were uploaded to the ACM SIGGRAPH YouTube channel (). These videos covered a range of topics, from interviews with the keynote speakers to venue spotlights to attendee interviews. In addition to these videos, we also produced four promotional videos for SIGGRAPH Asia, recorded the Student Volunteer Orientation and produced a DVD (overnight) that was used by SVs to review the orientation session, and recorded the Pioneers Reception speaker.
For SIGGRAPH 2010, our team will continue to work with the SIGGRAPH Podcasting Director. We have already been asked to record and produce many more segments this year so we are very excited to see what SIGGRAPH 2010 has to offer.
Associate Membership Program
The NYC and Paris Chapters continue their work with this system and we are now at the point where we are able to add new chapters. These include Silicon Valley (USA), Madrid (Spain), and Cascade (Portland, USA). Over the last year, credit card processing has been added and is in use by the NYC Chapter. We have also added a Technical Profile Area which will allow us to capture member information in areas such as Job Title, Areas of Interest, and Volunteer Availability. Having this bank of information will allow our chapters to identify areas of interest amongst their members and this will help them to plan better events within their program calendars.
SIGGRAPH 2009 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 35 chapter leaders from all around the world. In addition to our usual sessions, we tried our very first Logistics Fair. Modeled after the conference Logistics Fair, it allowed each chapter to meet with the different members of the Chapters Committee and ACM representatives to ask questions and exchange information in a very short amount of time. The session was very successful and as a result will be a part of our SIGGRAPH 2010 Chapters Development Workshop.
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 20 interested individuals.
We also had several chapter-specific meetings. These included one for our Web Site Committee, one for our Student Chapters, and one for our European Chapters.
The annual Chapters Party was held at the “Generations Hall” nightclub. Over 1,900 people attended this event. For the third year in a row, we also hosted and funded the annual Student Volunteer Alumni Reunion. Attendance was excellent and saw a major surge from the two previous events; close to 100 people attended this activity.
Program Year 2009 – 2010
During the 2009 – 2010 year, our chapters were very active. Total chapter membership around the world is between 2,600 and 3000 professional and student members. Total attendance at chapter events (from those chapters reporting) is over 17,000 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: “Aliens Among Us: The VFX Behind District 9”, “Computer Vision and Computer Graphics for the Analysis of Fine Art”, “Illustrators: Analog to Digital”, “Computer Graphics in Protein X-ray Crystallography and Drug Discovery””, “The Democratization of 3D Cinematography”, “To Middle Earth and Back”, and “Virtual Cityscapes: Recent Advances in Crowd and Traffic Simulations”. These are just a few examples of the hundreds of presentations that are hosted by the chapters each year.
Over 15 chapters presented the SIGGRAPH 2009 CAF DVDs. In addition, several chapters also presented the SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 and 2009 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: RIT School of Design, Escuela Da Vinci, Hong Kong Comics and Animation Federation, Thai Association of Computer Graphics and Animation (TACGA), National University of Singapore, Visual Effects Society (VES), Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), The International Academy of Design and Technology – Detroit, Bogota Film Festival, Electronic Arts, Casual Games Association, and Tourism Vancouver, just to name just a few.
Digital Arts Committee (Jacquelyn Ford Morie)
The DAC has over 450 members on our Ning social networking site!
There is a constant buzz of activity there with well over 1500 artists' works being featured on the front page in an ongoing slide show, along with postings, events, blog entries and conversation between the artist members. The NING site became a fee-based, rather than free site this year. We have decided to pay the $499 annual fee to allow the momentum to continue, as it is only about twice what we were paying to keeps the site ad free up until now. Ad-free is included in the new payment structure. We have also started a FaceBook group and have over 300 members there.
The Traveling Art Show continues to be a challenge. The remaining artworks being stored at the Freeman warehouse in Anaheim have been inventoried but it has been slow going to find the artists and return the work. Even with contact, some artists have not been there when the work is delivered, resulting in it being returned to us, and wasting what little funding we do have to return works. With the recent extremely reduced funding it is expected that this process will take a few years now, rather than several months.
We interviewed a number of highly qualified candidates for the core committee this year and formed a vibrant new group to lead the DAC into the future.
The SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community Committee Core Board now comprises:
Jacquelyn Morie, Chair. Cynthia Beth Rubin, Li Qin Tan, Greg Garvey, Hye Yeon Nam, and Patricia Galvis-Assmus.
Our new Production Assistant is Darold Davis.
The new DAC Expert Advisors are: John Hyatt (Global Outreach), Copper Giloth (Digital Art History) and Sue Gollifer (Organizational Outreach).
Since Jacquelyn Morie has been elected to the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee, finding a new Chair for the DAC will be part of the new year's work.
We are looking forward to another great year!
Education Committee (education.) (Marc Barr)
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 2010 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 Committee (Jenny Dana)
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 infrastructure of the ACM SIGGRAPH organization website, 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 Drupal site for S2010.
Website content is provided and maintained by the client committees Conference, Arts, Communications, Chapters, Education, Publications, S3 either as a sub-section of the site or on an independent site. Management and decisions about content are the responsibility of the Communications committee especially for sections that don't have a clear owner and provide information to the ACM SIGGRAPH members such as (News, Social Networking buzz, general Membership/Committee/Organization Information, inquiries from members via webmaster of a non-technical nature). In practice, many of these tasks are being handled by ISC which puts an extra strain on our resources or they are falling through the cracks.
The ISC is made up of a core team of two part time paid consultants - Ken Bauer - system administrator, Viveka Weiley - web design consultant. The role of CMS consultant (renamed from Plone Consultant) was cut from the FY2010 budget, it was requested again for FY2011, so is currently unfilled. The budgeted hours for the two remaining consultants was also reduced for FY 2010 causing an increased workload for the volunteers and a reduction in our capacity to improve existing systems or rapidly deploy new systems (e.g. FAQ, Drupal site, Google Docs integration). Ken is supported from two system administrators from his company, Eduardo Romero and Belia Romero. The two 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, John Michael Pierobon - events calendar. 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. However only a small subset of these 20 people work on any ISC tasks/projects (4-5), so this can be somewhat misleading in terms of available resources. It is possible and desirable to expand this volunteer pool. However it must be done with care to only include experienced, talented, careful and trusted new volunteers since they require some level of training and privileged server access to do most useful tasks.
ISC Activities:
• Sysmgrs meeting and wrap-up held at S2009. Annual sysmgrs meetings arranged for SIGGRAPH 2010
• Submitted FY 2011 Budget for ISC
• Submitted ISC annual, mid-year and Viability reports to the EC
• ISC representatives met with chapter leaders during S2009 and SA2009 and staffed a Chapters workshop logistics fair station. This will be continued for S2010 and possibly SA2010.
• Introductory presentation of ISC services to the S2011 committee and S2010 pre-conference meetup were canceled due to budget cuts - should consider making this part of annual conference budgets since it is important for communication flow and helps reduce last minute scrambles on technical projects that don't get communicated to ISC.
• 100% budget freeze with the exception of contracted invoices and sysmgrs/S2010 attendance for chair/sysadmin/webmaster.
• Organization tasks included streaming media solutions investigation (video), media storage (video, audio, images), Social Media maintenance, FAQs link, new website, software/website task force, Mint and Analytics stats access/maintenance, content updates, events calendar, Encore support, reduce annual website maintenance work - by reducing references that require updates (for example specific year/person mentions), Plone2 editor fix.
• New Drupal install/maintenance used for conferences websites and intended for new website. Also being evaluated for use for Treasurer financial reporting.
• WordPress MU (Multi-user) trial completed and is now available to chapters and other groups.
• Helpdesk requests from Talley/Koelnmesse for conferences lists, aliases, redirects, schedulers, submission deadlines for SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia.
• Additional technical advice and assistance on database requests during papers submission, and new conference interactive scheduler PDF generation.
• Standing Committee Support -
• Chapters - setup chapter electronic services, advise website sub-committee on new guidelines, implement new chapters directory, Scoop/Podcasting e-services.
• Communications - advice and assistance for siggraph-announcements initiative, Drupal mock-up from new site design ideas, server access and information for new content person, answered/forwarded inquiries made via webmaster alias.
• Education - discussion of options for migrating Education site off of Plone2
• S3 - electronic services setup for S3 web presence, adding new chair info to appropriate webpages
• Publications - assistance with trying to recover some lost website content
• Arts - updated some outdated links
• Social Network Stats
• 3211 LinkedIn ~25% increase in join requests
• 1752 Facebook - successfully consolidated into two primary (ACM SIGGRAPH group and SIGGRAPH Conferences fan-page, excluding affiliate pages)
• 3200 Twitter (joint organization/conferences primary feed) ~30% increase in followers this past year
• YouTube (channel views: 11,224, upload views: 245,603) - Scoop, Conferences, International Resources Podcasts - primary content creators
Webmaster Report (Viveka Weiley) - contracted for 50 hours per month (budget reduced to 30 hours per month)
1. Content & Design Maintenance: 20 hours per month
- Content, information architecture and visual & interaction design updates (adding & editing pages, sections and templates).
- Odd tasks such as updating archived content, Plone disaster recovery, updating the Wiki templates, updating the web stats engines, mailing list management, making banners for the social sites (facebook, youtube).
2. Help: 5-10 hours per month
- Assisting users: setting up accounts
- Assisting teams such as SIS, newsletter, education
- Responding to Webmaster enquiries
These tasks are ongoing, and have no beginning or end date. However some others do:
3. Pre-conference and conference activities: 100 hours.
- Pre-conference support activities: updates, redirects, logins, wiki and blog config etc.
- Support and training for content contributors during conference
Three weeks before the conference content maintenance and assistance requests begin to ramp up, totaling perhaps 10 hours that week, 20 hours the next, 30 the week before the conference and then of course full-time during the conference week.
4. Migration of left over original website content sections to plone. These were generally sections without a clear content owner (jobs, CG resources, travelling art show, art & design).
Completed August 2009. Approx. 40 hours.
5. Plone 3: Approx 60 hours.
* Setup completed August 2009.
* Skin design & implementation: completed September 2009
* Plone 3 content migration:
- has been cancelled in order to evaluate shift to Drupal.
6. New site visual design: approx 40 hours. Presented to committee members at SIGGRAPH 2009, but since cancelled in order to focus on Drupal migration.
7. Drupal: Approx 70 hours.
* Drupal setup - January 2010 (10 hrs)
* Templating, info architecture, configuration for new Drupal site - February 2010 (10 hrs)
* Testing Drupal extensions and theming - March 2010 (10 hrs)
* Drupal content management & IA research - April 2010 (10 hrs)
* Implement Drupal site to committee spec. - May 2010 ( 30 hrs)
The bulk of my responsibilities involve a large variety of ongoing maintenance tasks and helping users.
While I was contracted at 50 hours per month, those took approximately 30 hours per month, leaving 20 hours for work on new projects, such as the initial design and setup of the plone site, setup of the wiki, and work on committee websites.
With the budget cut to 40 and then 30 hours, the maintenance tasks are still essential, and as the number of sites has increased and the main site has grown their number has increased.
However with efficiency measures and increased help from the committee chair they now take around 25 hours per month, leaving 5 hours for work on new projects, such as the design and setup of the Drupal site.
This is still clearly not enough. The proposed Drupal shift presents the opportunity to revisit information architecture and design decisions. Moving the intranet portions of the site to a separate system is eminently sensible. However ACM SIGGRAPH is a large organisation with a lot of activities and a lot to communicate. Any redesign should be undertaken as a main project, not a side activity. Use case scenarios should be written. Business goals should be set; requirements gathered. Card sorting and other contextual investigations into user understanding of the site structure should precede large-scale modifications to the information architecture.
The current budget and volunteer base allows us to maintain what we have, and to set up new sections when we have eager volunteers to run them (e.g. education, arts, chapters). I am happy to work as a volunteer to progress new sections of the site, but my efforts alone are not going to get us big new things quickly. If we want to move faster on new projects, then we need to devote more resources to them. Commercial rates for this kind of expertise and work are high, so perhaps the right answer is to recruit more volunteers for these projects. I don't know the answers, but I do know that there is a lot more demand for web projects than there are currently resources to meet that demand.
System Administrator Report (Ken Bauer) - approx. 30 hours per month
#1 Drupal setup and support for SIGGRAPH conference and SIGGRAPH Asia. This includes SIGGRAPH 2010, 2011 and the Asia 2010 conferences. Lots of discussion and support with the web design team of the conferences for this. This is about 40% of our time from my team on this project.
#2 System maintenance and support. Keeping the systems updated, responding to account and mail setup requests. This is about 50% of our time from my team on this project.
#3 Plone maintenance and planning for the migration. We have not done any migration but the movements on Drupal seem to point in that direction. This build of Plone for the main site needs to get moved. Whether manually or some systematic approach, it needs to get moved off. This is about 7% of our time from my team on this project.
#4 Authentication systems. We already had authentication with ACM logins for the SIGGRAPH wiki. We have done a proof of working setup on a Drupal install and are currently working on getting this working for our Plone3 installs. This is about 3% of our time from my team on this project.
Membership and Communications Committee (Kathryn Saunders)
Committee Name: Communications and Member Services
Kathryn Saunders, Chair
Hans Westman, e-Quarterly Editor
Claudia Chagui, Booth Manager, Photographer
Newly recruited: Teresa Hardy, Website Strategist
Project Background and Description
The Communications and Membership Services Committee oversees the content development of the website as well as membership communications and benefits procurement. The Communications Chair is also in charge of the ACM SIGGRAPH Village at both conferences as well as content capture.
Membership:
The economic downturn during the past few years has proven to be a difficult time for both the conferences and for ACM SIGGRAPH. Although conference attendance and membership is down, we still enjoy a high degree of loyalty from the computer graphics community who consider SIGGRAPH their academic ‘home’ and an important social base. Hence, the membership downturn appears to be a function of the economy and not one of loyalty. Including an ACM SIGGRAPH membership as part of the cost and benefit of a full-conference pass is something that I highly recommend go forward in the next year, at least for the SIGGRAPH conference.
Member Benefits:
Membership and Member Benefits needs to be an organization-wide endeavour. I would urge the Executive Committee to encourage cooperation and communication not only between the different committees within in the organization but within the Conference and the Organization as well. If both the conference and the organization were mandated to be on the look-out for membership benefit opportunities, and communicating those opportunities to the Chair, it would go a long way to encourage membership through increased member services and benefits.
I have enlisted a new recruit to assist in the market analysis and development of member benefits. We will be working on a report to the Board for the upcoming EC strategy meeting in October.
Outcomes:
• Branding: Changing the perception of ACM SIGGRAPH:
• This has been a major focus over the last three years. The aim has been to move the perception of ACM SIGGRAPH from an ‘evil empire’ devoid of humanity to an international organization that is worth belonging to.
• A major component of the re-branding has centered on ‘populating’ visible assets with photos of members, including the Village booths at both SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia as well as the ACM SIGGRAPH booth in Shanghai. In addition, the member graphics have been used for an Asia-centric and a North American centric ACM SIGGRAPH ‘Member Resource Guide’ promotional pamphlet. The member photographs are taken at the conferences at a photography booth located in the Village.
• We are proposing to include a different ‘featured member’ on the website to reinforce our image as a member-focused diverse international organization
• We have received extremely positive feedback from the SIGGRAPH community
Communications
• Announcements Listserv. Based on the SIGCHI model, and with ACM’s help and the implementation strategy of the ACM SIGGRAPH sysmanagers team, ACM SIGGRAPH now has an Announcements Listserv. Anyone in the SIGGRAPH community can post, but the listserv is moderated by Kathryn Saunders, Jean Michael Pierbon and Teresa Hardy.
• website: The overhaul of the ACM SIGGRAPH organization website has begun. We are currently developing a proposal that will go to the Executive Committee for review. Issues such as drupal vs. plone, information architecture, site sustainability, branding and user experience are being examined in addition to two different ‘scopes of work’ and the monetary and implementation implications of each. At paramount importance is communicating to our community the remarkable things this organization does, and engaging them to participate. We are proposing to possibility of creating new content as well linking and leveraging various off-site content from both SIGGRAPH and non-SIGGRAPH sites. It is my hope that the e-Quarterly will be folded into the website content in a more strategic way.
Possible Website Committee Members Recruits:
Etta Di Leo, writer (confirmed)
Samuel Lord Black, website content updating (in discussion)
Publications Committee (Stephen Spencer)
It's been a year of belt-tightening and change, but documenting the content presented at our sponsored events is Job #1, and we continue to do that, to the best of our abilities.
Fewer events are opting for printed proceedings, replacing them with CD-ROM or DVD-ROM deliverables.
The annual conference has a number of changes in its documentation:
- Technical Papers videos are now user-prepared and included as auxiliary material on the Full Conference DVD-ROM and in the ACM Digital Library, replacing the "Technical Papers Video" DVD discs. (For SIGGRAPH 2010, this resulted in a one-disc reduction in the size of the Full Conference DVD-ROM publication.)
- TOG subscribers will receive a "special issue" DVD-ROM publication with technical papers and their auxiliary material, replacing the printed proceedings which have been sent to them in years past.
ACM is implementing an automated copyright form delivery system, and I hope to test it out with a smaller, sponsored event soon. This new system would require authors to deliver their copyright forms and third-party material permission documentation directly to ACM for review.
I continue to work with Deborah Cotton at ACM on the complex issues surrounding appropriate uses of third-party material in technical papers and other documentation.
We continue to look at alternatives to the deliverables now produced for the SIGGRAPH Video Review program, and hope that we can make substantive progress in that area soon.
ACM SIGGRAPH Student Services Committee (Lou Harrison)
The ACM SIGGRAPH Student Services Committee (S3) serves as a resource and information hub for ACM SIGGRAPH Student Members, and other students who volunteer their time for ACM SIGGRAPH activities, such as the conferences' Student Volunteer programs. Since formation in 2007, S3 has been working to organize a core of key volunteers and resources who will provide year-round information and services to the students we serve. This year, Lou Harrison continued as chair of the committee. The following is the current committee:
1. Student Services Manager (Josh Grow)
2. Mentoring Lead (Sarrah Vesselov)
3. Technical Lead (Nico Gonzales)
4. Academic Coordinator (Open)
5. Industry Coordinator (Mikki Rose)
in addition to himself as chair and Jim Kilmer as our founder, advisor and unofficial member.
Since last year's annual report, S3 has been involved in a number of activities. First, they have supported the SIGGRAPH SV Program and the SIGGRAPH Asia Intern program by facilitating set-up of the student forums at the CG Society website, and getting all SVs (all of whom are SIGGRAPH student members) access to the SIGGRAPH Forums there and also free access to all the CGS forums as well. The SIGGRAPH SV program has a long history of providing talks for the SVs on-site, and this year, we assisted at SIGGRAPH Asia in doing the same. We secured 4 timeslots for talks and hand-picked 4 conference presentations to reproduce (sometimes in a shorter format) exclusively for the interns. While the talks were excellent, the highlight was the Q&A period where the students and presenters got into all kinds of topics, from their presentations to education, to work, it was very exciting to see. One highlight was a presentation by Lindsey Olivares, who (after we had picked her) won Best in CAF for her short "Anchored" and did a remarkable job with the students even though it was her first time speaking for a crowd.
We've gone through our first shift change, as Cris Cheng and Alexis Casas both left the Committee. Sarrah Vesselov (who attended our meeting at S2009 as a guest and friend of the committee) has replaced Cris and we're hoping to talk to some interested people at S2010 to replace Alexis. We have resurrected a contest to brand S3, and picked a winner. The new look and feel will be placed at as time allows. Jorge Ramos Moukel, a student at University of New Mexico, had the winning design and won a conference pass to S2010.
Currently, ACM SIGGRAPH maintains a cooperative agreement with The CGSociety, an online global organization for creative digital artists, to co-brand certain online resources that will provide student members of both organizations with a variety of online services, including a professional portfolio, group and one-on-one mentoring services, and community forums. Through this cooperative agreement, S3 will actively recruit mentors and career councilors to work with students online, accepting questions and providing subject-matter expertise through this online system. This system has not been as easy to use as we would like, and while we are still using it, we are also looking for other social media tools that might work better, and be closer to what young people are used to. S3 has a Facebook page, which we hope to use as a funnel to send student members to whatever social tools we choose.
Heading toward S2010, we've been busy trying to try some tests of a few different mentoring models. We are doing a trials of One-to-many mentoring with a webinars in the weeks leading up to SIGGRAPH, one by the International Committee member Sandro Alberti. We are also planning on several face-to-face portfolio review sessions for students on-site at S2010, and a small number of one-to-one mentoring for Student Volunteer Team Leaders (the group closest to a career path, and the ones we can best hope to get good feedback from).
We have also been planning our annual face-to-face meeting at SIGGRAPH, along with a large number of other meetings to connect with all the people we currently work with and hope to work with. CGS, Educators, CAG, Job Fair, Academic Exhibitors, Sysmgrs, EvolveCG and CGcon, for example. Several committee members will also assist the SV committee onsite with SV registration, typically a very busy time at the start of the week.
Small Conferences Committee (Brian Wyvill)
SCC Committee
The SCC committee is as follows:
Brian Wyvill Chair
Marie-Paule Cani EC liaison
Jeff Jortner (Treasury)
Diego Gutierrez
Caroline Larboulette
Wolfgang Heidrich
Joaquim Jorge
Erin Butler
Heinrich Muller (Chair of the Eurographics (EG) Workshop Board)
Issues and Work Done
The work proceeds, for the most part, smoothly. Some problems arose with regards sponsorship of joint EG/ACM conferences but these were solved and the conferences (SBIM/NPAR) proceeded without problems.
