Annual Report of the SIG Governing Board

For the period
1-July-03 through 30-June-04

Submitted by:
Alan Berenbaum
09-September-2004

1. Governance

1.1 The SIG Governing Board (SGB)

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

1.2 The SGB EC

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

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

During FY'04 the following individuals held the positions indicated:

 

Name	Position	Term End
Alan Berenbaum	Chair	July 1, 2004
Alain Chesnais	Past Chair	July 1, 2004
Hal Gabow	Conference Advisor	July 1, 2004
Robert Walker	Vice Chair for SIG Development	July 1, 2004
Alex Wolf	Small SIG Advisor	July 1, 2005
Bruce Klein	Vice Chair for Operations	July 1, 2004
Henry Walker	Secretary	July 1, 2005
Hans Boehm	Large SIG Advisor	July 1, 2005
Tamer Ozsu	Publications Advisor	January 1, 2005
Donna Baglio	Staff Liaison

1.3 Council Representatives

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

During FY'04 the following individuals held the ACM Council positions indicated:

 

Name	Position	Term End
Alan Berenbaum	SGB Chair	July 1, 2004
Jim Cohoon	SGB Representative	July 1, 2005
Stuart Feldman	SGB Representative	July 1, 2004
Mark Scott Johnson	SGB Representative	July 1, 2005

1.4 Standing Committees

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

1.5 Significant SGB actions

The SGB voted to change all SIGs to a single-SIG designation, thus discontinuing the conference-only, publication-only and multi-service SIG categories. Each SIG will provide a list of member benefits to the SGB in the fall for the following fiscal year.

1.6 Miscellaneous Appointments

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

 

Name	Position	Term End
Peter Denning	Education Board Liaison	July 1, 2004
[vacant]	Membership Board Liaison
Tamer Oszu	Publications Board Liaison	January 1, 2005
Barbara Ryder	FCRC Steering Comm. Chair

1.7 SGB Nominating Committee

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

 

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

2. SIGs and SIG Membership

Appendix B summarizes basic SIG Statistics for FY'04. Included are member and subscriber totals, newsletter and proceedings activity, and conference involvement.

2.1 Membership Counts by class of membership:

	FY'02	FY'03	FY'04
ACM/SIG Members	40,667	38,754	37,747
SIG Only Members	6,820	8,064	7,923
Subscribers	4,179	3,272	2,800
Total SIG Memb/Subs	51,666	50,090	48,470
Total ACM Members	69,547	73,709	77,585

The SIGs overall member/subscriber count is 48,470 as compared to 50,090 in FY'03.

2.2 Membership Gains and Losses

 

Most Significant Membership Gain			Most Significant Membership Loss
SIG	# New Members		SIG	# Lost Members
GRAPH	1,127		GRAPH	1,736
CHI	1,095		CHI	1,117
SOFT	400		SOFT	495
CSE	370		CSE	424
OPS	295		ART	404

 

2.3 Membership Renewal Rates

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

 

The SIGs with the highest retention are:			The SIGs with the lowest retention are:
ARCH	68%		APP	38%
CSE	67%		DOC	46%
Ada	66%		Ecom	47%
METRICS	66%		KDD	49%
MOD, SAM, SOFT	64%		SIM, WEB	52%

3. New SIG Formation and Dissolution

The 2 new SIGs chartered during FY'02 started officially on July 1, 2003. Both SIGBED and SIGITE sponsored conferences, published electronic newsletters and continued to develop their volunteer base.

SIGCAPH petitioned for a name change, and is now known as SIGACCESS, the Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing.

SIGSound was dechartered in September 2003, but may continue as a forum on ACM's listserve as long as they wish.

4. SIG Program Reviews and Annual Reports

4.1 Program Reviews

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

The SGB conducted 2 full program reviews during the year: SIGDOC and SIGIR were deemed viable under existing criteria.

The following SIGs remained in transition: SIGACCESS and SIGGROUP.

4.2 Annual Reports

Annual reports for FY'04 were received from:

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

Annual reports for FY'04 were not received from:

SIGAPL, SIGMOBILE, SIGSIM

5. SIG Technical Highlights

The strength of the SIGs lies in their technical excellence. Once again we have seen a continued growth in conferences, improvements in publications, innovations in many areas, expansion of the awards program, increased attention to educational activities and increased cooperative efforts among the SIGs. The following excerpts from the FY'04 SIG Annual Reports detail only some of the outstanding activities going on in the SIG Community. I urge you to review the individual SIG Annual reports, which can be found in Appendix D.

5.1 Electronic Community

SIGCHI is commencing an overhaul of their on-line communications--streamlining their currently overlapping sets of web sites, mailing lists, etc., to create a more comprehensible and better organized on-line presence.