I have had considerable correspondence with a large number of conference organizers and joined several conference steering-committees (SBIM, NPAR, CAe, CGI, SMI).
I attended EG 2010 with Marie-Paule Cani and a report was submitted to the SIGGRAPH President. One of the main agreements with regards to Small Conferences was that the head of the Eurographics workshop and symposia board and Siggraph chair of small conferences would serve on the other board to ease the organization of co-sponsored events (currently, Heinrich Mueller and Brian Wyvill).
For 2011 NPAR (ACM), SBIM (RG) and CAe (EG) will co-locate with SIGGRAPH. A joint sponsorship agreement is being negotiated.
Web.
Web pages. A draft has been prepared and will be discussed by the SCC at SIGGRAPH 2010. Co-located information for SIGGRAPH 2010 was posted in Spring 2010.
Conferences Handled
Current Policy
In-cooperation
Approval is give if the conference meets the ACM criteria, is a not-for-profit conference that deals with subject matter that falls within the 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 enhancing the next conference. SIGGRAPH has a policy guideline that we follow to approve this use of funds. Notably that a one page description of use of funds be approved by the SCC.
ACM contacts:
Maritza Nichols (sponsored conferences)
Lauren Thompson (in-coop)
SIGIR FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009-June 2010
Submitted by: Elizabeth Liddy, Past Chair
Introduction
The year just completed has again been a successful one for SIGIR. The SIG remains in a healthy position financially, with professional memberships at approximately 850, and direct sponsorships of several well-attended annual conferences. Recent SIG elections have seen a new Executive Committee installed, and the management of the SIG is passing into safe hands. The new EC will continue to be supported by an active group of officers and volunteers; and the research focus of SIGIR continues to be of key and increasing significance to the world at large.
Finances
The Executive Committee attempts to run a “break even” budget in which SIGIR neither gains nor looses much money. However, we are glad to report that SIGIR has an estimated surplus of $133K in FY 2009 / 10. This is a result of several successful conference sponsorships, including: SIGIR’09, $23K; CIKM’09, $22K; WSDM’10, $7K; and JCDL’09, $1K. Expenses across these conferences included $101K paid to ACM for support services. Other income included $89K from 331K downloads from the ACM Digital Library, and membership income around $35K.
The SIG’s reserves remain greater than one times the annual conference expenditure, and the 2010 Geneva Conference has almost certainly broken even, and is probably in surplus. After the ACM conference overheads, the largest single budget expense for the SIG in 2010 was $60K paid for student travel support to attend the SIGIR conference, plus a further $10K to support students living or studying in developing countries, the result funding coming directly from a generous individual. The EC is comfortable with these expenses as the future of the SIG and our field as a whole is dependent on our future researchers, whom we now support as students.
The SIGIR Executive Committee has decided not to raise dues for the coming year.
Conferences
SIGIR sponsors, co-sponsors, and cooperates with other technical groups on several conferences and / or workshops during the year. The main conference is the annual SIGIR conference, which is located on a 3-year rotation in: (1) The Americas (2009 Boston, 2012 Portland OR, 2015…); (2) Europe, Africa, or the Middle East (2010 Geneva, 2013 Dublin, 2016…); and (3) Asia or Australia (2011 Beijing, 2014…).
SIGIR
The thirty-third Annual ACM SIGIR International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR’09, was held in Geneva, Switzerland on July 19-23, 2010. Key positions and statistics are summarized below:
General Chairs: Fabio Crestani (University of Lugano) and
Stéphane Marchand-Maillet (University of Geneva)
Program Chairs: Hsin-Hsi Chen, Efthimis N. Efthimiadis, and Jacques Savoy
Acceptance Rate: 520 papers were submitted; 87 were accepted; 17% acceptance rate
Other Content: 90 posters, 10 software demonstrations, 11 tutorials, 9 workshops.
Keynote Speakers: Donna Harman (National Institute of Standards and Technology),
Is the Cranfield Paradigm Outdated?
Best Paper: Ryen W. White, Jeff Huang,
Assessing the Scenic Route: Measuring the Value of Search Trails in Web Logs
Best Student Paper: Ioannis Arapakis (student), Konstantinos Athanasakos (student), and
Joemon M. Jose, A Comparison of General vs. Personalized Affective Model for the Prediction of Topical Relevance
Attendance: Total registrations: 550 (approx); Main conference: 522; Workshops: 244; Tutorials: 274; First time attendees: 167
Sponsors: Baidu, Google, Microsoft Research, Yahoo!, Information Retrieval Facility, Yandex, IBM Research, Swiss Informatics Society Special Interest Group in Information Systems, Swiss National Science Foundation, Université de Genève, Università della Svizzera italiana, Université de Neuchâtel, Wolfram Research, Elsevier.
Future conferences: SIGIR 2011 will be held in Beijing, China on July 24–28; SIGIR 2012 will be held in Portland, Oregon, USA, tentatively July 19–23; and SIGIR 2013 will be held in Dublin, Ireland.
Preliminary expressions of interest were presented at the 2010 conference for SIGIR 2014, which is a year for Asia to host SIGIR, with presentations from Hyderabad (India) and Brisbane (Australia). The bidding groups will now be asked to prepare formal bid documentation to be reviewed by the Executive Committee, following the ACM protocol.
Other Conferences
SIGIR also co-sponsors three other ACM conferences, CIKM, JCDL, and WSDM. Each of these upcoming conferences was reported on at the SIGIR ’10 Conference,
In Cooperation
In addition to the four conferences that SIGIR sponsors or co-sponsors, we “cooperate” with several other IR-related conferences but have no financial stake in them. These conferences complement the technical focus of our own conferences. As a cooperating society, SIGIR members obtain reduced registration fees and other member benefits at these conferences. This past year, SIGIR had “in cooperation” agreements with: RecSys ’10 (ACM Conference on Recommender Systems); ECIR (European Conference on Information Retrieval ‘10), and; AIRS 2009 (Asia Information Retrieval Societies Conference).
Publications
The SIGIR Web site is maintained by SIGIR's Information Officer, Djeord Hiemstra. It provides timely information about SIGIR-sponsored conferences, “in cooperation” conferences, and SIGIR activities, as well as Business Meeting slides, the annual report, and other information about how SIGIR operates and SIGIR’s history. In addition to providing information about the organization, the SIGIR web site also hosts the SIGIR Forum and SIG-IRList sites.
The SIGIR Forum is co-edited by Diane Kelly and Ian Ruthven. The Forum is published three times a year. The Special issue is the SIGIR Proceedings; the December and June issues cover IR conferences, workshops and symposia, as well as in-depth essays based on the Salton Award Lecture and other keynote addresses, as well as short papers on current research trends. The Forum appears both online () and in paper.
The SIG-IRList is a SIGIR-sponsored electronic newsletter (), edited by Mark Smucker, of the University of Waterloo. The SIG-IRList provides a regular newsletter of IR information and nicely compliments the archival publication SIGIR Forum. The SIG-IRList contains job announcements, notices of publications, conferences, workshops, calls for participation, and project announcements. It is a much valued and appreciated service of SIGIR for its members.
Membership and Membership Programs
SIGIR offers members the following benefits: SIGIR Forum (paper & online); reduced conference registration fees to sponsored and “in cooperation” conferences; access to the ACM Digital Library; as well as optional Proceedings and DiSC Packages, and the SIG-IRList electronic newsletter. The SIGIR Proceedings Package includes copies of the CIKM and JCDL conference proceedings. The SIGIR Digital Symposium Collection (DiSC) package includes a DVD containing proceedings from a wide range of IR- and DB-related conferences (including SIGIR, CIKM, JCDL, SIGMOD, and SIGKDD), and newsletters from a wide range of ACM SIGs (including SIGIR and SIGMOD).
The SIGIR Executive Committee has discussed the question of providing hard copy Conference Proceedings at the conference during the general discussion at the Annual Meeting and then during an Executive session, and has decided to advise next year’s conference chair to provide a ‘No Paper’ option. The belief is that over time, the attendees’ desire for hard copy proceedings will diminish to the point where CDs only can be distributed, and the membership will be satisfied.
Awards
In addition to Best Paper Award(s), SIGIR has only one other award that it bestows, the triennial Gerard Salton Award, last presented in 2009. SIGIR continues working to put forth deserving nominees for the general ACM Awards.
Gerard Salton Award
This award is presented every three years to an individual who has made "... significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval". It honors Professor Gerry Salton, who is considered by most to be the person most responsible for the establishment, survival, and recognition of the field of IR. The Salton Award Committee is comprised of the available prior winners of the Salton Award, in consultation with the SIGIR Chair.
ACM Fellows
SIGIR continues to be frustrated at its failure to have more of its members honored as ACM Fellows, despite regularly making EC-endorsed “on behalf of the SIG” nominations of outstanding senior members. There is a general belief among the SIG members that being elevated to Fellow status is such a tightly guarded process that there is no point seeking it, regardless of their level of contribution to the SIG, to ACM, or to the wider computing community; and regardless of their seniority within the profession.
Volunteers
In addition to the elected officers, SIGIR is served by a large community of volunteers:
Asia Regional Representative to the EC: Tetsuya Sakai
Forum Editors: Ian Ruthven & Diane Kelly
SIG-IRList Editor: Mark Smucker
Information Director: Djoerd Hiemstra
JCDL Liaison: Edie Rasmussen
CIKM Liaison: Justin Zobel
WSDM Liaison: Ricardo Baeza-Yates
SIGIR thanks them all for their work on behalf of the IR community during the last year.
Elections
Elections were held in 2010 to form a new SIGIR Executive Committee. Mark Sanderson took responsibility for collating a slate of outstanding volunteers, and from amongst them the following were elected to serve three-year terms through until June 2013:
Chair: James Allan
Vice-Chair: Ian Ruthven
Treasurer: Ian Soboroff
Secretary: Andrew Trotman
Summary
SIGIR had another productive and successful year, with important intellectual and social contributions. Our conferences have been successful in all senses (with strong technical content and good international participation), and our financial situation is quite healthy. Perhaps most importantly, we continue to have very strong participation in ACM SIGIR by the international IR community, especially in a willingness to serve as volunteers for conference and SIG-related activities. The outgoing Executive Committee thanks the IR community for its help during the past year; congratulates the new Executive Committee on their election; and wishes them well for the next three years of SIGIR.
SIGITE FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009 – June 2010
Submitted by: Mark Stockman, Chair
During Fiscal Year 2010 SIGITE continued its discussion on IT as an academic discipline and mulled over strategies for expanding membership, paper submissions, an active volunteer base, and conference attendance. This report will provide an overview of this as well as updates on emerging initiatives of the SIG.
Conference
The annual SIGITE conference remains the primary focus of SIGITE and continues to have a loyal core of participants. SIGITE 2009 was no exception to this, hosted by George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Attendance was down a bit from 2008 to around 100, but considering the economy that number is certainly as positive and at a similar level to past conferences.
SIGITE leadership was disappointed with the relative low paper submission rate (only 72 from a membership of over 400) as well as the higher acceptance rate (68%). The vast majority of those papers were of very good quality. There were however, a few papers that were not up to the standards of SIGITE. To address this problem, the SIG has embarked on strategies to assure higher quality reviews for future conferences. For the SIGITE 2010 conference for example, the program chairs pushed to get an additional set of reviewing eyes on each paper. In the future the SIG also hopes to provide additional guidelines for reviewers and perhaps make it obligatory for all individuals submitting papers to also perform reviews (adding even more reviews for each paper).
Now becoming a norm, the conference was preceded with an IT department chairs meeting. With feedback garnered from previous years, this time the meeting was less formal than in the past. Participants again were quite happy with this meeting to share ideas and look forward to future meetings.
Thanks to Don Gantz from GMU who served as General Chair of the 2009 conference. While there was some hesitation to the fact that the conference was held on campus rather than at the hotel where attendees were staying, in the end Don and his staff at GME made it work without a flaw. Daniel Garrison in particular worked closely with Don on the local arrangements and pulled a double duty by also serving as Program Chair along side Ken Baker. Daniel and Ken did a fine job pulling together a stimulating program, our gratitude goes out to them for this hard work and J. Ekstrom (former program chair) for his assistance in the process. Henry Walker from Grinnell University again allowed us to use his submission engine for the review process, our thanks to him for this.
SIGITE 2010 will be hosted by Central Michigan University from October 7-9 in Midland, Michigan. Two steps were taken to further encourage research papers submissions to the SIGITE conference. First, SIGITE is providing scholarships to accepted student research papers amounting to a free conference registration and a $200 travel reimbursement. Second, SIGITE has partnered with ACM-W to participate in their own student scholarship program that provides scholarships in the amount of $600 to female student conference participants. SIGITE 2010 will also pickup a past norm of awarding a Best Paper award.
Early planning is being done for SIGITE 2011 to be hosted by the United States Military Academy whose faculty have been active members of SIGITE.
Another step towards increasing the quality of paper submissions to the conference and review participation will be the implementation of new system based on research by Rob Friedman of New Jersey Institute of Technology. This system is based on his work, An Open Knowledge Exchange System (OKES) to Promote Meta-Disciplinary Collaboration Based on Socio-Technical Principles for which he has received NSF support to implement. The OKES will be implemented during the SIGITE 2011 review process offering authors the option of having their abstracts open to view by registered SIGITE members (their peers), thereby creating opportunities for feedback beyond the traditional blind peer review system, and collaboration on papers by the authors and commentators showing interest.
Finances
SIGITE’s fund balance continues to grow now to over $75,000 up $10,000 from a year ago. The SIG will look to use some of these monies towards expanding membership and participation in SIGITE.
Membership
Membership in SIGITE remains at just over 400. Significant discussions remain in the SIGITE Executive Committee about how to increase membership in the SIG. Terry Steinbach, SIGITE's Secretary/Treasurer, has agreed to assemble a plan utilizing the Regional Representatives from the Executive Committee to address this plateau from past growth. Initiatives described above to strengthen the conference will also create more interest in membership to SIGITE.
Activities
The activities of SIGITE will continue to focus on strengthening the conference and thereby membership. In addition however, there are a few initiatives being worked on by the organization.
After the successful creation of the 4-year IT model curriculum, SIGITE is in the process of completing its first draft of the 2-year IT model curriculum. Deborah Boisvert is leading this effort and her committee is nearing completion of a draft to be presented to the SIGITE membership for comment. The number of 2-year degrees available in the IT discipline space is significant. The hope is that this model will assist them and give the faculty within these programs exposure to SIGITE as a venue for discussion about IT as a discipline.
SIGITE is also happy to now be part of two groups defining the future of computing education. The Computing Education Coordinating Council is starting to get off the ground, as participants in this council it is our hope to further define and promote computing and its associated educational component. SIGITE is also pleased to now have a representative serving on the ACM Education Board making decisions on the future of computing education.
Future Challenges
As stated above, the current and future challenge faced by SIGITE as it was last year is maintaining and growing an active membership and volunteer base. It is believed that the vast majority of the computing faculty population, which could be served by SIGITE, still has no knowledge of the SIG or what is has to offer. A concerted effort is being made to address this situation.
In Memoriam
SIGITE is sad to report the loss this year of one of its most loyal members and volunteers, Jack Krichen. Dr. Krichen has served as a Conference Chair for SIGITE and more recently as Communications/Web Chair for the SIG till his death this past spring. He frequently published papers in the SIGITE conference proceedings, participating from the inception of SIG. Our friend Jack will without a doubt be a missed presence at future SIGITE conferences.
SIGKDD FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009-June 2010
Submitted by: Usama M. Fayyad, SIGKDD Chair
1. Annual Awards
ACM SIGKDD 2010 Innovation Award to Prof. Christos Faloutsos - Jun 22, 2010.Citation: for contributions to graph and multimedia mining, fractals, self-similarity and power laws; indexing for multimedia and bioinformatics data, and data base performance evaluation.
ACM SIGKDD 2010 Service Award to Prof. Osmar R. Zaiane - Jun 22, 2010. Citation: for his significant service and contributions to the global KDD community.
The 2009 SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation award has attracted a high number of excellent applicants. The winner was
Jure Leskovec, for his dissertation "Dynamics of Large Networks” (advisor: Christos Faloutsos, Carnegie Mellon University).
Runner up was Arthur Zimek, dissertation "Correlation Clustering" (advisor: Hans-Peter Kriegel, Ludwig Maximilians University, Germany).
Honorable mentions were given to
• Dr. Aris Gkoulalas-Divanis (Dissertation: "From Itemsets Through Trajectories to Location Based Services: A Knowledge Hiding Privacy Approach"; Advisors: Elias Houstis and Vassilios Verykios, University of Thessaly, Greece) and
• Dr. Hong Cheng (Dissertation: "Towards Accurate and Efficient Classification: A Discriminative and Frequent Pattern-Based Approach"; Advisor: Jiawei Han, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Both finalists will also be recognized at the opening ceremonies and will receive a certificate of recognition.
All annual awards were presented at KDD-09 Conference in Paris.
The 2010 Dissertation Awards will be announced in July 2010 and will be awarded at the SIGKDD-2010 conference in Washington, D.C. July 25, 2010
2. Significant Publications
The KDD 2009 annual conference maintained SIGKDD position as the leading conference on data mining and knowledge discovery, with a record 659 submissions (21% acceptance rate).
Among the topics presented at KDD-09 were Social networks, Recommender systems, Clustering, Temporal & Streams Mining, Anomaly detection, Graph mining, Text mining, Search and advertising, Security and Privacy, Enterprise & Finance applications, Telecom applications, and Information Extraction & Text Mining.
Best Research Paper award was given to:
Collaborative Filtering with Temporal Dynamics, by Yehuda Koren
Best Research Paper Runner-up paper was:
A LRT Framework for Fast Spatial Anomaly Detection, by Mingxi Wu, Xiuyao Song, Chris Jermaine, Sanjay Ranka, John Gums
Best Student Paper Winner:
Anonymizing Healthcare Data: A Case Study on the Blood Transfusion Service, by Noman Mohammed, Benjamin C. M. Fung, Patrick C. K. Hung, Cheuk-kwong Lee
Best Student Paper Runner-up was:
Optimizing Web Traffic via the Media Scheduling Problem, by Lars Backstrom, Jon Kleinberg, Ravi Kumar
KDD-09 Conference continued to have strong participation of the industrial researchers, as evidenced by the record 122 papers submitted to the industrial track (34 accepted).
The Best Application Paper award was given to
Large-Scale Behavioral Targeting, by Ye Chen, Dmitry Pavlov, John Canny
The Best Application runner-up was:
Sustainable Operation and Management of Data Center Chillers using Temporal Data Mining by Debprakash Patnaiky, Manish Marwah, Ratnesh Sharma, Naren Ramakrishnany
The KDD-2009 conference held in Paris in June 28-July 1, and attracted 770 attendees, continuing the tradition of being the largest conference in the field.
2.1 Workshops and Tutorials
In addition, KDD 2009 hosted 11 Workshops and 7 Tutorials.
Full-day Workshops
* W1 - Statistical and Relational Learning and Mining in Bioinformatics (StReBio'09)
* W2 - The 3rd International Workshop on Knowledge Discovery from Sensor Data (SensorKDD-2009)
* W3 - ACM SIGKDD Workshop on CyberSecurity and Intelligence Informatics (CSI-KDD)
* W4 - Workshop on Visual Analytics and Knowledge Discovery (VAKD '09)
* W5 - The Third International Workshop on Data Mining and Audience Intelligence for Advertising (ADKDD)
* W6 - The 3rd Workshop on Social Network Mining and Analysis (SNA-KDD)
Half-day Workshops
* W7 - Human Computation Workshop (HCOMP 2009)
* W8 - Data Mining using Matrices and Tensors (DMMT'09)
* W9 - Third Workshop on Data Mining Case Studies and Practice Prize (DMCS)
* W10 - KDD cup 2009: Fast Scoring on a Large Database (KDDcup09)
* W11 - The First ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Knowledge Discovery from Uncertain Data (U'09)
Tutorials topics included:
• Mining Large Time-evolving Data Using Matrix and Tensor Tools
• A Statistical Framework for Mining Data Streams
• Statistical Modeling of Relational Data
• From Trees to Forests and Rule Sets -- A Unified Overview of Ensemble Methods.
• Learning Bayesian Networks
• Time Series Classification
• Mining Shape and Time Series Databases with Symbolic Representations
2.2 SIGKDD Video Releases: the KDD-2009 conference program videos are released
We released the full video program of KDD-2009, all recorded material is published in video format on:
2.2 SIGKDD Explorations
SIGKDD Explorations published two issues:
June 2009, Volume 11, issue 1: this issue included a special focus on: Special Issue: Open Source Analytics
December 2009, Volume 11, Issue 2: this issue included a special issue focusing on: Special Issue: on Visual Analytics and Knowledge Discovery
3. Significant programs that provided a springboard for further technical efforts
ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (TKDD), , with Jiawei Han as editor in Chief, has established itself as a top-tier journal for the field. TKDD published 4 issues in 2007 and 2008, respectively, and 3 issues in 2009 so far.
4. Innovative programs which provide service to some part of your technical community
KDD-09 featured a novel conference social networking and scheduling platform,
It provided conference attendees with many useful abilities, including managing conference schedule, meeting each other, and commenting on papers. SIGKDD is in process of evaluating the success of this effort.
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.
Some of the key issues for SIGKDD and SIGKDD members:
• Maintaining effective SIGKDD operation after transfer to new SIGKDD leadership.
• Difficulty in getting industry participation in KDD conference
• Growing rift in the relevance of problems that academia can work on due to the difficulty of getting access to large real-world data, with some of the most important data and research problems locked inside Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and other web “giants”.
• Getting new membership and especially student members
• Negative perception of “data mining” in the US (and sometimes reality) that data mining is a technology which invades privacy (e.g. Recent NH and VT laws prohibiting “prescription data mining”)
• Addressing issues of data privacy and the role of data mining positive or negative in that arena
• Competitive pressure from a new generation of APPLIED conferences that are drawing attention and causing some attention pressure. KDD-2010 is responding by creating an additional applied invited track on predictive analytics as well as new formats for fireside chat on important topic and special applied panels.
SIGMETRICS FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009 - June 2010
Submitted by: Carey Williamson, Chair
It was another active year for ACM SIGMETRICS, featuring an expanded awards program, a strong annual conference, and a celebration of our SIG history.
Awards
------
Dr. Jeffrey P. Buzen was selected as the recipient of the 2010 ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award. This prestigious award recognizes his influential contributions to queuing network modeling and performance evaluation.
Dr. Buzen's central server model and convolution algorithm, which he developed while working on his
1971 doctoral thesis at Harvard University, revolutionized the study of queuing network models. Dr. Buzen further reshaped the field of performance evaluation with his theory of operational analysis, a novel approach to deriving and understanding queuing network formulae that he introduced in 1976.
Dr. Buzen received his award at the ACM SIGMETRICS 2010 conference at Columbia University in New York in June 2010.
The citation for the award was:
"For seminal contributions to the analytical modeling of computer performance and for broad industry
impact through the successful commercialization of performance modeling software"
Dr. Milan Vojnovic was the recipient of the 2010 ACM SIGMETRICS Rising Star Researcher Award, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the analysis and performance-oriented design of computer systems and services.
Dr. Vojnovic is a Researcher with the Systems and Networking group at Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK. He received his Ph.D. in Communication Systems from EPFL, Switzerland, in 2003, and both M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Split, Croatia, in 1998 and 1995, respectively. His research interests are in the architecture and performance evaluation of computer systems and services. In particular, algorithms and systems for data transport, information
dissemination, mobile computing, decentralized network systems and services, online services, and algorithms for processing of large-scale data. He has received multiple paper awards, including Best Student Paper at ITC in 2001 and IEEE IWQoS in 2007, and Best Paper at IEEE INFOCOM 2005
and ACM SIGMETRICS 2005.
Dr. Vojnovic received his award at the ACM SIGMETRICS 2010 conference at Columbia University in New York in June 2010.
Our SIG presented its inaugural "Test of Time" awards at the ACM SIGMETRICS 2010 conference as well. We honoured three papers from the early years of SIGMETRICS conferences (1973-1999).
The honoured papers were:
"Fundamental laws of computer system performance" by Jeffrey P. Buzen (ACM SIGMETRICS 1976)
"A comparison of receiver-initiated and sender-initiated adaptive load sharing" by Derek Eager, Ed Lazowska, John Zahorjan (ACM SIGMETRICS 1985)
"Self-similarity in World Wide Web traffic: evidence and possible causes" by Mark Crovella and Azer Bestavros (ACM SIGMETRICS 1996)
In future years, we will present at most one Test of Time award each year, honouring a paper from 10-12 years prior.
Conference Activities
---------------------
The annual ACM SIGMETRICS conference is the premier forum for high quality performance evaluation research.
The 2010 conference took place at Columbia University in New York, NY, with Vishal Misra (Columbia University) as the General Chair. The Program Chairs were Paul Barford (University of Wisconsin--Madison) and Mark Squillante (IBM Research).
About 200 paper submissions were received, with 29 of these (14%) accepted for the conference. The accepted papers covered a broad range of topics, including theoretical performance analysis, measurements, peer-to-peer systems, streaming, Internet, wireless, storage, and energy conservation.
A summary of ACM SIGMETRICS 2010 follows, including attendance, finances, and logistics. Attendance was 142 paid attendees, very similar to last year in Seattle. Finances were very good, thanks to record-high sponsorship fund-raising of approximately $32K. The current projections are for a small surplus from the conference, ranging from $10K-12K. The conference ran very smoothly. Vishal identified Gil Zussman as the MVP on his organizing committee who handled many of the logistical details for the conference.
Several workshops are included as part of the overall conference week, including MAMA (MAthematical performance Modeling and Analysis), Green Metrics, and HotMetrics (Hot Topics in Metrics). MAMA continues to be a high-profile and popular event. Concerns were raised about the ongoing viability of the HotMetrics workshop, since submissions and attendance were very low this year.
The main conference was 3 full days, with 29 papers, 22 posters, 3 invited talks, a featured panel, and a student-industry event. The main conference took place mid-week (Tues-Thurs) with the workshops
provided as bookends on Monday and Friday.
The general feedback on the conference was very positive. The technical content of the conference was very strong, though a bit too theoretical, according to some of the attendees. The meeting facilities and quality of the food were good. The banquet was held on a cruise boat that toured past the Statue
of Liberty in the harbour. Attendees enjoyed the outing immensely.
Two papers received awards at the conference. The Best Paper award was presented to A. Ganesh (Bristol University), S. Lilienthal (Cambridge University), D. Manjunath (IIT Mumbai), A. Proutiere (Microsoft Research), and F. Simatos (INRIA) for their work on "Load Balancing via Randomized Local Search in Closed and Open Systems". The Kenneth C. Sevcik Outstanding Student Paper Award went to Amin Karbasi (EPFL) and Sewoong Oh (Stanford University) for their paper "Distributed Sensor Network Localization from Local Connectivity: Performance Analysis for the HOP-TERRAIN Algorithm".
Both of the authors were students.
The SIGMETRICS 2011 conference will be part of ACM's Federated Computing Research Conference (FCRC) in San Jose, California, in June 2011.
We are exploring options for holding SIGMETRICS/Performance 2012 (jointly between ACM and IFIP WG 7.3) in Europe, most likely in the UK.
New Initiatives
---------------
One of our main initiatives this past year was documenting our SIG history. With assistance from ACM HQ, the ACM Digital Library, and our members, we have compiled a history of SIGMETRICS officers
and our conference series over the past 35 years. This information is now on the SIGMETRICS Web site. We have augmented this data with some anecdotes and facts about each decade of SIG activity. We also ran a SIGMETRICS trivia contest at ACM SIGMETRICS 2010. The questions and answers for the trivia quiz are now on the Web site as well.
The biggest priority for our SIG at the moment is our proposal for a new transactions-style journal, tentatively called ACM Transactions on Modeling and Performance Evaluation (ToMPE). We are currently revising the proposal that was submitted to the ACM Publications Board previously, based on the feedback from ACM and several other SIGs. We hope to have the journal approved by the end of the calendar year.
We are contemplating preparing a commemorative CD for our SIG's 40th birthday in November 2011.
Issues and Challenges
---------------------
The never-ending challenges for our SIG are visibility and membership. We have addressed visibility with a revamped Web site, and a broader range of partnerships with other conferences, including ICPE (formerly WOSP), IMC, QEST, SenSys, and ValueTools. Regarding membership, we have polled
several former members to find out why their memberships have lapsed. Common reasons include job changes, the economy, and the ACM Digital Library. We hope that the proposed journal, the Test of Time awards, and the possible commemorative CD will help rekindle SIG interest from some of our former members, and recruit and retain new ones. We expect some growth in our membership as these plans move forward.
SIGMICRO FY'10 ANNUAL REPORT
July 2009- June 2010
Submitted by: Erik Altman, Chair
The following are highlights of SIGMICRO's activities during fiscal year 2010.
SIGMICRO has worked to ensure the success of our flagship MICRO conference. MICRO celebrated its 42nd anniversary last year in the hustle and bustle of Manhattan's Times Square with an excellent technical program, outing, and high attendance. SIGMICRO has also helped start and support several other major conferences since 2001: CASES, CGO, and Computing Frontiers. All are doing well as reported below. As also reported below, we have a strong program to encourage attendance at our conferences by students and those facing financial hardship, with numerous travel grants provided to help defray cost of attendance, in addition to heavily discounted student registration rates. Our ambitious history project is nearing completion. SIGMICRO has also been active in organizing and funding a "Bob Rau" award to recognize excellence in microarchitecture and closely related fields.
SIGMICRO CONFERENCE Activities
MICRO-42: December 12-16, 2009
SIGMICRO's flagship conference was successful with turnout of 365 people, 153 of whom were students. In addition the conference had 209 submissions --a near record in the last 12 years and more than double the number received a dozen years ago in 1997. The exciting Times-Square venue may have helped push these numbers. With ACM's help, Micro was able to secure very attractive hotel rates at the depths of the financial crisis, and the gamble paid off that the economy would improve and the location would draw attendees. The conference ended with almost a $39,000 surplus, approximately 1/6 of revenue. In addition to these outstanding numbers, Micro enjoyed excellent technical talks, keynotes, workshops, and tutorials, and very effective organization by co-chairs Margaret Martonosi and David Albonesi, who managed to raise over $40,000 in corporate donations. As testament to this excellence, Micro polled attendees using and received over 100 responses, with large majorities in all categories ranking the conference as "Excellent" or "Good".
In all, 40 papers were accepted from a near record total of 210 submissions, an increase of more than 25% over the previous year. There were also 5 workshops and 6 tutorials. Micro provided $5000 for
student travel grants and for the first time also offered grants to those with hardships attending the conference. Finally, the Times Square location allowed Irene Frawley, SIGMICRO's liaison at ACM to attend and provide valuable comments and adjudication at the MICRO business meeting.
Location: New York, NY
Outings: Naples 45 Restaurant (Officially) and unofficial events at BB King's Heartland Brewery, and Rockefeller Center Ice Rink.
General Co-Chairs: Margaret Martonosi, Princeton and David Albonesi (Cornell) Program Co-Chairs: Paolo Faraboschi, HP Labs and Steve Keckler, UT-Austin
Keynotes: Balaram Sinharoy (IBM), Mark Horowitz (Stanford)
(Continued)
MICRO-42: December 12-16, 2009 (Continued)
6 Tutorials:
• The PARSEC Benchmark Suite
• SimFlex and ProtoFlex: Fast, Accurate, and Flexible Simulation of Computer Systems
• Building Dynamic Instrumentation Tools with DynamoRIO
• Archer --Deploying Zero-configuration Virtual Appliances for Architecture Simulation
• Integrated Multi-core Modeling
• GPGPU-Sim: A Performance Simulator for Massively Multithreaded Processor Research
5 Workshops:
• Network on Chip Architectures (NoCArc)
• Binary Instrumentation Systems and Applications
• New Directions in Computer Architecture
• Photonic Interconnects & Computer Architecture (PICA)
• Computer Architecture Education
Best Paper Award:
"The BubbleWrap Many-core: Popping Cores for Sequential Acceleration", Ulya R. Kargpuzcu, Brian Greskamp, and Josep Torellas – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Best Student Presentation Award:
"Light Speed Arbitration and Flow Control for Nanophotonic Interconnects"
Dana Vantrease – University of Wisconsin, Madison
Student travel: $6000 donated by SIGMICRO.
CGO 2010: April 24 -28, 2010
Also Co-Sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN.
CGO [Code Generation and Optimization] continued to attract high quality papers and sessions at its 7th annual conference. Submissions remained at 70, the same as the previous year, and of those 70 submissions, 29 papers were accepted. In addition, CGO 2010 featured two keynotes, a welcome reception / student poster session, and numerous workshops and tutorials. Indeed, there were 4 workshops and 4 tutorials, compared to 4 workshops and only 1 tutorial the previous year.
Location: Marriott Bloor Yorkville Hotel, Toronto, Canada
General Chairs: Andreas Moshovos, U of Toronto and Greg Steffan, U of Toronto Program Chairs: Kim Hazelwood, U of Virginia and David Kaeli, Northeastern U
Keynotes: Ben Zorn (Microsoft Research) Chris (CJ) Newburn (Intel)
4 Tutorials:
• Building Dynamic Instrumentation Tools with DynamoRIO
• The Speedup-Test
• Transactional Memory for C/C++
• Detailed PIN! Binary Instrumentation Tool
4 Workshops:
• Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing
• Architectures and Compiler Technology
• Infrastructures for Software/Hardware Co-design
• Optimizations for DSP and Embedded Systems
Best Paper Award:
"PinPlay: A Framework for Deterministic Replay and Reproducible Analysis of Parallel Programs," by Harish Patil, Cristiano Pereira, Mack Stallcup, Gregory Lueck and James Cownie.
Best Student Presentation Awards:
"An Efficient Software Transactional Memory Using Commit-Time Invalidation"
Justin Gottschlich
"Contention Aware Execution: Online Contention Detection and Response"
Jason Mars
Student travel: $1000 in grants from SIGMICRO.
CASES 2009: October 11-16, 2009
Also in cooperation with ACM SIGBED
CASES [Compilers, Architecture, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems] joined two other embedded systems conferences in 2006 to create a larger "ESWeek" grouping and promote cross-fertilization of efforts in the embedded area. The combination of conferences was a success, and ESWeek was has been repeated since, with the 2009 version in Grenoble, France. In all, 72 submissions were received, of which 31 were accepted. There were also 7 workshops.
Location: Grenoble, France
One of 3 Conferences in Embedded Systems Week:
•CASES
• CODES+ISSS (Co-sponsored by ACM SIGDA and SIGBED)
• EMSOFT (Sponsored by ACM SIGBED)
General Co-Chairs: Wayne Wolf, Georgia Institute of Technology and Donatella Sciuto, Politecnico di Milano
Program Chair: Joerg Henkel and Sri Parameswaran
Keynotes: Carol de Vries, Vice president R&D Business Unit Automotive NXP Semiconductors
Hermann Kopetz
Vienna University of Technology
Martin Nally,
Chief Technical Officer, IBM Rational Software
Best Paper Award:
"Tabu Search-Based Synthesis of Dynamically Reconfigurable Digital Microfluidic Biochips," by Elena Maftei, Paul Pop, and Jan Madsen
Computing Frontiers 2009: May 16 -19, 2010
Computing Frontiers continued to attract high quality papers on futuristic ideas on the frontier of computing. Submission rates continued to be similar to most previous years, with 113 papers submitted, of which 30 were accepted. There were also 25 posters each allotted a "lightning talk" of 3 minutes. For the first time, Computing Frontiers moved its location from its traditional venue: the island of Ischia, near Naples, Italy. However, it did not move far, relocating to Bertinero, Italy -approximately half-way between Bologna and the Adriatic coast town of Rimini
Location: Bertinero, Italy
General Chair: Nancy Amato, Texas A&M University,
Program Co-Chairs: Hubertus Franke, IBM Research Paul H J Kelly, Imperial College London
Keynotes: Ozalp Babaoglu, University of Bologna Daniela Rus, MIT
Workshop:
Intel Parallel Programming Workshop
Student travel: $3000 in grants
FUTURE PLANS
We are working to improve the value of SIGMICRO to its members:
• In consultation with the Micro Conference Steering Committee, we are nearing completion of a new "Bob Rau" Award to recognize excellence in microarchitecture and closely related fields. SIGMICRO has pledged $5000 initially and $20,000 over 20 years to fund this award.
• SIGMICRO has expanded the Micro Hall of Fame, recognizing those authors with 8 or more papers since the conference inception in 1967. Unfortunately, we currently lack good records for Micro-1 through Micro-4, and hope this omission is soon remedied. The Hall of Fame currently has 31 members, with two new members inducted in 2009: Norman Jouppi and Mikko Lipasti.
• We are working to capture SIGMICRO history, via an oral history project under the auspices of the larger ACM oral history project. Yan Solihin of North Carolina State is leading this effort, and has begun his work with the first person to be interviewed. These oral histories will be available to SIGMICRO members via the Digital Library. The first set of interviews for the oral history have been completed for Edward Davidson and Bob Colwell. Those histories are currently being transcribed and summarized.
We are also exploring other ways to add value:
• Providing simplified mechanism for ACM and SIGMICRO membership when registering for our flagship MICRO Conference.
• Encouraging qualified members of SIGMICRO to become Senior and Distinguished ACM Members.
• Providing a discount on SIGMICRO membership for members of other SIGs. Joint membership helps encourage cross-pollination of ideas and areas, which often leads to productive results.
• Minimizing conflicts between conferences dates.
LEADERSHIP
The leadership of SIGMICRO remained stable in FY2010.
Chair: Erik Altman (IBM)
Vice-Chair Lizy John (University of Texas, Austin)
Secretary-Treasurer: Milos Prvulovic (Georgia Technological University)
Members-at-Large: Jim Dehnert (Google)
David Kaeli (Northeastern University)
Sally McKee (Cornell University)
SIGMIS FY’10Annual Report
July 2009- June 2010
Submitted by: Janice C. Sipior, Chair
Mission and Overview
SIGMIS is the Special Interest Group on Management Information Systems of the ACM. Members of SIGMIS are interested in information systems and technologies for management and the management of these systems and technologies. SIGMIS was founded in 1961 as the Special Interest Group on Business Data Processing and later was known as the Special Interest Group on Business Information Technology. SIGMIS publishes The Data Base for Advances in Information Systems (Data Base, for short) and holds the annual SIGMIS CPR conference dedicated to computer personnel research. SIGMIS also participates in the annual International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) and the annual International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) TC8 committee, as well as other conferences. SIGMIS promotes student achievement and partners with other organizations to provide services to members and to the profession.
Summary of Recent Accomplishments
During FY’10, some of the major events and accomplishments of SIGMIS include:
• Held the SIGMIS CPR Conference May 20-22, 2010 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
o Awarded the “Magid Igbaria Outstanding Conference Paper of the Year Award”
• In-cooperation with the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS2009) December 15-18, 2009 in Phoenix, Arizona USA
o Sponsored the Doctoral Dissertation Paper Award
o Held the ninth annual reception for SIGMIS members at ICIS2009
• Continued to represent ACM as a member of a select group to develop model curriculum for education in IS, both at the undergraduate and graduate level
• Continued to fund a representative to the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP)
1. Awards
Beginning with ICIS 1995, SIGMIS became the sponsor of the ICIS MIS Doctoral Dissertation Award. In 2009, the award was given to Nicholas Berente for his dissertation entitled, "Institutional Logics and Loosely Coupled Practices: The Case of NASA's Enterprise Information System Implementation," completed at Case Western Reserve University. Additionally, we had second and third place recipients this year. Second place was awarded to James Howison for his dissertation entitled, "Layered Collaboration: A Socio-Technical Theory of Motivation and Organization for Free and Open Source Software Development," completed at Syracuse University. Third place was awarded to Hong Guo for his dissertation entitled, "For Whom the Bell Tolls: A Two-Sided Market Analysis and Public Policy Implications for the Net Neutrality Debate," completed at University of Florida.
The recipients of the “Magid Igbaria Outstanding Conference Paper of the Year Award” at the 2010 SIGMIS CPR Conference are Maung Sein, University of Agder and Stig Nordheim, University of Agder, for their paper entitled “Learning Processes in User Training: The Case for Hermeneutics.”
2. Papers
SIGMIS held the SIGMIS CPR Conference May 20-22, 2010 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The conference program is available from the SIGMIS blog website at:
or directly at:
.
Additionally, SIGMIS publishes The Data Base for Advances in Information Systems (Data Base, for short), a quarterly peer-reviewed publication devoted to communicating advances in research and best practice in MIS. Beginning in January 2007, the editorship transitioned to Tom Stafford of the University of Memphis, who added Global Co-Editor Patrick Y.K. Chau, University of Hong Kong. Colleen Schwarz of Louisiana State University is the Managing Editor. For the current and previous issues of Data Base, please visit the SIGMIS website or go directly to .
3. Programs
To promote professional interaction among SIGMIS members, the ninth annual reception at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS2009) was held on Monday, December 14, 2009 in Phoenix, Arizona USA, just prior to the conference December 15-18, 2009.
4. Service to MIS Community
In conjunction with representatives of the Association for Information Systems (AIS), SIGMIS has been involved in the development of model curriculum for education in information systems both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The latest version of the curriculum, IS 2010 Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Information Systems, has been finalized. IS 2010 is now available as a Communications of the Association for Information Systems (CAIS) article at . The ACM news release is available at: .
Additionally, the ACM and the IEEE Computing Society are founders of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). IFIP acts on behalf of member societies in carrying out international cooperation to advance the information processing profession. SIGMIS continues to fund the attendance of the ACM's representative for one of the annual meetings of IFIP to promote involvement among the membership of SIGMIS and IFIP.
5. Key Issues
Plans for forthcoming annual CPR Conferences are underway. We discussed potential hosts at the SIGMIS Business Meeting at CPR 2010. The 2011 conference will be held in San Antonio, TX USA. The Conference Chair is Cindy Riemenschneider. We are now in the process of following up on suggestions for hosts for subsequent CPR conferences.
SIGMM FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009 – June 2010
Submitted by: Klara Nahrstedt, SIGMM Chair
1. Awards
Over the last year 2009-2010, we have given out one SIGMM-wide award, the SIGMM Technical Achievement award 2009 to Dr. Lawrence Rowe from FXPal, USA for his technical achievements in the area of multimedia streaming and compression. The SIGMM Technical Achievement award was presented to Dr. Rowe at the SIGMM premier conference, the ACM International Conference on Multimedia 2009, held in October 2009 in Beijing, China.
At the ACM Multimedia 2010, held in Florence, Italy, we will be presenting our 3rd SIGMM Technical Achievement award 2010 to Prof. Ramesh Jain from UC Irvine for his technical achievements in the area of multimedia processing, retrieval and applications.
The awardees for 2009 and 2010 were selected by the SIGMM awards committee, consisting of Prof. Georganas, Dr. Zhang, SIGMM officer, Prof. Effelsberg (2009) and SIGMM officer, Prof. Rainer Lienhart (2010).