Started by Steve Levitan and now run by new SIGDA Advisory Board member Mehmet Yildiz, SIGDA's web server (http://www.sigda.org) has long been a primary source of up-to-date and archival information about the activities of both SIGDA and the electronic design automation community as a whole. The server contains links to a significant amount of design automation information including calendars, design automation websites, newsgroups, and to people with "who's who" pages.

SIGGRAPH continues to significantly expand its online information, and ongoing improvements in this area are a very high priority. One of its high-level goals remains to complete a Hub prototype implementation. It currently offers technical presentations from the SIGGRAPH 2003 Conference online as streaming video and synchronized slides through the ACM Digital Library, and continues its news alliance with Computer Graphics World.

The SIGMICRO newsletter has been restarted in an online form, with Erik Altman (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center) as the editor. In addition to normal online article content, the newsletter has a novel feature: the newsletter is organizing live e-seminars (telecon+softcopy slides) that the SIGMICRO community can listen in to, around the world, and can ask technical questions to the speaker.

5.2 Publications

SIGCHI has continued its work with ACM on enhancing the DL not only with media, but also with greater metadata to support conference identity, "front matter," and award information.

SIGBED has started up the publication of a newsletter, the SIGBED Review. This electronic newsletter, edited by Dr. Tarek Abdelzaher, Dr. Sandeep Neema and Dr. Oleg Sokolsky, is a peer-reviewed quarterly publication, which provides a dissemination forum for research on embedded computing.

SIGDA has pioneered electronic publishing of electronic design automation (EDA) literature, beginning with the DA Library in 1989, which captured 25 years of EDA literature onto an archival series of CDROMs. SIGDA also produces an annual DVD Super Compendium of those proceedings, and Multimedia Monographs, variously based on talks at DAC or ICCAD or on specially-produced tutorials. Two new initiatives, now in their second year, were SIGDA's E-Newsletter (containing information on upcoming conferences and funding opportunities) and DA TechNews (containing a summary of the latest EDA news).

The Executive Editor of Mathematical Reviews (MR) Jane Kister has expressed interest in indexing SIGSAM content and working with ACM to electronically transmit metadata for our publications, saving effort by MR staff. This is a significant initiative that has the potential to make SIGSAM's publications more widely known to mathematicians.

Starting in FY04, an annual SIGPLAN CD-ROM became a member benefit. The SIGPLAN 2004 CD was enclosed with the May 2004 issue of SIGPLAN Notices. Covering the year 2003, the CD contains the proceedings of all SIGPLAN sponsored or co-sponsored conferences, all issues of SIGPLAN Notices, all volumes of TOPLAS, and all SIGPLAN-sponsored workshops that were published by the ACM.

5.3 Technical Meetings

The annual SIGCSE Symposium was held in March 3-7, 2004, in Norfolk, Virginia USA. . Attendance continued very strong, with over 1,150 attendees -- up about 100 from the previous year Submissions to SIGCSE 2004 were up significantly from past years. In all, 320 papers were submitted, whereas between 220 and 235 papers had been submitted each of the previous 3 years. This reinforced previous discussions to extend the length of the conference by a half day, and the main symposium ran three full days (Thursday morning through Saturday afternoon) with plenary sessions, papers, panels, special sessions, birds-of-a-feather sessions, and both faculty and student posters. Workshops and SIGCSE's Doctoral Consortium provided activities before and/or afterward, extending some activities from Wednesday through Saturday evening. Special activities were organized for students and for first-timers.

In May 2004, SIGACCESS sponsored the International Cross Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility 2004 (W4A) at ACM's WWW Conference. The workshop was cross-disciplinary and brought together users, accessibility experts, graphic designers, and technologists from academia and industry to discuss how accessibility can be supported. The workshop theme was 'Accessible Layout - The Tension Between Accessibility and Visual Design'

The ACM SIGAda Annual International Conference on the Ada Programming Language (SIGAda 2003) was held in San Diego, California from 7-11 December 2003. The conference was successful from a technical and financial perspective. There were 82 attendees. 25.6% of the attendees were from overseas, representing the countries of Australia, Belgium, France, Gambia, Germany, Italy, Korea, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, and the UK.

SIGCHI continues to sponsor and co-sponsor conferences with exciting, cutting-edge research and opportunities for professional development. Its conference proceedings remain among the most sought-after content in the ACM Digital Library as they continue to attract both newcomers, experienced researchers and professionals. Like other SIGs, it is experiencing significant increases in conference submissions and has been working to streamline the mechanics of the peer review process (through software systems) while maintaining its traditional high standards.