Our ACM TOMCCAP (Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communication and Applications) journal and its editorial board acknowledged every year at the ACM Multimedia conference the best TOMMCAP associate editor who provides most excellent services to the authors, reviewers, and the community. In 2009, Prof. Shervin Shirmohammadi from University of Ottawa was named the best associate editor of ACM TOMCCAP.
In 2009, we have applied for the SIGMM Best PhD thesis award which was approved and will be presented for the first time at the ACM International Conference on Multimedia 2010, held in October 2010 in Florence, Italy. We will present our first SIGMM Best PhD thesis award to Effrosyni Kokiopoulou from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. The SIGMM awards committee for this award consisted of Prof. Svetha Venkatesh, Prof. Dick Bulterman and SIGMM officer, Prof. Rainer Lienhart.
At our SIGMM-sponsored conferences, we have given out various conference-specific awards as follows:
a. ACM Multimedia 2009: we have given out Best Papers award, Open Source Competition award, Grand Challenge award, Grant Challenge Participants for Most Practical Applications, Grand Challenge Participants for Best Presentation, and Student Travel award.
b. ACM CIVR 2010 (International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval): we have given out the best paper award.
c. ACM CIVR 2009: we have given out a best paper award.
2. Significant papers
There were several papers on new areas published in SIGMM-sponsored proceedings:
a. ACM Multimedia 2009:
a. We had papers/presentations in the brave new topics session that indicated a strong and new connection between neuro-scientists and image processing researchers.
b. We had research papers in interactive art, connected with a very interesting multimedia art exhibition.
c. We had interesting sessions/papers on learning and concept detection in multimedia; 3D mesh streaming, and much wider set of interesting papers on audio and music research.
d. Major research and significant papers are happening in Quality of Experience (QoE) as well as connecting QoE with underlying Quality of Service. This conference had a keynote speaker in this area as well as session with interesting papers.
b. ACM NOSSDAV 2009:
a. Significant papers started to come out in the areas of Understanding and Improving User Experiences by the multimedia systems and networking designers, i.e., connecting the user experiences with the underlying system and networking platforms.
c. ACM Multimedia Systems 2010:
a. New papers appeared that combine multimedia systems and networking issues with narrative-driven virtual worlds, convergence of games, multimedia and real-world sensors, and reconfigurable video coders.
d. ACM CIVR 2009:
a. The best paper and hence significant paper that combines relevance learning with social image retrieval was “Unsupervised Multi-Feature Tag Relevance Learning for Social Image Retrieval” by X. Li et al. from University of Amsterdam.
e. ACM CIVR 2010:
a. The best paper represents the significant paper in this venue: “ Real-time Bag of Words, Approximately” by J. Uijlings et al.
f. ACM MIR 2010:
a. Special sessions had interesting papers combining (1) statistical modeling and learning for multimedia, (2) processing data streams from body sensor networks and (3) multi-modal music information retrieval.
3. Significant programs
Throughout the SIGMM-sponsored conferences we had several significant programs that provided a springboard for future technical efforts:
a. ACM Multimedia 2009:
a. Highlight of this conference was the Multimedia Grand Challenge program organized for the first time as a part of the conference program. Multimedia Grand Challenge is a set of problems and issues from a number of industry leaders geared to engage the multimedia research community in solving relevant, interesting and challenging questions about the industry’s 2-5 year horizon for multimedia. Researchers were encouraged to submit working systems in response to the challenge. A large number of submissions were received for this first edition of the competition. We will be continuing with this challenge in ACM Multimedia 2010.
b. ACM NOSSDAV 2009:
a. We had a keynote speaker from a computer graphics area, Prof. Fuchs, who talked about the experiences in building 3D tele-immersive interactive systems for medical domain, and encouraging new directions.
c. ACM CIVR 2009:
a. VideOlympics – an informal competition in which several state-of-the art systems are competing simultaneously on a video retrieval task.
d. ACM MIR 2010:
a. MIRFLICKR Evaluation: The challenge of visual concept detection
4. Innovative programs
Several SIGMM-sponsored conferences had innovative programs which provided service to technical community:
a. ACM Multimedia 2009:
a. Open Source Competition brings major service to technical community since software is then released to the community with corresponding agreements in place.
b. ACM MMSys 2010:
a. Session of four invited speakers/papers from a diverse set of viewpoints on 3D worlds, games, sensors in games, and video gaming standards.
c. ACM CIVR 2009:
a. Participation of CIVR practitioners such as content owners, creators, archivists, service providers, and policy makers.
d. ACM CIVR 2010:
a. Practitioners’ Day included two sessions showing Asia perspectives and European perspectives in Image and Video Retrieval.
e. ACM MIR 2010:
a. Mini-poster and mini-demo Introduction allowed each presenter in 1 minute to introduce his/her poster and/or demo and entice audience to come to his/her poster and/or demonstration
b. Industrial leadership session included invited speakers from industry to talk about research opportunities, challenges, and emerging multimedia technologies
5. Brief summary for the key issues that the memberships of SIGMM will have to deal with in the next 2-3 years
The key issues are:
a. Change by-laws of SIGMM to represent better the changes happening in the SIGMM community, e.g., extending the SIGMM officers’ time from 2 years to 3 years in first term and then allowing serve each officer two terms.
b. Prepare special events to celebrate 20th anniversary of ACM Multimedia conference in 2012.
c. Come up with a sustainable funding model for the multimedia art community within the SIGMM community and their participation at our premier ACM Multimedia conference.
d. Expand SIGMM presence in various social networks.
e. Increase industry participation in SIGMM activities to strengthen ties and increase impact between industry and academia.
f. Automate process for talks content, web, other SIGMM material preservation at SIGMM venues.
g. Increase SIGMM participation of female researchers.
6. Other Highlights in SIGMM activities
a. We have started a new SIGMM-sponsored conference, the ACM Multimedia Systems conference (MMSys 2010), this year, held in February 2010, in Scottsdale, Arizona.
b. We have formalized and streamlined the ACM Multimedia conference bidding process (our premier conference) and moved to three year bidding process. This year at ACM Multimedia 2010, we will hear bids for ACM Multimedia 2012 and 2013. This effort is led by the SIGMM officer, Dr. Mohan Kankanhalli.
c. Our SIGMM e-newsletter has been included into the ACM Digital Library due to the efforts of Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Carsten Griwodz.
d. We have made significant progress in SIGMM preservation efforts by (1) establishing presentation chair as part of the ACM Multimedia conference organization, (2) establishing a preservation committee, led by Dr. Mohamed Hefeeda, who set up a website to preserve past SIGMM-sponsored venues as well as establish processes towards presentation of SIGMM-sponsored venues and their websites, proceedings, etc.
e. We have new Editor-in-Chief for ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications, Dr. Ralf Steinmetz.
f. We have established a SIGMM-specific educational committee which compiles and keeps up-to-date educational material in the area of multimedia computing, communications, and applications. This effort is led by Dr. Wei Tsang Ooi.
g. We have assisted Dr. Yong Rui to establish SIGMM chapter in China. This chapter has its own conference that is usually held in winter. The first conference was held in Winter (December) 2009.
h. We have volunteers, Dr. Baochun Li and Dr. Rainer Lienhart, who are looking into stronger ties between SIGMM researchers in academia and industry.
i. All established SIGMM-sponsored events have very competitive acceptance rates:
a. ACM Multimedia 2009 had 305 long paper submissions and 50 long papers were accepted (16.4% acceptance rate). The short paper track received 369 papers and 103 papers were accepted (27.9% acceptance rate).
b. ACM NOSSDAV 2009 had 71 submissions and 22 papers accepted;
c. ACM CIVR 2009 had 138 papers submitted and 45 accepted (18 oral papers and 27 posters).
d. ACM CIVR 2010 had 153 papers submitted and 53 papers were accepted (34.6% acceptance rate). Out of the 53 papers, 16 papers were arranged for oral presentation (10.5% acceptance rate) and 37 papers were arranged as poster presentations (24.2% acceptance rate).
e. ACM MIR 2010 had 29% acceptance rate.
j. All SIGMM-sponsored events have a strong industry sponsorship and/or industry participation via talks, papers, demonstrations, including companies such as Microsoft Research, FXPal, Yahoo!, Google, IBM, HP Labs, Phillips, Nokia, NEC labs, AT&T and many others.
k. We are planning to merge ACM CIVR and ACM MIR (started as a SIGMM-sponsored Multimedia Information Retrieval Workshop associated with ACM Multimedia) into a major conference, the ACM ICMR (International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval) that will start in 2011, and will be held in April 2011 in Trento, Italy.
SIGMOBILE FY'10 Annual Report
July 2009 - June 2010
Submitted by: Roy Want, SIGMOBILE Chair
Introduction
SIGMOBILE is the ACM Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data, and Computing. Its scope includes all aspects of mobile computing and communications, such as mobile systems and applications, wireless networking protocols and algorithms, and mobile information access and management. SIGMOBILE is a strong, vibrant SIG, with growing membership, healthy finances, well-respected, successful conferences, workshops, and publications, and valuable services for its members and the community.
The current elected officers in SIGMOBILE’s Executive Committee are:
* Chair: Dr. Roy Want (Intel, US);
* Vice Chair: Prof. Robert Steele (University of Sydney, Australia);
* Secretary: Prof. Ramesh Govindan (University of Southern California, US); and
* Treasurer: Prof. Lili Qiu (University of Texas at Austin, US).
The Executive Committee has now served one year since the 2009 elections, and also includes the Past Chair, Prof. David B. Johnson (Rice University, USA).
Committee Appointed Positions
SIGMOBILE’s leadership has four committee appointed positions:
* Editor-in-Chief (EIC) for SIGMOBILE's journal/newsletter for our members (Mobile Computing and Communications Review or MC2R), Prof. Suman Banerjee (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, USA)
* Information Director Prof. Robert Steele (University of Sydney, Australia),
* Workshop Coordinator Prof. Ahmed Helmy (University of Florida, Gainesville, USA),
* Digital Library Coordinator: Dr. Guanling Chen (University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA).
In 2010, the previous Editor-in-chief for MC2R Prof. Srikanth Krishnamurthy (University of California, Riverside, USA) had served 2 years in the role and requested to step-down; we thank him for a job well done. The EIC position was advertised on the SIGMOBILE website requesting both suitable credentials and a position statement setting out a plan for bold new directions for the journal. Four candidates applied for the position, and were evaluated by a search committee including internal and external reviewers and chaired by Prof Robert Steele. By the end of February the committee selected Prof. Suman Banerjee as the new EIC, the most qualified candidate and previously an MC2R Area Editor with a clear vision for the future.
Sponsorship for the Mobile Computing Research Community
Also this year, SIGMOBILE provided sponsorship with financial support for three programs in the mobile computing research community.
* CRAWDAD: a Community Resource for Archiving Wireless Data At Dartmouth, is an archive of wireless-network traces that aims to help researchers to bridge the gap between research and the real-world use of wireless networks. Data captured from live wireless networks, when available, provide researchers with important information about how users, applications, and devices use networks under real-world conditions.
CRAWDAD has rapidly become the most important wireless-network data resource for the world's research community. As of June 2010, CRAWDAD has over 2,000 users from institutions in 72 countries, using 60 data sets and 23 tools contributed by over a hundred researchers. Hundreds of papers have been written about CRAWDAD data sets, many in the leading venues of the field, including MobiCom, MobiSys, MobiHoc, SIGCOMM, INFOCOM, and SenSys.
Tristan Henderson and David Kotz launched CRAWDAD in 2005 with support from the NSF CRI program, and continue to operate it today with support from SIGMOBILE and Intel. This support provides for staff and students who recruit new data sets, respond to user inquiries, develop new tools, and to process new data sets as researchers contribute them. In the past year they added five new data sets and three new tools, revamped the bibliography to support user contributions, and started developing tools that will enable self-service creation of the metadata of new data sets. In the coming year they hope to add many new data sets (including new data collected from the Dartmouth campus network), and to roll out the self-service metadata tools. New ideas and suggestions from the community are always welcome.
* N2Women: Networking-Networking Women is a discipline-specific community for researchers in the communications and networking research fields. The main goal of N^2 Women is to foster connections among the under-represented women in computer networking and related research fields. N^2 Women allows women to connect with other women who share the same research interests, who attend the same conferences, who face the same career hurdles, and who experience the same obstacles. The first meeting was held at the ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc) on May 24th, 2006 in Florence, Italy. Since May 2006, 43 other N^2 Women meetings have been held at various ACM and IEEE research conferences (see the list under Events on the N^2 Women website). An email list has been created for the N^2 Women group, N2Women@, to facilitate further networking. N2 Women is an ACM SIGMOBILE program that is also supported by the IEEE Communications Society, Microsoft Research and HP Labs and currently has over 390 members.
The goal of N^2 Women is to provide opportunities for the under-represented women in our field to meet, network, and discuss issues of concern. This enables mentoring of the younger members of our community (and even the more senior members!). It also provides an opportunity for the younger members of the community (e.g., graduate students) to learn about the careers and research of successful women. We have heard from many students how inspirational this can be, and our hope is that this encourages even more women to pursue research careers.
* SIGMOBILE has also provided financial support to the Illinois Wireless Summer School, organized by the University of Illinois. The first event was on 3-7th August, 2009 with 190 attendees. The primary target audience for this summer school in wireless networking is graduate and undergraduate students from all universities, and it is also open to faculty and to researchers from industry and government organizations. The topics covered include antennas, physical layer issues, wireless networking protocols, wireless security, and wireless standards. Greater than 50% of the support came from NSF, and the rest from SIGMOBILE, Qualcomm, Microsoft Research, NEC Labs, and Rockwell Collins.
SIGMOBILE Conferences and Workshops
SIGMOBILE currently sponsors or co-sponsors five annual conferences, all recognized as the premier conferences on their particular topics and focus areas within the field:
* MobiCom: The Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, covers all areas of mobile computing and mobile and wireless networking at the link layer and above. MobiCom has been held every year since 1995.
* MobiHoc: The ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing, addresses the challenges emerging from wireless ad hoc networking and computing, with the focus being on issues at and above the MAC layer. MobiHoc has been held every year since 2000.
* MobiSys: The International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, addresses broad systems research issues in mobile computing and mobile networking, particularly valuing the practical experience gained from designing, building, and using mobile systems, applications, and services. MobiSys has been held every year since 2003.
* SenSys: The ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, focuses on systems issues in the emerging area of embedded, networked sensors, spanning multiple disciplines, including wireless communication, networking, operating systems, architecture, low-power circuits, distributed algorithms, data processing, scheduling, sensors, energy harvesting, and signal processing. SenSys has been held every year since 2003.
* Ubicomp: The International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, addresses the interdisciplinary field of ubiquitous computing, which utilizes and integrates pervasive, wireless, embedded, wearable and/or mobile technologies to bridge the gaps between the digital and physical worlds. Ubicomp has been held every year since 1999, and SIGMOBILE began sponsoring it in 2009.
MobiCom 2009, the 15th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, was held September 20-25th, 2009, in Beijing China. Prof. Kang G. Shin (University of Michigan, USA) and Yongguang Zhang (Microsoft Research Asia, China) served as General Co-Chairs, and Rajive Bagrodia (University of California, Los Angeles, USA) Ramesh Govindan (University of Southern California, USA) served as the Program Co-Chairs.
The MobiCom 2009 technical program featured two keynote talks, one by Jeannette M. Wing Assistant Director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, National Science Foundation, entitled “Frontiers in Research and Education in Computing: A View from the National Science Foundation"; and a second by Moon-Ki Choi , President Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, entitled "Mobile Communication in Korea". The MobiCom 2009 program also included two days of workshops.
The workshops, on September 21st and 25th, together featured 5 full-day workshops:
* CoRoNet 2009: The ACM International Workshop on Cognitive Radio Networks
* MICNET 2009: The ACM International Workshop on Mobile Internet Through Cellular Networks
* WiNTECH 2009: The Fourth ACM International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental Evaluation and Characterization
* CHANTS 2009: The Fourth ACM Workshop on Challenged Networks
* VANET 2009: The Sixth ACM International Workshop on VehiculAr Inter-NETworking
In addition, continuing a tradition started at MobiCom 2005, and again for 2009, the conference hosted an ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) and poster session (see awards section). It also supported the traditional N^2 Women lunch meeting. The conference included a notable excursion to the Great Wall of China at Juyongguan (Juyong Pass), where the conference banquet was also held; a location hard to better by future conferences organizers. MobiCom 2010 will be held September 20-24, 2010, in Chicago, Illinois, USA; and co-located with ACM MobiHoc 2010 (MobiHoc’09 May 2009 was summarized in last year’s annual report).
MobiSys 2010, the 8th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, was held June 15-18th, 2010, in San Francisco, California, USA and in-cooperation with SIGOPS. Sujata Banerjee (HP Labs, USA) served as the General Chair, and Prof. S. Keshav (University of Waterloo, Canada) and Alec Wolman (Microsoft Research Redmond, USA) served as the Program Co-Chairs.
The MobiSys 2010 technical program featured a keynote talk by Prof. Rosalind W. Picard entitled "Mobile Emotional Intelligence." Rosalind is a founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory, co-director of the Things That Think Consortium, the largest industrial sponsorship organization at the lab, and leader of the new and growing Autism Communication Technology Initiative at MIT.
On June 17th (day 2), the SIGMOBILE 2009 Outstanding Contributions Award (OCA), the most prestigious SIGMOBILE technical award, was presented to Prof Deborah Estrin. She had not been able to attend MobiCom’09 in Beijing and the Executive Committee had postponed the presentation to MobiSys’10. She also gave a plenary talk entitled, “Participatory Sensing: Applications and Architecture”. Deborah Estrin (Ph.D., MIT, 1985; B.S., UC Berkeley, 1980) is a Professor of Computer Science at UCLA and Founding Director of the NSF-funded Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS). Estrin's current work focuses on participatory sensing systems, leveraging the location, image, and user-contributed data streams increasingly available globally from mobile SmartPhones. Projects include Participatory Sensing campaigns for civic engagement, and privacy-aware self-monitoring applications for health and wellness. Estrin's recognitions include: Anita Borg Institute's Women of Vision Award for Innovation and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.
The MobiSys program also featured 3 workshops and a PhD Forum on Tuesday, June 15th:
* NSDR 2010: 4th ACM Workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions
* HotPlanet 2010: The 2nd ACM International Workshop on Hot Topics in Planet Scale Measurement
* MCS 2010: The 1st International Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing & Services: Social Networks and Beyond
* PhD Forum on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services
In addition, the MobiSys 2010 program included an N^2 Women lunch on Wednesday, June 16th.
MobiSys 2011 is being planned for June 2011 on the East Coast, USA; and will likely be in Washington.
SenSys 2009, the 7th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, was held November 4-6, 2009, in Berkeley, California, USA. Prof. David Culler (University of California, Berkeley, USA) served as the General Chair, and Jie Liu (Microsoft Research, USA) and Matt Welsh (Harvard University, USA) served as the Program Co-Chairs. SenSys is co-sponsored by SIGMOBILE and SIGCOMM (30% each); and SIGARCH, SIGOPS, SIGMETRICS, and SIGBED (10% each) and the NSF.
The SenSys 2009 technical program featured a keynote talk by Bill Weihl (Google, CA, USA) on “The power of Energy Information”. The program also included three full-day workshops on November 3rd.
* BuildSys'09: The First ACM Workshop on Embedded Sensing Systems for Energy Efficiency in Buildings
* WISP Summit’09: First workshop on Wirelessly Powered Sensor Networks and Computational RFID
* WUWNet'09: The Fourth ACM International Workshop on Underwater Networks
In addition, the SenSys 2009 program included an N^2 Women luncheon on Thursday November 5th.
SenSys 2010 will be held November 3-5th, 2010, in Zurich Switzerland.
Ubicomp 2009, the 11th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing was held September 29th- October 3rd, 2009, in Orlando, Florida, USA, and co-sponsored with SIGCHI. Sumi Helal (University of Florida, USA) served as the General Chair, and Hans Gellersen (University of Lancaster) and Sunny Consolvo (Intel Labs, USA) served as the Program Co-Chairs.
Two keynote presentations were made on the first and last day: 1) “Poor Man’s Ubicomp”, by Dr Henry Tirri, Sr. Vice President, head of Nokia Research Center Nokia; and 2) “Honest Signals from Reality Mining”, Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ubicomp’09 also supported a Doctoral Colloquium on Tuesday, 29th September, and six all-day workshops on Wednesday 30th September:
* MELT’09: The 2nd International Workshop on Mobile Entity Localization and Tracking in a GPS-less Environment.
* Globicomp: Taking Ubiquitous Computing Beyond Developed Worlds
* DIPSO’09: The 3rd International Workshop on Design and Interaction Principles for Smart Objects
* Hybrid Design Practice (HDP): Situating UbiComp’s Interdisciplinary
* Architectural Robotics: An Emerging Case of Ubiquitous Computing in the Built Environment
* PerEd’09: Workshop on Pervasive Computing Education
In addition to the conferences and co-located workshops above, SIGMOBILE also sponsors the HotMobile (previously known as WMCSA) workshop as a stand-alone event, not co-located with a conference. The HotMobile workshop series focuses on mobile applications, systems, and environments, as well as their underlying state-of-the-art technologies, in a small workshop format that makes it ideal for presenting and discussing new directions or controversial approaches. The Executive Committee encourages the MobiCom Program Committee meeting be collocated with HotMobile to ensure a representative selection of senior researchers attend the event. This workshop was previously sponsored each year by the IEEE Computer Society but has been sponsored instead by SIGMOBILE since HotMobile 2008.
HotMobile 2010, the 11th Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, was held February 22-23, 2010, in Annapolis, Maryland, USA. Angela Dalton (JHU Applied Physics Lab, USA) served as the General Chair, and Roy Want (Intel Labs, USA) served as the Program Chair. The HotMobile 2010 technical program featured a keynote talk by Dr. Allison Druin entitled, “The Future Users You May Not Be Thinking About: From older adults to children, from the developing world to the streets of Chicago”. Allison is the Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) and an Associate Professor in the University of Maryland (USA) College of Information Studies. Since 1998, she has led interdisciplinary research teams of computer scientists’ educational researchers, librarians, artists, and children to create new educational technologies for learning.
HotMobile 2010 also included a Doctoral Consortium, providing feedback on students' current research and guidance on future research directions, offering each student comments and fresh perspectives on their work from faculty and students outside their own institution, and promoting the development of a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research. HotMobile 2011 will be held March 1-2nd, 2011, in Phoenix, Arizona, USA.
SIGMOBILE continues to be fortunate to receive strong support for its conferences and workshops from leading-edge companies and organizations from around the world. This last year, the organizations that have contributed to SIGMOBILE conferences and workshops, helping to ensure their success, include: Intel Labs, Microsoft Research, Nokia, HP labs, Deutsche Telecom Inc R&D Lab USA, Euro-NF, Google Research, IBM, Motorola, NEC Laboratories, Research In Motion, NSF, AT&T Labs Research, IXIA, Samsung, ETRI, NSFC, Arch Rock, Crossbow, MAXFOR Technology, iFIve, Citris, Cooperating Objects Network of Excellence (CONET), Synapsense. SIGMOBILE sincerely thanks each of them for their support.
Each year, SIGMOBILE is also "in-cooperation" with a number of different events sponsored by other organizations. Events offered "in-cooperation with" SIGMOBILE allow SIGMOBILE members to register at the same discounted rate as for members of other sponsoring organizations for the event, providing a significant savings to SIGMOBILE members. During this past year (July 2009 through June 2010), SIGMOBILE was in-cooperation with the following events:
* Mobility’09: The International Conference on Mobile Technology, Applications and Services, Nice, France, 2-4 September, 2009
* MobileHCI’09: 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. September 15-18th, 2009 at the University of Bonn in the city of Bonn in Germany
* MoMM’09: The 7th International Conference on Advances in Mobile Computing & Multimedia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 14-16 December, 2009
* COMSNETS’10: The 2nd International Conference on COMmunication Systems and NETworkS, Bangalore, India, January 5-9, 2010
* WiSec’10: The 3rd ACM Conference on Wireless Security, Hoboken, NJ, USA, March 22-24th 2010
SIGMOBILE Publications
In addition to the proceedings for each of the conferences and workshops that SIGMOBILE sponsors, SIGMOBILE also publishes a peer-reviewed, quarterly journal/newsletter for SIGMOBILE members, Mobile Computing and Communications Review (MC2R). Others may also subscribe to MC2R, and MC2R is available in the ACM Digital Library. The Editor-in-Chief for MC2R is Prof. Suman Banerjee (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA). The current Area Editors for MC2R are Prof. Aditya Akella (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA), Prof. Christian Bettstetter (University of Klagenfurt, Germany), Prof. Srdjan Capkun (ETH, Zurich, Switzerland), Prof. Landon Cox (Duke University, USA), Prof. Eylem Ekici (Ohio State University, USA), Prof. Adrian Friday (Lancaster University, UK), Dr. Michelle Gong (Intel, USA) , Prof. Bhaskar Krishnamachari (University of Southern California, USA), Prof. Prashant Krishnamurthy (University of Pittsburgh, USA), Prof. Panos Papadimitratos (EPFL, Switzerland), Prof. Andreas Terzis (Johns Hopkins University, USA), and Prof. Lin Zhong (Rice University, USA). In addition, MC2R currently has two Feature Editors: Dr. Ian Chakeres (The Boeing Company, USA), reporting on activities in the IETF MANET Working Group, and Prof. James C. Lin (The University of Illinois at Chicago, USA), reporting on health aspects of wireless communication.
MC2R publishes articles that provide a balance between state-of-the-art research and practice, with a thorough pre-publication review of every article by experts in the field. Beyond papers reporting the latest research results in all areas related to SIGMOBILE's scope, MC2R keeps the SIGMOBILE community apprised of relevant happenings in the area, by providing regular features on the status of major international mobile computing and communications standards, such as those from IETF, ITU, ISO, and IEEE. The journal also provides a variety of additional resources, such as bibliographies of recent publications in other journals, paper and book reviews, workshop and conference reports, calls for papers, information on research groups throughout the world, bibliographies and locations of technical reports, and other general news in the field.
MC2R places a strong emphasis on quick publication of interesting completed or work-in-progress technical work; the average turnaround time for papers published in MC2R is about 6 months. Papers in MC2R are selected mainly from an ongoing open call for papers, plus special sections based on conferences and workshops, occasional special topic issues, and some invited papers. The acceptance rate for papers submitted through the open call for papers is quite selective, remaining under about 20%. All aspects of the journal's operation are run entirely by volunteers, including final assembly of each issue.
SIGMOBILE also publishes a monthly E-Mail Newsletter for its members. This electronic newsletter was started in 2004 and is edited by SIGMOBILE's Information Director, Prof. Robert Steele (University of, Sydney, Australia). The newsletter includes SIGMOBILE announcements, pointers to relevant mainstream news articles of interest to SIGMOBILE members, a calendar of upcoming events of interest to our members, and pointers to developer news for active developers in the area of mobile computing and wireless networking.
As an additional resource for our members and the community, SIGMOBILE maintains an extensive web site at , including information about SIGMOBILE and its activities, information about our journal/newsletter MC2R, and information about membership in SIGMOBILE. This web site also contains archived copies of most SIGMOBILE conference web sites, including all previous years of MobiCom, MobiHoc, and MobiSys.
SIGMOBILE Local Chapters
There are currently three Local Chapters of SIGMOBILE chartered with ACM:
* Nanyang Technological University Student Chapter: This is a Student Chapter of SIGMOBILE, organized within the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) ACM club in Singapore.
* Sydney Professional Chapter: This is a Professional Chapter of SIGMOBILE, organized in Sydney, Australia.
* Taiwan Chapter (NEW in February, 2010): This is a University Based Chapter organized by Institute of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National I-lan University (NIU), Taiwan
Local Chapters provide a local focus to activities related to the area of SIGMOBILE, including mobile computing and wireless and mobile networking, and continue the work of SIGMOBILE within their local regions.
We encourage interested groups around the world to form a SIGMOBILE chapter in their local community, school, city, or region. For details about the benefits and procedures for forming a Local SIGMOBILE Chapter, see .
SIGMOBILE Membership
SIGMOBILE provides substantial benefits to our members, including:
* The quarterly journal and newsletter Mobile Computing and Communications Review (MC2R), serving both as a newsletter keeping SIGMOBILE members informed, and as a scientific journal publishing high-quality peer-reviewed research papers on mobile computing and wireless and mobile networking.
* A monthly e-mail SIGMOBILE newsletter, including SIGMOBILE announcements, pointers to relevant mainstream news articles of interest to SIGMOBILE members, a calendar of upcoming events of interest to our members, and pointers to developer news for active developers in the area of mobile computing and wireless networking.
* Qualify for the lowest registration rates at conferences and workshops sponsored by SIGMOBILE, and for the many events that are "in cooperation" with SIGMOBILE. SIGMOBILE sponsors five conferences each year (MobiCom, MobiHoc, MobiSys, SenSys, and Ubicomp) and the HotMobile workshop.
* Opportunities to share ideas, learn new results and practices, network with colleagues, and be active in a vibrant community of colleagues in all areas of mobility of systems, users, data, and computing.
* Through the Member Value Plus program, automatically receive a CDROM after each of SIGMOBILE's five conferences, containing the full conference Proceedings.
In addition, SIGMOBILE provides additional benefits to the broader community served by SIGMOBILE:
* Organization and sponsorship of five annual conferences (MobiCom, MobiHoc, MobiSys, SenSys, Ubicomp), and promotion of emerging new areas through sponsorship of numerous workshops each year.
* A range of full-day and half-day tutorials at many SIGMOBILE conferences, offering attendees an easy way to broaden their knowledge.
* Announcements via a moderated email distribution list about events of interest to those in the mobile computing and wireless networking community, such as conference Calls for Papers and Calls for Participation.
* The SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contribution Award, given to recognize an individual who has made a significant and lasting contribution to the research on mobile computing and communications and wireless networking.
* The SIGMOBILE Distinguished Service Award, given to recognize an individual who has made exceptional contributions to ACM SIGMOBILE, its conferences, publications, or its local activities.
* Other awards including Best Paper awards and often also Best Demo or Best Presentation awards at SIGMOBILE conferences and workshops.
* Support for students at SIGMOBILE conferences and workshops, through reduced registration fees, student travel awards for some conferences, student poster sessions, and hosting the ACM Student Research Competition at some conferences.
* Continuing financial support and hosting meetings for the group "Networking Networking Women" (N^2 Women), whose goal is to foster connections among the under-represented women in computer networking and related research fields.
* Financial support for CRAWDAD, the Community Resource for Archiving Wireless Data At Dartmouth, which archives wireless trace data and develops better tools for collecting, anonymizing, and analyzing the data.
* Financial support for the Illinois Wireless Summer School August 3-7, 2009, which provides an opportunity for students interested in wireless systems to learn more and interact with top professionals in the field.
* The SIGMOBILE web site at , including a wealth of information for the community, such as complete details on SIGMOBILE conferences and workshops; information on SIGMOBILE membership, chapters, awards, and publications; and a Ph.D. thesis collection.
SIGMOBILE Awards
At MobiCom 2009, the Best Paper Award was presented to Vivek Shrivastava, Nabeel Ahmed, Shravan Rayanchu, Suman Banerjee, Srinivasan Keshav, Konstantina Papagiannaki, Arunesh Mishra (University of Waterloo, Madison and Intel Labs) for the paper entitled, "CENTAUR: Realizing the Full Potential of Centralized WLANs through a Hybrid Data Path" was presented by Vivek Shrivastava. The MobiCom Best Paper Award is given to the authors of the best paper from among all papers submitted to the conference that year; the MobiCom Technical Program Committee forms the Selection Committee for this award.
The MobiCom 2009 ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) resulted in two candidates for the short list in the SRC Grand Final (2010). This is a great achievement in itself, but were not selected in the competition’s final top three placements. We recognize them both for the high standard of their work and as a credit to SIGMOBILE:
* Undergraduate candidate: Ahmed Saeed (MobiCom 09 Second Place)
* Graduate candidate: Dimitrios Koutsonikolas (MobiCom 09 First Place)
At SenSys 2009, two Best Paper Awards were presented at the conference banquet. The papers are “VTrack: Accurate, Energy-Aware Traffic Delay Estimation Using Mobile Phones”, by Arvind Thiagarajan, Lenin Sivalingam, Katrina LaCurts, Sivan Toledo, Sam Madden, Hari Balakrishnan (MIT), Jakob Eriksson (UIC), and “Low-power clock synchronization using electromagnetic energy radiating from AC power lines” Anthony Rowe, Vikram Gupta, Raj Rajkumar (Carnegie Mellon University). The best poster award went to, “The FlockLab Testbed Architecture” by Jan Beutel, Roman Lim, Andreas Meier, Lothar Thiele, Christoph Walser, Matthias Woehrle, Mustafa Yuecel (ETH).
At MobiSys 2010, the Best Paper Award was given for "ParkNet: Drive-By Sensing of Road-Side Parking Statistics" by Suhas Mathur, Tong Jin, Nikhil Kasturirangan, Janani Chandrashekharan, Wenzhi Xue, Marco Gruteser, Wade Trappe. Best Poster Award: “Vehicular Networking Using Optical Transceivers” by Aaron Ganick, Matthew Figueroa, Jonathan Lobo, Peter Schimitsch, Travis Rich, Thomas D.C. Little, (Boston University); and Best Demo Award: “Playing Pacman with Sensei-UU: A relocatable testbed with support for mobile nodes” Olof Rensfelt, Joel Samuelsson, Frederik Hermans, Per Gunningberg, Lars-Ake Larzon (Uppsala University).
At HotMobile 2010, the two Best Paper Presentation awards went to 1) Simo Hosio for his presentation of "Supporting Distributed Private and Public User Interface in Urban Environment" by Simo Hosio, Marko Jurmu, Hannu Kukka, Jukka Riekki, and Timo Ojala; and 2) Jonathan Hull for his presentation of "Mobile Image Recognition: Architectures and Tradeoffs" by Jonathan Hull, Xu Liu, Berna Erol, Jarney Graham, and Jorge Moraledai. The Best Poster/Demo Awards was given for "Chameleon: Color Adaptation on OLED Displays" by Mian Dong, and Lin Zhong
Finally, SIGMOBILE is proud to announce that Prof. Deborah Estrin (UCLA, USA) was the recipient of the ACM SIGMOBILE 2009 Outstanding Contributions Award, for significant and lasting contribution to research on mobile computing and communications and wireless networking, presented at MobiSys 2010, June, in San Francisco (see MobiSys’10 conference summary).
Future Challenges
An on-going challenge for SIGMOBILE is to deliver compelling value to its members in an environment where more and more of the information we provide can also be found freely on the Internet. Increasing the visibility and relevance of our MC2R publication is a good place to start, and with Prof. Suman Banerjee as a new Editor-in-chief we are well positioned.
This year our membership figures are near steady on last year. This nevertheless indicates the need to work to maintain existing members and attract new members. One way that we may bolster SIGMOBILE membership in the future is to expand the number of chapters. This year we added one more, a total of three, but this is still a small number, and the potential to expand them internationally to support SIGMOBILE interests holds potential. Another way to build mindshare around SIGMOBILE is to form alliances with other SIGS. This year MobiSys was held in-cooperation with SIGOPS. The SOSP conference has significantly grown in recent years and MobiSys and SIGMOBILE could also benefit from this expansion.
A goal for 2010/11 is to add the Pervasive conference to our current list of five sponsored conferences. Pervasive has traditionally had a close relationship with Ubicomp as it covers a similar research agenda and the program committees, the publication standards, and the attendees are all similar. Pervasive and Ubicomp have also cooperated each year to ensure they are 6 months apart, allowing two equally spaced opportunities per year to publish in these venues. Now Ubicomp is officially a SIGMOBILE sponsored conference, Pervasive is an obvious candidate to bring into the portfolio.
Finally, after 15 years of service as Chair of the Awards Search Committee, Victor Bahl has requested that he pass the torch onto a new champion. Although hard to replace, we will actively look for a new Chair in the coming year.
Summary
SIGMOBILE continues to be a strong, successful SIG. Our conferences, workshops, and publications are well respected and well supported, our finances are healthy, and our membership is growing and active.
SIGMOD FY’10 ANNUAL REPORT
July 2009 – June 2010
Submitted by: Yannis Ioannidis, Chair
Mission
ACM SIGMOD (Special Interest Group on Management of Data) is concerned with the principles, techniques, and applications of database management systems and data management technology:
“The goal of SIGMOD is to be the premier international community for innovative dissemination of knowledge concerning the management of data, broadly defined to include all aspects of data description, storage, querying, analysis, security, and privacy.”
Membership Levels and Associated Benefits
There is a trend in the SIGMOD membership toward a preference for online content over content distributed using physical media. This has previously led to the following revised membership-level structure that took effect in July 2007 and remains in effect:
Online-Professional
• SIGMOD Online (through the website)
• Information about SIGMOD
• SIGMOD Record (4 issues per year)
• SIGMOD/PODS conference proceedings (available one month before the conference)
• SIGMOD Anthology metadata, linking to the ACM Digital Library
• Database resources (e.g., public domain software, list of graduating grad students)
• Registration discounts for SIGMOD/PODS conference and other SIGMOD-related conferences and workshops
• Discounts on purchases of SIGMOD materials, such as the SIGMOD Anthology Silver Edition (2 DVDs collecting all Anthology volumes)
Print-Professional
• All benefits of Online-Professional members
• SIGMOD Record print edition (4 issues per year)
In addition, we have the Member Plus option, which can be used in conjunction with either of the online memberships and offers additional benefits:
• SIGMOD DiSC, DVD version; DiSC 07/08 shipped recently, and DiSC 09/10 is expected to be ready for shipping October 15
• SIGMOD/PODS conference proceedings in CD format
• Periodic SIGMOD Anthology volumes in DVD format
Last but not least, SIGMOD offers student memberships at an affordable rate.
Beyond the above benefits that come with the various levels of “formal” membership to SIGMOD, members of the database community in general receive the following benefits:
• Online access to
• Information about SIGMOD
• Database resources (e.g., public domain software, list of graduating grad students)
• Purchase of SIGMOD Anthology Silver Edition 2 DVD collection via the ACM e-store at (members receive a substantial rebate)
• Historical materials collected by or commissioned by SIGMOD (e.g., an oral history of Charles Bachman, one of the pioneers of database field)
SIGMOD also supports the following activities that benefit the database community:
• Support for DBLP - a bibliography of computer science publications ()
• Sponsorship of SIGMOD and PODS conferences annually, co-sponsorship of SOCC, SIGKDD, and other conferences/workshops on occasion
• The SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovation Award and the SIGMOD Contributions Award
• SIGMOD Best Paper and Test-of-Time awards
• The SIGMOD Jim Gray Dissertation Award
• The PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award
• Undergraduate scholarships to enable undergraduates to attend SIGMOD/PODS Conferences
• The SIGMOD/VLDB Digital Library Donation Program - contributes SIGMOD Anthology Silver Edition DVDs to research institutions in needy countries
• A book donation program - contributes books collected from SIGMOD/PODS conference attendees to research institutions in needy countries
• The soon to take off SIGMOD/VLDB Traveling Speakers Program - organizing multi-day visits to major campuses in a chosen country by a pair of senior database researchers
• Cooperation with ETH Zurich on the PubZone non-profit discussion forum for publications in the database community
We now describe some of the above benefits in more detail:
SIGMOD Online — The online component (), managed by our Information Director Prof. Jeffrey Yu (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), has undergone a complete technological upgrade during the reporting period. It includes the following:
• References to the SIGMOD and PODS conference proceedings, and to the proceedings of affiliated, co-sponsored events (with the papers residing in the ACM Digital Library)
• SIGMOD Record, available in html/PDF
• Videos of interviews of distinguished profiles in databases
• dbworld, a very popular mailing list with web-based posting and archives
• Web-based repositories of information on graduating database students, database events database research groups, database publications servers, and free/public-domain software
• Links to journal publications that are available to SIGMOD members at special rates
We are currently searching for a new Information Director.
SIGMOD Anthology — This is a collection of over 130,000 digitized pages of the database research literature, including back issues of three journals (IEEE TKDE, ACM TODS and VLDBJ), 27 conferences (ADBIS, CIKM, CoopIS, DASFAA, DBPL, DL, DOLAP, EDBT, ER, GIS, Hypertext, ICDE, ICDT, KRDB, MFDBS, MobiDE, NPIV, PDIS, PODS, SIGBDP, SIGIR, SIGMOD, SIS&R, SSDBM, VLDB, WIDM and WorkshopOODS) five newsletters (SIGBDP DATA BASE, SIGFIDET Newsletter, SIGKDD Explorations, SIGMOD Record and IEEE Data Engineering), several books, and meta-data (DBLP). Volume 6 of the Anthology shipped recently. After producing over 20 CDs, we moved to DVD technology for Volume 6. Anthology metadata is available online (we do not have permissions to put pdfs online). Prof. Curtis Dyreson (Utah State University) remains in charge of the Anthology.
When preparing Volume 6, Curtis made a survey of content that was not in previous volumes, but that we would like to have in new volumes. Almost all of that content is copyrighted by Springer, Elsevier, or Blackwell. Unfortunately, we have not been able to obtain permission from them to include anything. Thus, the combined volumes of the Anthology now contain all research content that we believe that we can get; we find that the Anthology effort has achieved its purpose with the publication of Volume 6.
SIGMOD Digital Symposium Collection (DiSC) — This is an annual electronic publication containing the proceedings for that year for a number of conferences, several newsletters, as well video of some conference sessions. DiSC is available on DVD, and metadata is available online (we do not have permissions to put pdfs and videos online).
As we have evolved towards a situation where almost content on the DiSC DVDs is available in the ACM DL, we are questioning whether or not to continue to ship DiSC after DiSC 09/10.
SIGMOD Record — SIGMOD Record continues to be a high quality newsletter and its coverage has been growing. Over the past years, several columns were added (influential papers, database principles, systems and prototypes, and standards). During the reporting period, Prof. Alex Labrinidis has stepped down as editor-in-chief (he is now Secretary/Treasurer of SIGMOD) and Prof. Ioana Manolescu (INRIA) has taken over. It has been decided to recruit associate editors to help the editor-in-chief stay on top of the workload. Ioana is developing an editorial policy for the Record.
SIGMOD/PODS Conferences — These continue to be very successful and highly regarded events. As discussed in Section 4, we have taken steps to periodically hold these events outside North America. We have an EC-level Conference Coordinator to provide continuity in the organization of the conference from year-to-year. Prof. Lisa Singh (Georgetown University) has been the Conference Coordinator during the reporting period. Starting with SIGMOD/PODS 2011, Dr. Sihem Amer-Yahia (Yahoo! Inc.) will take over. Lisa remains on board until after this conference to ensure a smooth transition to Sihem.
New and On-Going Initiatives
The following are some new or on-going initiatives that have been active in the reporting period:
6. Web-site migration to Plone. Our Information Director, Prof. Jeffrey Yu, has led the effort to migrate our Web site at to use the Plone content-management system, which was chosen by the ACM as the preferred CMS for SIGs. Having moved all earlier content to the new site, including almost 30 years of conference proceedings, newsletter issues, and video from the last few plenary sessions, we are now planning to modify the structure of the site itself, to increase its usefulness, readability, and searchability. We intend to move in this direction as soon as the new Information Director joins the EC.
7. Experiment repeatability trial. After its launch in the 2008 SIGMOD conference, the program of evaluating the “repeatability” of experimental results reported in SIGMOD papers has entered a 3-year trial period in which authors of accepted papers are extended the option of having the experimental aspects of their work validated by a separate SIGMOD-sponsored experimental program committee. This is de-coupled from the conference reviewing, both in terms of the program committees and timelines. Validated papers are listed in a SIGMOD Record article and can make reference to this, as an incentive for authors to participate in this effort to improve the standards of experimentation in the database field. The first two years of this trial period (at the 2009 and 2010 SIGMOD Conferences) have been quite successful and the community has learned several lessons from this activity. It will be repeated once again during the 2011 SIGMOD Conference and its future will then be thoroughly evaluated.
Educational, Conference, and Membership Activities
The SIGMOD/PODS conference is a highly prestigious event bringing together theoreticians & experimentalists and continues to be very well attended, approaching record numbers in Indianapolis in 2010 (coming behind only the 2007 event in Beijing, China). In addition to the high-quality research and other results presented in the various kinds of conference sessions, the value of SIGMOD/PODS is also enhanced by several other SIGMOD (co-)sponsored meetings that are co-located with the main conference, such as several workshops and the Symposium On Cloud Computing (SOCC), held for the first time in 2010 right after SIGMOD/PODS (see below for details). Indicative of the impact that SIGMOD/PODS has in the community are the facts that, in a list of the most referenced papers (˜ley/db/about/top.html), papers from the SIGMOD conference appeared more often than any other conference, other studies have reported similar results, while SIGMOD papers continue to be among the most popular downloads from the ACM Digital Library.
As part of its educational mission, SIGMOD has an ongoing Undergraduate Scholarship Program that subsidizes undergraduate students (six of them in 2010) from various institutions around the world to attend the annual conference and present posters on their research work. There is an open call for undergraduate posters and a selection process led by a conference officer dedicated to the task. In addition, SIGMOD subsidizes several graduate students to attend the conference who would otherwise not have been able to do it. Finally, there are several special events during the SIGMOD/PODS conference that focus on young researchers, such as the IDAR workshop (PhD forum) and a “Life after Graduation” panel, which is widely attended. In 2010, there was also a Database Mentoring workshop (DB ME), co-organized with CRA and CDC, with additional funds from NSF.
Collaborations
We continue to be in close collaboration on various activities with our sister societies, such as VLDB, EDBT, ICDT. Especially with VLDB, we have a series of on-going initiatives, i.e., the library donation program, the Traveling Speakers Program, the inclusion of VLDB material in the ACM DL, and others. We are also carefully observing their PVLDB journal initiative, where VLDB conference presentations are associated with PVLDB journal papers published during the preceding year and are not chosen by a special program committee, and will evaluate it from the SIGMOD viewpoint in the near future. Additionally, we are coordinating with EDBT/ICDT so that every year SIGMOD/PODS is held outside North America (such as in 2011), the corresponding event is held in North America, instead of Europe.
We are also cooperating closely with several other ACM SIGs on various activities. Examples, include our cooperation with SIGIR in the DL, with SIGKDD in membership promotions and in SIGMOD’s small contribution to sponsoring the KDD Conference, with SIGSOFT in co-sponsoring the Distributed Event-Based Systems Conference (DEBS), and with SIGKDD, SIGIR, and SIGWEB in co-sponsoring the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM, ), which has been running very successfully for three years now.
Recently, in cooperation with SIGOPS, we have launched the new Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC), which as mentioned earlier, was held for the first time in 2010, co-located with SIGMOD/PODS. The event was very successful, it was attended by more than 200 participants, and its program included three keynotes by distinguished members of the two communities and 23 paper presentations selected among 119 submissions. Next year, SOCC will be held in conjunction with the SOSP conference, in Lisbon, Portugal.
Current Status and Future Issues
SIGMOD is a thriving, very active SIG with healthy finances in spite of the economic downturn. This is largely thanks to the efforts of our corporate-sponsorship chairs of the last few years, who have been able to secure sponsorship funds for the SIGMOD conference in excess of $100,000 on the average annually, ensuring profitability of the individual conferences as well as financial security of the SIG overall. Given this balance, we are considering expanding our annual allocation for travel grants, scholarships, and special programs, especially those that support students at all levels and students and faculty in developing regions. A first step in this direction was taken in relation to the 2010 SIGMOD/PODS conference and we expect to go one step further in the 2011 conference.
SIGMOD is also one of the largest SIGs, the sixth largest overall. Still, our membership is decreasing and we are working hard to identify ways to reverse the current trend. Our efforts are in the directions of (a) introducing new superior benefits or refining and improving existing ones and (b) engaging in community mobilization activities and other beneficial initiatives. Students as well as researchers in developing countries are important target groups in these efforts. To help our work within (a) we have distributed a questionnaire during the 2010 SIGMOD/PODS Conference, which has been filled out by over 200 participants and has provided us with very useful input in terms of what is important to conference attendees (most of them members) and how we may improve the event itself.
While these concerns are real, we feel that SIGMOD is a strong organization, and we have every expectation of it continuing to provide useful benefits to its members, and thereby, continuing to grow.
SIGOPS FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009 - June 2010
Submitted by: Doug Terry, Chair
Overview
SIGOPS continues to be a vibrant community of people with interests in “operating systems” in the broadest sense, including topics such as distributed computing, storage systems, security, concurrency, middleware, mobility, virtualization, networking, datacenter software, and Internet services. We sponsor a number of top conferences, provide travel grants to students, present yearly awards, disseminate information to members electronically and through our web site, and collaborate with other SIGs on important programs for computing professionals.
The SIGOPS officers are Doug Terry as Chair, Frank Bellosa as Vice Chair, Jeanna Matthews as Treasurer (and Editor of our newsletter), and Stefan Saroiu as the Information Director. Their terms expire in June 2011, and so new SIGOPS elections will be held next spring.
Highlights from the past year include:
• The ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), our flagship conference, was held in Big Sky, Montana, on October 11-14, 2009 with a record attendance of 565. The conference was under the leadership of Jeanna Mathews, the General Chair, and Tom Anderson, the Program Chair. Nine SIGOPS-sponsored workshops were held in conjunction with SOSP, including workshops on cloud computing, storage and file systems, power aware computing, systems for developing regions, and diversity. The next SOSP is being planned for October 2011 in Cascais, Portugal with Ted Wobber as the General Chair and Peter Druschel as the Program Chair.
• A new annual ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC) was started with joint sponsorship from SIGMOD and SIGOPS, and the first instance was held in Indianapolis, Indiana in June following the SIGMOD 2010 conference. This new conference attracted over 200 attendees. SOCC 2011 is being co-located with SOSP in Portugal.
• The annual SIGOPS Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (APSys) was started, and the first instance is planned for August 30, 2010 in New Delhi, India, immediately before the SIGCOMM 2010 conference. The goal of this new workshop is to encourage and catalyze systems work in the Asia-Pacific region by providing a forum for systems researchers and practitioners across the world to present their work in computer systems and for locals to meet, interact, and collaborate with top researchers in the field.
• SIGOPS members produced the Cloud Computing Tech Pack, the first in a series of integrated learning packages on specific topics designed especially for practitioners and managers.
Awards
SIGOPS presents several awards on a yearly basis, and here are this past year’s recipients:
• Eric Brewer received the Mark Weiser Award for creativity and innovation in operating systems research.
• Tushar Chandra, Vassos Hadzilacos, and Sam Toueg received the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing.
• The SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award, which recognizes the most influential systems papers, was presented to three papers:
o Cary G. Gray and David R. Cheriton, Leases: An Efficient Fault-Tolerant Mechanism for Distributed File Cache Consistency, Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), December 1989, Litchfield Park, AZ, USA.
o Butler W. Lampson and David D. Redell, Experience with processes and monitors in Mesa, Proceedings of the Seventh ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), December 1979, Pacific Grove, CA, USA.
o Nancy P. Kronenberg, Henry M. Levy, and William D. Strecker, VAXclusters: A Closely-Coupled Distributed System, Proceedings of the Tenth AMC Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), December 1985, Orcas Island, USA, USA.
Programs and Services
Professional SIGOPS membership dues remain at $15, and student membership is just $5 per year. We offer a “member plus” package (for $20) for those who wish to continue receiving printed proceedings for the SOSP, ASPLOS, and EuroSys conferences; thus far, demand for this package is low, but this could partly stem from it not being well advertised.
Several widely respected conferences were sponsored or co-sponsored by SIGOPS this year. This includes the EuroSys Conference (with our European SIGOPS Chapter), the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), co-sponsored with SIGARCH and SIGPLAN, the Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), co-sponsored with SIGACT, the International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), co-sponsored with SIGCOMM, SIGARCH, SIGBED, SIGMOBILE, and SIGMETRICS, the International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE), co-sponsored with SIGPLAN, and the new Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC), co-sponsored with SIGMOD.
SIGOPS encourages participation in conferences and career building activities for young members of the community. For example, substantial funding was provided this year as travel grants for students to attend conferences and diversity workshops, with many of these grants targeted at women and underrepresented minorities.
SIGOPS also publishes a quarterly newsletter, Operating Systems Review, which focuses on specific research topics or research institutions, manages an electronic mailing list, which is used for announcements, and maintains a web site: .
Key Issues
Although the number of SIGOPS members is substantially lower than ten years ago, this is not a serious concern for our organization. We still have a committed core of researchers and volunteers, have a healthy fund balance, and are able to continue sponsoring a broad spectrum of popular conferences. Our challenge is to convince active members of the community to become SIGOPS members, to increase student memberships, to reach out to practitioners, and to expand our global outreach. Given our low yearly membership dues, financial concerns should not be a barrier to membership. We simply need to make it easy for new members to join and demonstrate how their involvement strengthens our community. By providing travel grants to conferences, we allow students to experience the benefits of belonging to the SIGOPS family. We also provide the opportunity for members of our European chapter to automatically become SIGOPS members through a joint registration process. Based on our success with EuroSys, a yearly systems conference in Europe, we are now exploring holding conferences and workshops in other parts of the world, particularly Asia, Australia, and South America. We expect the new APSys workshop to become a yearly event in the Asia-Pacific region and to lead to the formation of a SIGOPS Chapter with the long-term goal of highlighting and supporting systems research in the region.
SIGPLAN FY '10 Annual Report
July 2009—June 2010
Submitted by: Philip Wadler, Chair
Overview
SIGPLAN had another very strong year with excellent attendance at conferences and workshops. We have continued to see high rates of student participation. Conference submissions rates have remained
high. The SIGPLAN Executive Committee reported on the state of SIGPLAN at the annual open meeting at PLDI in Toronto on Monday 7 June 2010. The slides for the open meeting are available on the web at . In general, the SIGPLAN web site () contains useful information on SIGPLAN activities and policies.
The financial state of SIGPLAN is strong because our conferences do well financially. We budget them conservatively to break even, which generally results in small profits for each conference.
SIGPLAN has a healthy rotation of conferences between the United States and Europe. We are beginning to also see conferences in Asia. PPoPP took place in Bangalore in January 2010, ICFP is planned for Tokyo in September 2011, and PLDI is considering locating in China in 2012.
OOPSLA continues to face turbulence while adjusting to a changing world. For many years, OOPSLA attracted major industrial participation and earned substantial income for SIGPLAN---SIGPLAN's
healthy surplus can be attributed largely to OOPSLA earnings. In recent years, OOPSLA has retained a strong academic reputation but seen declining industrial participation. The SIGPLAN and OOPSLA
leadership believe it is desirable to retain a venue that attracts industry participation. This year the collection of events centred around OOPSLA has rebranded itself as SPLASH, retaining the name
OOPSLA for the conference at its centre. OOPSLA broke even in 2008 but suffered substantial losses in 2009. This year considerable attention was paid to revamping the budget structure of SPLASH, for
which we thank its general chair William Cook. The SIGPLAN executive and OOPSLA leadership have been in close communication throughout the year and this will continue until SPLASH has reached a stable footing.
We have a decreasing number of members who receive physical copies of SIGPLAN Notices each month (print members), but a growing number of whom receive the newsletter electronically (electronic members). Previously, our pricing structure broke even for online members, but lost about $45 per print member. This year, after surveying the membership, SIGPLAN raised its rate for print members by $45. The new prices reflect the costs of printing and postage, based on current print runs. We expect print membership may further decline, in which case reduced print runs will cause a further increase in per unit cost. By setting the costs as low as possible, we aim to permit circulation to settle slowly to its natural level. It may be a while before we reach the appropriate balance, as print membership decreases and printing costs increase.
This year SIGPLAN funded a number of initiatives to help the community, including our PAC Program, a summer school for PhD students, and the OOPSLA (now SPLASH) Educator's Symposium.
The PAC Program provides scholarships to attend conferences to students, members who need travel companions (parents of small children and people with disabilities) to attend events, and members
who often have to travel extreme distances to attend SIGPLAN meetings (e.g., people in Australia and Asia). In 2010, the PAC committee made awards to 76 individuals for a total of $67,000. This year a
supplement to the PAC basic budget was obtained by a generous support from NSF and Google, and this money was handled and distributed according to the PAC guidelines and using the standard PAC
infrastructure. The PAC workflow website () continues to be enormously useful in managing the program.
For Ph.D. students, SIGPLAN provided $5,000 in scholarship money to support attendance at a summer school on "Logic, Languages, Compilation, and Verification" held 15--25 June 2010 at the University of Oregon. The school consists of 39 tutorial-level lectures from nine world-class researchers over eleven days with 86 participants. In addition to SIGPLAN, sponsors of the school included the NSF, Google, Microsoft Research, INRIA, Jane Street Capital, and Galois. More information on the workshop is available from: .
The Educators' Symposium at OOPSLA strives to improve the quality of object-oriented education and give educators a voice in the premier conference for object-oriented research. In support of this program, SIGPLAN gave $5,000 to fund travel scholarships for educators from two- and four-year colleges to attend the conference and the Educators' Symposium.
Awards
SIGPLAN made the following awards in FY 2010.
2010 SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award: Gordon Plotkin
(announced at PLDI in Toronto). The award includes a cash prize of $5,000.
2010 SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award: Jack W. Davidson
(presented at PLDI in Toronto). The award includes a cash prize of $2,500.
2010 SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award: Chris Lattner for the LLVM
Compiler Infrastructure (announced at PLDI in Toronto).
The award includes a cash prize of $2,500. This is the first year this award was given.
2009 SIGPLAN Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award: two awards were given,
to Akash Lal, University of Wisconsin, for "Interprocedural Analysis and the Verification of
Concurrent Programs" and to
William Thies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for "Language and Compiler Support
for Stream Programs" (both presented at PLDI in Toronto).
The award includes a cash prize of $1,000.
Most Influential 1999 ICFP Paper Award: to Malcolm Wallace and Colin Runciman for
"Haskell and XML: Generic combinators or type-based translation?"
(presented at ICFP in Edinburgh). The award includes a cash prize of $1,000.
Most Influential 1999 OOPSLA Paper Award to Bowen Alpern, C. R. Attanasio, Anthony
Cocchi, Derek Lieber, Stephen Smith, Ton Ngo, John J. Barton, Susan Flynn Hummel, Janice
C. Shepherd, and Mark Mergen for "Implementing Jalapeno in Java"
(presented at OOPSLA in Orlando). The award includes a cash prize of $1,000.
Most Influential 2000 POPL Paper Award to Luca Cardelli and Andrew D. Gordon for
"Anytime, Anywhere: Modal Logics for Mobile Ambients" (presented at POPL in Madrid).
The award includes a cash prize of $1,000.
Most Influential 2000 PLDI Paper Award to Vasanth Bala, and Evelyn Duesterwald,
Sanjeev Banerji for "Dynamo: A Transparent Dynamic Optimization System"
(presented at PLDI in Toronto). The award includes a cash prize of $1,000.
2009 John Vlissides Award to Tudor Dumitras
(presented at OOPSLA in Orlando). The award includes a cash prize of $2,000.
Information about SIGPLAN awards, including citations for all the awards above, is available from the web page: .
Other programs
The SIGPLAN CACM Research Highlights Nomination Committee, chaired by Ben Zorn, nominated three additional papers for consideration by the CACM Research Highlights editorial board. More information about the committee is available from the web:
.
The SIGPLAN Education Board was formed in Spring 2009 to promote and develop programming-languages curricula, particularly for undergraduates. Board members include: Kim Bruce (chair, Pomona College), Kathi Fisler (WPI), Steve Freund (Williams College), Dan Grossman (University of Washington), Matthew Hertz (Canisius College), Gary Leavens (University of Central Florida), Andrew Myers (Cornell University), and Larry Snyder (University of Washington). This year, the Board created a short document broadly aimed at computer scientists titled, "Why Undergraduates Should Learn the Principles of Programming Languages." The Board has a new ACM-hosted web-site and blog, inviting comments on this and ongoing work: . Board member Dan Grossman has also been appointed the SIGPLAN representative to the ACM Education Council. The next goal is to specify a curriculum unit covering essential topics in functional programming.
Key issues for next 2-3 years
As mentioned above, the balance between print and online membership will continue to evolve, and we need to monitor the situation closely. Some of our members strongly value print membership, and we aim to keep price rises minimal so as to stabilize at the highest viable print membership while not asking online members to subsidize print. It has proven increasingly hard to locate material for SIGPLAN Notices, and we need to consider alternatives. We also plan to investigate a stronger online presence, perhaps through a blog.
Having initiated the Programming Language Software Award, the executive is now looking into initiating a new award for young researchers, perhaps named in honour of Robin Milner who passed away
recently.
An issue of continuing concern to many members is the inclusion of a programming language material in the ACM Curriculum standard. SIGPLAN's Education Board produced one document to this end
(see above), and is continuing to work on this problem. We also intend to explore whether the Education Board's document "Why Undergraduates Should Learn the Principles of Programming Languages" can serve as the basis for a white paper aimed at explaining the importance of programming languages to the broader community, including funding agencies and government.
SIGSAC FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009- June 2010
Submitted by: Elisa Bertino, SIGSAC Chair
1. SIGSAC CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS
SIGSAC’s mission is to develop the information security profession by sponsoring high quality research conferences and workshops. SIGSAC’s first sponsored event was the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) in 1993. Since then, it has been held twice in Fairfax, Virginia (1993, 1994), and once each in New Delhi, India (1996), Zurich, Switzerland (1997), San Francisco (1998), Singapore (1999), Athens, Greece (2000) and Philadelphia (2001). In the period 2002-2008, CCS has been held in the Washington, DC metropolitan area (i.e., In Alexandria, VA). In November 2009, CCS was held in Chicago and had 529 attendees which represents about a 29% increase in attendees from 2008. The 2010 CCS conference will be also held in Chicago on October 4-8.
From its inception, CCS has established itself as among the very best research conferences in security. This reputation continues to grow and is reflected in the high quality and prestige of the program. In 2010, the CCS acceptance rate was 17% (i.e., 55 papers accepted from 325 submitted). Undoubtedly, CCS remains one of the most competitive conferences in the area. As in previous years, the program of CCS includes several co-located workshops. We expect the CCS submission rate and attendance to remain high in future years.
Starting in 2001, SIGSAC launched a second major annual conference called the ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT). The first three meetings were held in Chantilly, Virginia; Monterey, California; and Como, Italy. From 2002, SACMAT meetings have been co-located with the IEEE International Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks. The 2006 SACMAT was held in Lake Tahoe, California, in 2007 in Nice – Sophia Antipolis, France, in 2008 in Estes Park, Colorado, in 2009 in Stresa, Italy. The 2010 SACMAT was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The symposium attracted 79 submissions of which 19 papers were accepted for presentation at the conference (a 24% acceptance rate).
In 2010, SIGSAC held the fifth instance of its third major conference, namely ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (AsiaCCS), in Beijing, China, on April 13-16, 2010. The first AsiaCCS was held in Taipei, Taiwan, on March 21-23, 2006, the second was held in Singapore on March 22-24, 2007, the third in Tokyo, Japan, from March 18-20, 2008, and the fourth in Sydney, Australia, from March 10-12, 2009. This year, AsiaCCS received 166 submissions and accepted 25 regular papers and 13 short papers yielding an acceptance rate of 15% for full papers and 23% for short papers. This suggests that there is sustained interest in the information security area outside North America. Next year, ASIA CCS will be held in Hong Kong, China, from March 22-24, 2011.
SIGSAC launched its fourth major conference, on Wireless Network Security (WISEC), in Alexandria, Virginia, from March 31-April 2, 2008. This conference merged two successful ACM workshops, namely WiSe (held in conjunction with Mobicom) and SASN (held in conjunction with CCS) in the US, and a successful European workshop (ESAS) held in conjunction with ESORICS in Europe. In 2009, WISEC was held in Zurich, Switzerland. This year the conference was held in Hoboken, New Jersey, from March 22-24, 2010. The conference received 99 submissions. Of these, 9 submissions were chosen for presentation as full papers, with an acceptance rate of 9%. Twelve submissions were accepted for presentation as short papers, for an overall conference acceptance rate of 21%. The location of this conference alternates between US and Europe every other year. Next year, WISEC will be held in Hamburg, Germany, from June 14-17, 2011.
2. SIGSAC PUBLICATION INITIATIVES
ACM Transactions on Information and Systems Security (TISSEC) remains our major journal venue for research publications. We do not expect to sponsor another journal for the foreseeable future.
3. SIGSAC SPECIAL PROJECTS
Two additional projects have started in 2010.
The first project is a conference focusing on data and applications security and privacy. With rapid global penetration of the Internet and smart phones and the resulting productivity and social gains, the world is becoming increasingly dependent on its cyber infrastructure. Criminals, spies and predators of all kinds have learnt to exploit this landscape much quicker than defenders have advanced in their technologies. Security and Privacy has become an essential concern of applications and systems throughout their lifecycle. Security concerns have rapidly moved up the software stack as the Internet and web have matured. The security, privacy, functionality, cost and usability tradeoffs necessary in any practical system can only be effectively achieved at the data and application layers. This new conference provides a dedicated venue for high-quality research in this arena, and seeks to foster a community with this focus in cyber security. The inaugural edition of the new annual ACM Conference on Data and Applications Security and Privacy (CODASPY 2011) will be held February 21-23 2011 in Hilton Palacio Del Rio, San Antonio, Texas. Professor Ravi Sandhu from the University of Texas at San Antonio will serve as general chair and Professor Elisa Bertino from Purdue University will serve as program chair.
The second project is the establishment of the SIGSAC Doctoral Dissertation Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis in Computer and Information Security. This annual award by SIGSAC will recognize excellent research by doctoral candidates in the field of computer and information security. The SIGSAC Doctoral Dissertation Award winner and up to two runners-up will be recognized at the ACM CCS conference. The award winner will receive a plaque, a $1,500 honorarium and a complimentary registration to the current year’s ACM CCS Conference. The runners-up each will receive a plaque. The award will be assigned starting from 2011.
4. AWARDS
The two SIGSAC awards started in 2005. The 2005 Outstanding Innovation Award was given to Dr. Whitfield Diffie of SUN Microsystems, and the Outstanding Contribution Award was given to Dr. Peter G. Neumann of SRI International. In 2006, the Outstanding Innovation Award was given to Dr. Michael Schroeder of Microsoft Research and the Outstanding Contribution Award was given to Dr. Eugene Spafford of Purdue University. The 2007 Outstanding Innovation Award was given to Dr. Martin Abadi of the University of California, Santa Cruz (and Microsoft Research) and the Outstanding Contribution Award was given to Professor Sushil Jajodia of George Mason University. The 2008 Outstanding Innovation Award was given to Professor Dorothy Denning of Naval Postgraduate School and the Outstanding Contribution Award was given to Professor Ravi Sandhu of the University of Texas at San Antonio.
The 2009 Outstanding Innovation Award was given to Dr. Jonathan Millen of The MITRE Corporation, and the Outstanding Contribution Award was given to Dr. Carl Landwehr of the University of Maryland.
5. ACM DIGITAL LIBRARY
The ACM Digital Library has become an important source of revenue for all SIGs. With the addition of several workshop proceedings, SIGSAC received a healthy share of the total revenue. SIGSAC will seek new ways to add to the library’s content (such as collecting speakers’ slides and videos of conference invited talks, tutorials, and paper presentations) to strengthen and broaden its appeal to all subscribers.
6. ELECTIONS AND EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
At CCS 2007, the SIGSAC membership approved the policy that any SIGSAC officer can serve for at most two, two-year terms. This policy is intended to demonstrate the depth of leadership talent within the ranks of the SIGSAC membership, and to give dedicated individuals an opportunity to serve the profession in leadership roles.
Following the elections hold in 2009, the following officers started their terms of office on July 1, 2009:
Professor Elisa Bertino of Purdue University (Chair),
Professor Vijay Atluri of Rutgers University (Vice-Chair), and
Professor Peng Ning of North Carolina University (Treasurer).
According to the bylaws of SIGSAC, the executive committee starting from July 2009 consists of the elected officers and the previous SIGSAC Chair, Professor Virgil Gligor of CMU. The chair of the executive committee is Professor Elisa Bertino.
7. SUMMARY
SIGSAC is in excellent shape both in terms of successful technical activities and finances. We expect that, in the coming years, SIGSAC will continue to sustain and build on existing activities.
SIGSAM FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009- June 2010
Submitted by: Jeremy Johnson, Chair
SIGSAM Communications in Computer Algebra
The Communications in Computer Algebra has been published since 1965 (previously SICSAM Bulletin and SIGSAM Bulletin). The CCA is published quarterly; however, only two double-issues are printed and mailed per year, with the four electronic issues appearing through the digital library and the SIGSAM website. The change to two rather than four printing was made to prevent delays and save money and is consistent with the wishes of many of our members.
After serving as co-editor, with Ilias S. Kotsireas, for many years Austin Lobo stepped down and was replaced by Manuel Kauers from RISC J. Kepler University of Linz, Austria. Manuel was previously on the six member editorial board. His vacated board position was filled by Lihong Zhi, Academia Sinica, Beijing, China.
Conference and Event Sponsorship
ISSAC. The International Symposium for Symbolic and Algebraic Computation (ISSAC) for 2009 was held at the Korean Institute of Advanced Studies (KIAS) in Seoul, South Korea from July 28-31. The conference was co-sponsored by ACM SIGSAM and KIAS, each with a 50% financial sponsorship. The conference received $57,792 in revenue, including a generous donation from KIAS, and had $55,176 in expenses for a net surplus of $2,616. Proceedings were published by ACM Press, and digital proceedings were distributed on DVDs to SIGSAM members. The distributed DVDs contained slides, with author approval, of all of the talks. Poster and Software demo abstracts were published in the CCA.
ISSAC 2010 was held July 25-28, 2010 at the Technische Universität München, in Munich Germany. ISSAC 2010 was sponsored in full by Fachgruppe Computeralgebra, in cooperation with ACM SIGSAM. The proceedings were published by ACM Press.
ISSAC 2011 will be held June 8-11, San Jose, CA. ISSAC will be part of the Federated Computing Research Conference. It will be fully sponsored by ACM.
SIGSAM reserves a portion of its funds (referred to as the ISSAC contingency fund, and tracked by the SIGSAM treasurer to support the ISSAC conference series. The level of this contingency fund is currently USD 7070.99 and does not include surplus from ISSAC 2009.
ECCAD, PLMMS, PASCO. SIGSAM sponsored the East Coast Computer Algebra Day (ECCAD’10), in cooperation with ACM, on May 15, 2010, at Emory University in Atlanta Georgia. Poster abstracts from ECCAD’10 were published in CCA. In Summer 2010, SIGSAM sponsored a workshop on Programming Languages for Mechanized Mathematics Systems (PLMMS 2010), co-located with CICM (Conferences on Intelligent Computer Mathematics), in co-operation with ACM, at Paris France on July 8, 2010. Extended abstracts from this workshop were published in CCA. Also in the Summer of 2010, SIGSAM sponsored a conference on Parallel Symbolic Computation (PASCO 2010), in co-operation with ACM, in Grenoble France from July 21-23. Proceedings from this conference were published by ACM Press in the ACM Digital library.
Awards
SIGSAM sponsors prizes in computer algebra and nominates our best researchers for top-level awards and prizes.
ISSAC Awards. SIGSAM sponsors the ISSAC Distinguished Paper and Distinguished Student Author prizes. This is from an endowment with a value of USD 40,662 as of March 1, 2009.
• The ISSAC 2009 Distinguished Paper award was given to Chris Brown, Department of Computer Science, United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, USA, for the paper “Fast Simplifications for Tarski Formulas”.
• The ISSAC 2009 Distinguished Student Author Award was given to
o Wolf Daniel Andres, RWTH Aachen, Germany and Jorge Martìn Morales, University of Zaragoza, for the paper “Principal Intersection and Bernstein-Sato Polynomial of Affine Variety’’ (with V. Levandovskyy, RWTH).
o Yong Jae Cha, Florida State University, USA, for the paper “Liouvillian Solutions of Irreducible Linear Difference Equations’’ (with M. van Hoeij, Florida State University).
o Luca De Feo, 1 École Polytechnique and INRIA, France for the paper “Fast arithmetics in Artin-Schreier towers over finite fields’’ (with Eric Schost, ORCCA and CSD, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON Canada).
• The ISSAC 2010 Distinguished Paper award was given to Ioannis Emiris, Bernard Mourrain and Elias Tsigaridas for the paper “The DMM bound: multivariate (aggregate) separation bounds.”
• The ISSAC 2010 Distinguished Student Author Award was given to Pierre-Jean Spaenlehauer for the paper “Computing Loci of Rank Defects of Linear Matrices using Gröbner Bases and Applications to Cryptology” (with Jean-Charles Faugčre and Mohab Safey El Din).
Jenks Memorial Prize. SIGSAM also sponsors and administers the ACM SIGSAM Richard Dimick Jenks Memorial Prize for Excellence in Software Engineering applied to Computer Algebra. The prize was last given out in 2008 and was awarded to “The GAP Group". The prize will be given again at the 2011 ISSAC conference. This award is granted from an endowment with a value of USD 27,285 as of March 1, 2009.
ACM Fellow. SIGSAM successfully nominated Erich Kaltofen, Professor of Mathematics from NCSU for ACM Fellow for contributions to symbolic and algebraic computation, algebraic algorithms and complexity theory.
Transactions on Mathematical Software
SIGSAM has a seat on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (TOMS). This position is currently held by Gene Cooperman of Northeastern University (USA); however, his term has completed and several candidates are being considered for his replacement.
Viability Review
At the SIG Board meeting on March 27, 2009, SIGSAM was found to be viable and given a renewal for the standard four-year period. For the previous two renewals, SIGSAM had only been given two-year renewals.
SIGSAM Elections
The current ACM/SIGSAM officers requested that they remain for a second term. The reason for the extension was the feeling that a two year term was insufficient, given the start up cost, to accomplish the goals they put forth in their election.
SIGSAM Membership
As of June 30, 2010, SIGSAM had 346 members, up from slightly from 292 in June 2009. The membership increase was largely due to providing membership to all non-SIGSAM members attending ISSAC 2009 will be given SIGSAM, a conscious effort to increase membership in our main target audience.
SIGSAM Advisory Board
The Advisory Board advises the Chair on matters of interest to SIGSAM. It consists of the officers, the Past Chair, the newsletter Editor(s) and up to ten Members at Large elected by ballot by the members of SIGSAM at the Annual General Meeting. Two members at large will be replaced at the end of 2010.
SIGSAM Finances
The following financial report was prepared by Agnes Szanto (SIGSAM Treasurer).
Revenue and Expenses for the 2009-10 Fiscal Year
Estimated revenue and expenses for the 2009-10 fiscal year are as follows. The figures given below are based on currently available data from the ACM Financial Management Reporting System. The revenue/expenses of the ISSAC 2009 conference are preliminary estimates only.
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Required Fund Balance
ACM has set a target fund balance for each SIG of the sum of 50% of organization expenses and 40% of conference expenses. For the 2009-10 fiscal year this amounts to $18,350. If the above estimates are accurate then we are well above the required amount, by about $36,000. For the 2010-11 fiscal year the required balance decreases to $10,220, due to no conference expenses next year.
Summary
We inherited a financially robust SIGSAM, with an opening balance of over $47,000, well above what is minimally required, thanks to the fiscally conservative policies of our previous leaderships. SIGSAM was financially successful also during the 2009-10 fiscal year, adding another almost $7,000 to the balance, due in part to increased membership revenues, reductions in operational expenses, and an extremely successful ISSAC conference with generous external funding from KIAS and Maple. As a result, there is a significant surplus for the 2009-10 fiscal year.
SIGSIM FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009- June 2010
Submitted by: Osman Balci, Chair
Awards
a) Roger D. Smith (U.S. Army PEO for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation) was awarded the ACM SIGSIM Distinguished Contributions Award, which 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. The recipient of the Award received a plaque and an honorarium of $1500.
b) Claudia Szabo (National University of Singapore) was awarded the ACM SIGSIM Best Ph.D. Student Paper Award at the 2009 Winter Simulation Conference. The recipient of the Award received a plaque and an honorarium of $200.
Significant papers on new areas that were published in proceedings
SIGSIM sponsored the following two conferences and one workshop.
• Winter Simulation Conference (WSC)
• ACM International Conference on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems (MSWiM)
• Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS)
WSC, MSWiM, and PADS publish high quality papers in their proceedings. It is infeasible to identify which papers were significant since they all contribute to the state of the art in many different dimensions.
Significant programs that provided a springboard for further technical efforts
SIGSIM provided the following benefits to its members:
a) SIGSIM-members-only access to ACM SIGSIM M&S Knowledge Repository
b) Proceedings (CD) of the annual Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) mailed to each SIGSIM member
c) Proceedings (hard copy) of the annual International Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS) mailed to each SIGSIM member
d) Reduced registration fees for many conferences including WSC and PADS
e) SIGSIM members are granted full on-line access to the proceedings of the SIGSIM sponsored / supported conferences in the ACM Digital Library
SIGSIM provided the following benefits to its community:
a) Distinguished Contributions Award
b) Ph.D. Colloquium and Poster Session at the annual WSC
c) Best Ph.D. Student Paper Award at the annual WSC
d) Sponsorship of annual conferences: WSC, PADS, and MSWiM
e) In-cooperation support of many conferences including: DEVS, DS-RT, EOMAS, MASCOTS, MSI, SIMUTools, SpringSim, and SW
f) LinkedIn Professional Group named “ACM SIGSIM”, which provides professional networking among the Modeling and Simulation (M&S) professionals
g) Announcements via a moderated email distribution list about events of interest, Calls for Papers, and Calls for Participation
SIGSIM’s benefits delivered to its members and community together with the two conferences and one workshop it has sponsored provided a springboard for further technical efforts.
Innovative programs which provide service to our technical community
SIGSIM’s Modeling and Simulation (M&S) Knowledge Repository (MSKR) at
has been the innovative program which provided services to the SIGSIM technical community.
Summary of key issues that SIGSIM membership will have to deal with in the next 2-3 years
SIGSIM’s mission continues 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. The expansion of the M&S Knowledge Repository’s content to provide better technical service to the SIGSIM membership stands to be the most important issue. This expansion is very important for SIGSIM to accomplish its mission. Contributions are expected from all SIGSIM members as well as M&S community in general to expand the M&S Knowledge Repository’s content. How to motivate people to submit multimedia contributions for publication in the M&S Knowledge Repository remains to be a challenge.
SIGSOFT FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009 - June 2010
Submitted by: David S. Rosenblum, Chair
SIGSOFT had another excellent year, maintaining the technical excellence and financial health of its conferences despite increasingly difficult economic times, while continuing to reach out to the community, with increased attention given this year to the practitioner community.
The numerous conferences and workshops we sponsor and co-sponsor continue to be strong, both intellectually and financially. Our flagship conference, ESEC/FSE 2009, was held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, with Hans van Vliet serving as General Chair and Valerie Issarny serving as Program Chair. Our largest conference, ICSE 2010 (co-sponsored with the IEEE Computer Society), was held in Cape Town, South Africa, with Judith Bishop and Jeff Kramer as General Co-Chairs, and Prem Devanbu and Sebastian Uchitel as Program Co-Chairs. The main social event at ICSE was the Awards Banquet, where the SIGSOFT Chair presented several important SIGSOFT awards and recognised the new ACM Distinguished Members and Fellows from the software engineering community.
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, and ESEC/FSE 2011 will be held in Szeged, Hungary, with Tibor Gyimothy as General Chair and Andreas Zeller as Program Chair. Given the increasing number of submissions to FSE and the consequent increased workload for the Program Chair, for FSE 2012 we decided to name two Program Co-Chairs, with Tevfik Bultan and Martin Robillard filling these roles; a General Chair for FSE 2012 is expected to be named soon. ICSE 2011 will be held in Honolulu, Hawai'i, USA, with Richard Taylor as General Chair, and with Harald Gall and Nenad Medvidovic as Program Co-Chairs. Planning is underway as well for ICSE 2012, which will be held in Zurich, Switzerland, with Martin Glinz serving as General Chair, and with Gail Murphy and Mauro Pezze as Program Co-Chairs.
The problems and topics addressed in the papers presented at SIGSOFT meetings remain tremendously varied and timely, with papers on testing and analysis being predominant. This past year saw several papers on new and emerging topics, including several papers presenting important insights that can be gleaned through mining software repositories (such as source code and defect databases), increasing numbers of papers on probabilistic reasoning, and three papers at ICSE 2010 on legal and regulatory issues in software engineering.
The biggest challenge facing SIGSOFT and its membership in the coming years is conference budgeting. Operating and venue costs for conferences are rising, while the funds prospective attendees have for travel to conferences are decreasing. We recently began reducing the contingencies required of our more mature conferences, but more needs to be done. Maintaining financial viability involves an intricate series of tradeoffs among a number of goals that are not always compatible with each other, including, among other things, the desire to keep student registration fees low, to maintain the SIG services fee at an appropriate level to support the provisioning of services by ACM, and to allow SIGSOFT members to enjoy the benefit of our increasing Digital Library revenue.
Among the awards presented at the ICSE 2010 Awards Banquet were our annual service, research and education awards. This year's ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award was presented to Mary Lou Soffa of The University of Virginia. The ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award was presented to a group of recipients this year, the so-called "Gang of Four" responsible for the Design Patterns movement--Erich Gamma of IBM, Richard Helm of BCG, Ralph Johnson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and (posthumously) John Vlissides. As in past years, the awardees will be provided the opportunity to deliver a keynote address at FSE 2010, with Ralph Johnson expected to make the presentation. And now in its second year, the ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award was presented to Leon Osterweil of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who at the Awards Banquet was greeted by the sight of a few dozen of his academic "descendants" standing in his honour. We also continued to present a number of ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards at our sponsored meetings.
For the second year we presented the SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award to recognize a paper published in a SIGSOFT conference at least 10 years earlier that has had exceptional impact on research or practice. The 2009 SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award committee, led by John Knight, selected the paper "Yesterday My Program Worked. Today It Does Not. Why?" by Andreas Zeller, from the Proceedings of ESEC/FSE 1999. The Award was presented at ESEC/FSE 2009 to Andreas, who gave a keynote presentation reflecting on the origins and impact of his paper. We also presented Retrospective Impact Paper Awards to papers from the first 23 years of SIGSOFT's history of conference sponsorship. For the 2009 Retrospective Impact Paper Awards, ACM Fellow Richard Adrion once again chaired the selection committee, which selected the following five papers:
McCabe, T.J. 'A Complexity Measure.' In Proc. Second International Conference on Software Engineering (San Francisco, California, USA, 13-15 October 1976).
Rapps, S., and Weyuker, E.J. 'Data Flow Analysis Techniques for Test Data Selection.' In Proc. Sixth International Conference on Software Engineering (Tokyo, Japan, 13-16 September 1982).
Reiss, S.P.'PECAN: Program Development Systems That Support Multiple Views.' In Proc. Seventh International Conference on Software Engineering (Orlando, Florida, USA, 26-29 March 1984).
Boehm, B.W.'A Spiral Model of Software Development and Enhancement.' In Proc. International Workshop on the Software Process and Software Environments (Coto de Caza, Trabuco Canyon, California, USA, 27-29 March 1985).
Royce, W.W. 'Managing the Development of Large Software Systems: Concepts and Techniques.' In Proc. Ninth International Conference on Software Engineering (Monterey, California, USA, 30 March-2 April 1987).
As in past years, we made dozens of awards totaling around $50,000 to support travel by students to SIGSOFT-sponsored conferences, under our CAPS Conference Attendance Program for Students (CAPS). We also continued to make CAPS awards to undergraduates and provided awards for childcare support at conferences. Regrettably we were unable to identify a suitable recipient this year from the SIGSOFT community for the SIGBED/SIGSOFT Frank Anger Memorial Award, and so we are developing plans to attract more nominees. One incentive we plan to introduce is to identify and assign a host to the awardee at the awardee's chosen conference. This host will be a senior member of the SIGBED community who will welcome the awardee to the conference, introduce him or her to other attendees, and generally try to integrate the awardee into the conference activities. We have suggested to our colleagues in SIGBED that they follow a similar practice for the awardees they send to SIGSOFT conferences.
This past year Will Tracz continued his outstanding service as editor of our newsletter, Software Engineering Notes (SEN). To maintain and increase SEN and SIGSOFT's relevance to the community, Will initiated plans for the dissemination of content through a blog, with Eric Bodden volunteering to manage the blog.
This year a new SIGSOFT Executive Committee (EC) took office, and the new Chair decided to make a more formal delegation of responsibilities for specific activity areas to individual EC members. In accordance with the SIGSOFT Bylaws, Laura Dillon, who was re-elected as Member At Large, was appointed as the new Secretary/Treasurer. Two new Members At Large, Gail Murphy and Joanne Atlee, were assigned responsibility for Awards and Educational Initiatives, respectively. Almost immediately after taking office, Bashar Nuseibeh, the fourth elected Member At Large, decided to resign his position in order to assume the heavy responsibilities of Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. Bashar's departure was a great loss to the EC but also provided an opportunity to appoint a replacement who could serve the role of Practitioner Liaison. Thus, in accordance with the SIGSOFT Bylaws and ACM Policies on SIG governance, Mark Grechanik of Accenture was appointed as the replacement Member At Large. Mark has begun developing initiatives to increase practitioner participation in SIGSOFT's activities, including the creation of discussion groups on two social network sites, Linkedin and Facebook. He also was also instrumental in facilitating significant industrial involvement in a Workshop on the Future of Software Engineering Research to be held at FSE 2010, which helped dramatically increase industrial financial support for the conference.
In addition to the elected members of the EC, SIGSOFT continues to be supported by a cadre of unelected volunteers. Nels Beckman completed several years of dedicated service as our Information Director and turned the reins over in May 2010 to Greg Cooper. Roshanak Roshandel continued her excellent service as our CAPS Coordinator. And Tao Xie continues his role as History Liaison. As a result of the amazing energy and passion Tao has for historical initiatives, he was recently invited onto the ACM History Committee. This year Tao put together a SIGSOFT Chronology, modeled on SIGPLAN's successful Chronology, to document in as much detail and with as much completeness as possible the full history of SIGSOFT, including its officers, conferences and awardees, and its ACM Fellows and Distinguished Members and Turing Award winners. More recently Tao organised a SIGSOFT Community Directory that will soon be made public, allowing people to keep track of the doings of members of the SIGSOFT community. Finally, Tao completed the drafting of a proposal for a SIGSOFT Outstanding Dissertation Award, for which we hope to obtain approval from the ACM Awards committee in the coming year.
As a final note, SIGSOFT enthusiastically supported the successful re-appointment of David Notkin as Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology.
SIGSPATIAL FY'10 Annual Report
July 2009-June 2010
Submitted by: Hanan Samet, SIGSPATIAL 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.
2009 was the second year of SIGSPATIAL and its main activity was its flagship conference (ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS) that was held in Seattle, Washington, USA, on November 4-6, 2009. ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2009 was the seventeenth 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 to storage management, indexing, and algorithmic issues.
This was the second time that the conference was held under the auspices of the new ACM Special Interest Group on Spatial Information (SIGSPATIAL). The conference program attracted a record number of 210 attendees. The technical program lasted for two and half days, and based on the feedback of the participants, we can conclude that the conference was very successful in terms of new ideas presented and level of interaction provided.
The call for papers led to 212 paper submissions over four tracks: research, industry, PhD showcases, and demos. The research paper track attracted 185 research paper submissions, of which 38 were accepted as full papers and another 39 were accepted as poster papers. The industry track attracted five submissions, of which one was accepted as a full paper and another one as a poster paper. The Ph.D. Showcase track received 8 Ph.D. showcase submissions, of which 3 were accepted, while
the demonstrations track received 14 submissions, of which 10 were accepted. The submissions were reviewed by a program committee of 117 members. 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 program featured two outstanding invited speakers:
1. Pat Hanrahan, Stanford University, for a talk titled "Cartography and Information Presentation: A Graphics/Visualization Perspective"
2. Gur Kimchi, Microsoft Virtual Earth, for a talk titled "History and Lessons from Microsoft Virtual Earth"
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 also included a business meeting for SIGSPATIAL which was open to all SIGSPATIAL members as well as to all conference attendees. The meeting included a discussion of budgetary issues, plans for next year's conference, and soliciting feedback from members.
The conference was preceded by a workshop day with the following four workshops:
1. QuEST 2009: The 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS International Workshop on Querying and Mining Uncertain Spatio-Temporal Data
2. IWCTS 2009: The 2nd International Workshop on Computational Transportation Science
3. LBSN 2009: The 1st International Workshop on Location Based Social Networks
4. SPRINGL 2009: The 2nd ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS International Workshop on Security and Privacy in GIS and Location Based Service (LBS)
This year's conference was generously co-sponsored by ESRI, Google, Microsoft, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) whose participation and generosity demonstrated what can be accomplished by a successful partnership between academia and industry. We are also grateful to Microsoft which was responsible for all of the local
arrangements and managed the conference logistics in their entirety including manning onsite registration. The sponsors also contributed to the conference program by participating in a very lively
Sponsor Demo session preceding the conference banquet.
The SIGSPATIAL leadership is currently planning for the 2010 ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS Conference which will be held in San Jose, California on November 3-5, 2010 with as many as 7 workshops on November 2. It has already secured a commitment from Google to be a sponsor at the Silver Level and also additional financial aid in the form of sponsorship for women to attend the conference. In addition, ESRI and Microsoft will also be sponsoring the conference at the Bronze Level. SIGSPATIAL has also been successful in securing $20,000 from the National Science Foundation for holding a Doctoral Symposium in conjunction with the flagship conference. This will augment the Ph.D. Showcase track of the conference.
SIGSPATIAL is participating in the 3rd International Workshop on Similarity Search and Applications (SISAP) on September 18-19, 2010 in Istanbul, Turkey on an in cooperation basis as it did with the
conference in 2009.
Similarly, SIGSPATIAL participated in the 2009 International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM '09) on an in cooperation basis and will also do so in 2010 and 2011.
SIGSPATIAL also participated in the 6th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval on February 18-19, 2010 in Zurich, Switzerland on an in cooperation basis.
In addition, SIGSPATIAL is exploring sponsoring other conferences in the field as well as cooperating with other conferences (e.g., UBICOMP'11 which has already been approved on an in cooperation
basis), 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 continues to be 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 2009, SIGSPATIAL continued to offer a best paper award, and also, on a trial basis, a best student paper award. The winners were chosen by the 2009 ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS Best Paper Award Committee consisting of Amr El Abbadi (Chair), Mohamed Mokbel, Timos Sellis, Cyrus Shahabi,
and Peter Scheuermann. They made the following four awards:
Best Paper: Improved Visibility Computation on Massive Grid Terrains by Jeremy Fishman (Bowdoin College, USA) Herman Haverkort (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands), and Laura Toma (Bowdoin College, USA)
Runner-Up for Best Paper Preventing Velocity-based Linkage Attacks in Location-Aware Applications by Gabriel Ghinita (Purdue University, USA), Maria Luisa Damiani (University of Milan, Italy), Claudio
Silvestri (University of Venezia, Italy), and Elisa Bertino (Purdue University, USA)
Two Best Student Paper Awards:
1. An Agenda for the Next Generation Gazetteer: Geographic Information Contribution & Retrieval Carsten Kessler (University of Munster, Germany), Krzysztof Janowicz (University of Munster, Germany), and Mohamed Bishr (University of Munster, Germany)
2. Reducing the Memory Required to Find a Geodesic Shortest Path on a Large Mesh by Vishal Verma (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA) and Jack Snoeyink (University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, USA)
Awards were also made at the conference by a pair of ad hoc committees for the best poster paper presentation and the best fast forward poster paper presentation:
Best Poster Paper Presentation:
Opportunistic Sampling in Wireless Sensor Networks by Muhammad Umer (University of Melbourne, Australia), Egemen Tanin (University of Melbourne. Australia), and Lars Kulik (University of Melbourne, Australia)
Best Poster Presentation Runners-up:
Early Warning Systems in Practice: Performance of the SAFE System in the Field
Michael Klafft (Fraunhofer ISST, Germany), Tobias Krntzer (Fraunhofer ISST, Germany), Ulrich Meissen (Fraunhofer ISST, Germany), and Agnes Voisard (Fraunhofer ISST and FU Berlin, Germany),
Multi-dimensional Phenomenon-aware Stream Query Processing
Ashish Bindra (University of Washington at Tacoma, USA), Ankur Teredesai (University of Washington at Tacoma, USA), Mohamed Ali (Microsoft Corporation, USA), and Walid Aref (Purdue University, USA)
Best Fast Forward Poster Paper Presentation:
Sea Floor Bathymetry Trackline Surface Fitting Without Visible Artifacts Using ODETLAP
Tsz-Yam Lau (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA), You Li (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA), Zhongyi Xie (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA), W Randolph Franklin (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA)
Best Fast Forward Poster Paper Presentation Runners-up:
Quality Assessment of Automatically Generated Feature Maps for Future Driver Assistance Systems
Sabine Hofmann (IKG, Leibniz Universitt Hannover, Germany) and Claus Brenner (IKG, Leibniz Universitt Hannover, Germany)
A Parallel Plane Sweep Algorithm for Multi-Core Systems
Mark McKenney (Texas State University, USA) and Tynan McGuire (Texas State University, USA)
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 workshops that it sponsored in 2009. These workshops were proposed independently to SIGSPATIAL. In 2010, SIGSPATIAL has been actively soliciting even more workshop proposals and has designated its Treasurer, Markus Schneider, as the Workshops Chair for the 2010 ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS Conference, who has also been creating a uniform framework for them.
5. SIGSPATIAL CHAPTERS
Fiscal year 2010 saw the chartering of the first two SIGSPATIAL Chapters:
1. SIGSPATIAL China
2. SIGSPATIAL Australia
We have also had inquiries about starting a SIGSPATIAL Korea chapter. These chapters are representative of the amount in interest in SIGSPATIAL from members in these regions and are reflected by their participation in the flagship conference as authors and attendees.
6. PLANS FOR THE 2011 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
more sponsors and try to devise activities that will increase its attractiveness to the potential sponsors. It will try to continue to maintain, as well as build on, the momentum of its first two years of existence.
SIGUCCS FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009- June 2010
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 2009-2010 by sponsoring two useful conferences with five associated workshops, initiating a series of webinars on special topics, maintaining active mailing lists for discussion of issues of common concern, and generally facilitating networking among this group of individuals. In October 2009, the SIG was found viable for four more years, with the proviso that we must provide an interim financial report in 2011.
The Executive Committee members for 2009-2010 (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) completed the second year of a three-year term of office to which they were elected in the spring of 2008. Continuing to serve as appointed members of the board are Karen McRitchie (Tutorial Chair), Greg Hanek (coordinator of the Communication Awards program), and Christine Vucinich (chair of the Membership and Marketing Committee). Other volunteers too numerous to name individually contribute their energy and ideas to the organization through service on conference and program committees, on the Awards Committee, on the Membership and Marketing Committee, and as judges for the Communication Awards.
Awards Program
The SIGUCCS Awards Programs have been in place for a decade. The Penny Crane Award, renamed this year as the Penny Crane Award for Distinguished Service, recognizes significant multiple contributions to SIGUCCS and the profession from individuals over an extended period of time. The Hall of Fame awards recognize selected individuals who have contributed their time and energies to benefit SIGUCCS. For descriptions of the awards programs, please go to: .
Penny Crane Award for Distinguished Service – Rob Paterson was the recipient of the 2009 Penny Crane Award. For more information please go to: .
Hall of Fame – There were five people inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2009. They were: Nancy Bauer-Runyan, Jim Kerlin (posthumously), Theresa Lockard, Lynnell Lacy, and Glenn Ricart.
Conference attendance grants – The SIGUCCS Grant Program provides partial support for students and employees in institutions of higher education to participate in the SIGUCCS Management Symposium or the SIGUCCS Fall Conference. This support is funded by SIGUCCS and consists of a complimentary conference registration and hotel room accommodations. The program completed its second year in 2009-2010.
From 19 applicants for Fall Conference grants, the following five people received grants:
Yvonne Clark (Juniata College), Charles Hall (Alabama State University), Ted Wheeler (Northwest Nazarene University), and students Jeremy Henle (Illinois Wesleyan University) and Erik Kostka (University of San Diego).
From 7 applicants for SIGUCCS Management Symposium grants, the following five people received grants:
Melody Buckner (University of Arizona), Kristen Dietiker (University of Washington), Navneet Goyal (Birla Institute of Technology and Science, India), Marsha McGough (Bastyr University, Seattle), and Kim Tracy (Northeastern Illinois University).
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, 2010, Dennis Mar became Chair of the SIGUCCS Awards Selection Committee and John Bucher became Past Chair, following the rotation of the committee’s membership described at . Two new members, John Lateulere and Terry Lockard, replaced Linda Downing and Jennifer Fajman, who retired from the committee at the end of 2009. In June of 2010, John Lateulere stepped down from the committee to avoid a possible conflict of interest and was replaced by Jim Bostick.
2009 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 2009 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-seventh Fall Conference was held October 11-14, 2009 in St. Louis, Missouri, with the theme of “Communication, Collaboration.” Several presentations focused on remote delivery of instruction, services, and training, while others looked at information security and staff development, to pick just a few common themes from the panoply of topics covered. In addition to papers and posters, the conference organizers introduced two new types of session to the Fall Conference. LeadIT sessions were led by experienced IT professionals who spoke on subjects related to management and leadership, while DiscussIT sessions allowed all participants in a program track to engage in a facilitated discussion of shared issues and problems. The keynote speakers were Jason Young of LeadSmart, Inc., and Cynthia Golden of the University of Pittsburgh, talking about customer service and leadership, respectively. For the complete program, see .
The SIGUCCS Management Symposium was held from April 19-21, 2010 in Victoria, British Columbia. The theme was “IT – A Beacon for Innovation and Growth.” The program featured discussions of strategic planning, project management, leadership, and the implementation of new technologies on campus. Plenary addresses were given by Richard Katz of EDUCAUSE and Mark Roman of the University of Victoria. The complete program is available at .
Special Projects
Two projects that were underway at the time of last year’s annual report have been completed, or at least reached the stage where continued work on them is part of the organizational routine. The revamped SIGUCCS web site went live early in October 2009. Paul Hyde of the University of Delaware provided much of the technical expertise for developing the new site, with the guidance of a subcommittee of the board.
The memorandum of understanding with ResNet was signed in July 2009. Because SIGUCCS and ResNet are both organizations of people providing IT services in higher education, close cooperation makes sense. However, that commonality also means that both of us are suffering from the same economic forces that have depressed university support for travel and professional development. As a result, not all aspects of the cooperation envisaged in the memorandum of understanding have been implemented yet. We have, at least, had the opportunity to promote SIGUCCS at each of the past two ResNet annual conferences.
One of the hallmarks of SIGUCCS conferences has been the opportunity to interact with colleagues at other institutions who are facing the same issues and problems. We have long been interested in finding ways to continue that interaction between conferences. This year, we have initiated two means of doing so.
First, we have established an on-line community using Ning’s social networking service and linked its portal to our new web site. The community has so far attracted 100 members who have to varying degrees taken advantage of the ability to initiate discussions, create groups, contribute to blogs, and share photographs and other information.
Second, we began a series of webinars which we intend to continue on a quarterly basis. The first took place in January 2010. The second one was scheduled for April but postponed when the presenter fell ill. (The rescheduled webinar took place just last week.) Each attracted more than 70 registrants, and the feedback to date has been very positive. The topics covered so far have both been in the realm of staff development, but we expect that the webinars will range widely over the interests of SIGUCCS members. We are considering using the same medium for other purposes, including periodic open SIG meetings and an informational session about the board’s role prior to formulating a slate of candidates for the next election. We already use our webinar service for our monthly Board conference calls.
Issues
The most important issue facing us now is the same one described in last year’s report: the economic downturn and its effect on college and university finances. 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 two years. Attendance at the fall conference in St. Louis was 100 people fewer than the smallest conference in the preceding 10 years. It is slight consolation that similar conferences (ResNet’s is an example) have experienced corresponding precipitous drops in attendance. More encouraging is that the Management Symposium saw a slight increase in attendance from 2009 to 2010, although both Symposiums were down from the four years preceding 2009.
We are working on this problem on two fronts: marketing to attract more registrants—especially among what we suspect is still a relatively large group of higher education IT professionals who are not familiar with SIGUCCS—and judicious adjustments to conference budgets to achieve better financial results without reducing the value and appeal of the events. We renewed our subscription to a mailing list of IT directors and managers in higher education and are using it to let them know about our conferences, grants, and award programs. We have made small increases in our conference registration fees and are looking carefully for ways to cut conference expenses without reducing the essential value of the conference.
A related development, setting another challenge for ourselves, is the decision made last fall to change our conference schedule so that each year we offer a single conference that combines the content of the two existing meetings. As described in last year’s report, the motivation for this change was not primarily financial, but it should enable us to lower our conference costs. The challenge will be to preserve the audience (and its associated revenue), especially during the transition to the new conference schedule.
The first combined conference, named simply SIGUCCS 2011, will occur in November 2011 in San Diego. We have been fortunate to attract an energetic group of experienced volunteers to the conference committee. Planning for the new event compels us to re-think our old practices and to devise new practices that exploit the combined structure.
SIGWEB FY’10 Annual Report
July 2009 - June 2010
Submitted by: Ethan Munson, Chair
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 19 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
The current officers had their terms extended in 2009. Elections for new officers will be conducted in Spring 2011. 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 2010 TECHNICAL MEETINGS AND AWARDS
The technical meetings sponsored by SIGWEB were:
• ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng) 2009
(held in September 2009 in Munich, Germany)
• ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management 2009
(held in October 2009 in Hong Kong, China)
• ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2010)
(held February 2010 in New York City, USA)
• ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2010
(held June 2010 in Surfer’s Paradise, Australia)
• ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (HT) 2010
(held June 2010 in Toronto, Canada)
The awards presented by SIGWEB in FY 2010 were:
• The Douglas C. Engelbart Best Paper Award for 2010 (HT 2010)
“Hyperorders and Transclusion: Understanding Dimensional Hypertext”
James Goulding, Tim Brailsford and Helen Ashman
• The Theodor Holm Nelson Newcomer Award for 2010 (HT 2010)
“iMapping – A Zooming User Interface Approach for Personal and Semantic Knowledge Management”
Heiko Haller and Andreas Abecker
• The Vannevar Bush Award for 2010 (JCDL 2010)
“Transferring Structural Markup Across Translations Using Multilingual Alignment and Projection”
• David Bamman, Alison Babeu, and Gregory Crane
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 the final stages of making an agreement with the Web Science Trust to sponsor the Web Science conference series.
FINANCES
SIGWEB’s finances have strengthened considerably over the past few years. The SIG’s fund balance stands at over $530,000, which is an increase of about $100,000 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. SIGWEB’s executive committee has also made sure that SIG operating budgets are in surplus. As a result, the SIG has started new initiatives and is providing somewhat more support for SIG activities.
MEMBERSHIP
In June 2010, SIGWEB had 666 members (466 professional, 57 student, and 143 affiliate). This is a substantial increase from June 2007 (535 total) and June 2008 (644 total), but a decline from June 2009 (699 total). The Executive Committee will track this trend in the next year.
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. Overall, we consider this effort a success and we are considering expanding the format to a four-page format (single 11x17 sheet, folded), provided that we can do so at reasonable cost.
• SIGWEB has initiated a Student Travel Award program, modeled on those of SIGIR and SIGAPP, for its 100%-sponsored conferences. In 2009, about $10,000 was given for students presenting at Hypertext 2009 and DocEng 2009 ($5000 each). In 2010, about $17,000 in total will be given for Hypertext, JCDL, and DocEng. This is a way that SIGWEB can return some of its surpluses to the community and it is certainly popular with the participants.
• 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), but this was somewhat illusory, because the host institute allowed for many complimentary registrations. Attendance in 2010 was solid at about 100, so the conference appears stable, but may not be growing.
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 has continued to explore other conference sponsorships. In April 2010, the SIGWEB Chair attended the Web Science 2010 Conference where he reached a verbal agreement that SIGWEB will become the sponsor of the Web Science Conference series. Remaining work on this task includes the creation of a set of by-laws for a steering committee for the conference series that makes clear the roles of SIGWEB (as financial sponsor) and the Web Science Trust (as the founding research institution, for wont of a better description).
CONCLUSION
SIGWEB has successfully expanded its range of conference sponsorships and is continuing this trend. SIGWEB is also working hard on membership and volunteer development. SIGWEB is financially healthy and has solid leadership.
-----------------------
|Conference |Year |Type |Co-located|-'13BCVWXY ijX |Received dd/mm|Sent |Surplus (deficit) |
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| | | | |al | | | |
|I3D |2010 |Sponsored | |Approved | |Sep 24 2009 | |
|ETRA 2010 |2010 |In-Cooperation | |Approved |03/03 |03/24/09 | |
| | | | | | | | |
|VRCAI |2009 |Sponsored | |Approved |21/7 |22/7 |2008 |
| | | | | | | |$18,289 |
|APGV2009 |2009 |Sponsored | |Approved | | |2008 |
| | | | | | | |3,622 |
|UIST09 |2009 |Sponsored | |Approved | | | |
| | | | | | | | |
|2010 |2010 |2010 |2010 |2010 |2010 |2010 |2010 |
|SG10 |2010 |In-coop | |Approved | |9/Dec/09 | |
|SCA |2010 |Sponsored | |PAF approved | | | |
|Pacific Viz 10 |2010 |In coop | |Approved |26/Jul |26/Jul | |
|Laval Virtual |2010 |In coop | |Approved | |10/12/09 | |
|JVRC |2010 |In coop | |approved | | | |
|SPM |2010 |In coop | |approved | | | |
|Pacific viz |2010 |In coop | |approved | | | |
|Afrigraph |2010 |Sponsored | |Approved | |Jan/12/2010 | |
|Web 3D |2010 |Sponsored | |approved | | | |
|CyberWorlds |2010 |In coop | |Approved | |21-Dec-09 | |
|APGV |2010 |Sponsored | |Approved | |24 Dec-09 | |
|SCA 10 |2010 |Sponsored | |PAF approved | |Apr 2010 | |
|IVA 10 |2010 |In coop | |Approved | |Apr 2010 | |
|EG SR10 |2010 |In coop | |Approved | |Apr 2010 | |
|FAA 10 |2010 |In coop | |Approved | |Apr 2010 | |
|FDG 10 |2010 |In coop | |Approved | |Apr 2010 | |
|Visigrapp |2010 |In coop | |NOT Approved | |Apr 2010 | |
|EGSR |2010 |In coop | |Approved | |MAY 2010 | |
|UIST |2010 |Sponsored | |Approved | |June 2010 | |
|VRCAI |2010 |Sponsored | |Approved | |June 2010 | |
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