SIGITE held its annual conference, SIGITE 2003, at the Holiday Inn Select in West Lafayette in October hosted by Department of Computer Technology, School of Technology at Purdue University. There were 116 attendees (102 were pre-registered). Attendees included representatives from 38 different institutions/geographical locations. This included two international attendees (one from Malta and the other from the United Arab Emirates). The conference marked the dissolution of the Society for Information Technology Education (SITE), the organization name under which the group previously operated.

SAC 2004 was held in Nicosia, Cyprus, March 14-17, 2004, hosted by the Department of Computer Science at the University of Cyprus. Thanks to a great organizing committee, it was the most successful symposium in SAC history. New tracks included Data Streams, Engineering e-Learning Systems, Information Access and Retrieval, Internet Data Management, Object-Oriented Programming, Organizational Engineering, and Ubiquitous Computing.

The Fifth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC-04) was held in May 2004, in New York City, in conjunction with the WWW Conference. The conference attracted 97 attendees, approximately the same as last year. In an effort to broaden coverage, this year two Program co-Chairs were appointed, one from an area of existing strength (Theory, in this instance), and one from an area we seek to increase representation (Systems, in this instance). The approach worked, increasing the breadth of papers while maintaining a very high level of quality.

SIGGRAPH 2003 was held in San Diego, California on July 27-31, 2003 and chaired by Alyn Rockwood. It drew over 24,000 attendees, with a technical attendance of over 6,200 and had 240 exhibitors. The conference broke even as a result of adjusting the budget to take changing economic times into account and having all members of the organizing committees going above and beyond the call of duty to control costs while maintaining a high level of excitement for the conference. The Conference Advisory Group (CAG) is seeking to reach out to other technical communities and to increase the presence of games and interactive techniques in the annual conference. The CAG is working with the ACM SIGGRAPH Vice-President to have more symposia/workshops co-located with the annual conference. There will be three co-located workshops in conjunction with SIGGRAPH 2004.

Following the theme established last year of moving the conference to new locations, SIGUCCS' thirty-first spring Computer Services Management Symposium (CSMS) was held from March 21 to 23 in Santa Fe NM. The change in venue, and an aggressive marketing campaign attracted the largest participation since the mid 1990's. The registrations went up 20% from the previous year. Approximately 121 people attended this conference. The conference was a series of plenary sessions, facilitated discussion groups and evaluated papers.

SIGCOMM revised the main conference for 2003 to have a five-day format, with workshops (and tutorials) scattered throughout the program. Attendance was fantastic, and the conference made a profit that helped offset the losses in 2002. The workshops helped increase and broaden the attendance, and helped the community focus on new directions (FDNA, NREDS), assess past efforts (RIPQOS), explore emerging technical areas (NICELI, MoMe Tools), and consider how to teach the next generation of networking students (NetEd).

5.4 Professional Recognition/Awards

Sponsors	Award	Awardee
ACT	Godel Prize	Maurice Herlihy, Nir Shavit, Michael Saks, Fotios Zaharoglou
	Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award	Scott Aaronson, Jonathan A. Kelner
	SIGACT Distinguished Service Award	Rockford (Rocky) Ross
Ada	SIGAda Outstanding Ada Community Contributions	Michael Gonzalez Harbour
	SIGAda Distinguished Service Award	Leslie Dupaix, S. Ron Oliver
ARCH	The Eckert-Mauchly Award (co-sponsored with IEEE CS)	Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
	Maurice Wilkes Award	Kourosh Gharachorloo
	Influential ISCA Paper	Steven Przybylski, John Hennessy, Mark Horowitz
ART	Autonomous Agents Research Award	Nick Jennings
CAS	SIGCAS 2004 Making a Difference Award	Eugene Spafford
	SIGCAS 2004 Outstanding Service Award	Doris Lidtke
CHI	CHI Lifetime Achievement Award	Tom Moran
	CHI Lifetime Service Award	Robin Jeffries, Gene Lynch
COMM	2003 SIGCOMM Lifetime Achievement Award	David Cheriton
CSE	SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education	Mordechai(Moti) Ben-Ari
	The SIGCSE Lifetime Service Award	Bruce Klein
DA	ACM/IEEE William J. McCalla ICCAD Best Paper Award	Anirudh Devgan, Chandramouli Kashyap, Alper Demir
	Distinguished Service Award	Gordon Adshead, James Cohoon
	Technical Leadership Award	Robert Jones
DOC	2003 Joseph T. Rigo Award	JoAnn Hackos
	Diana Award	IBM Corp.
GRAPH	2003 SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award	Peter Schröder
	Significant New Researcher Award	Mathieu Desbrun
	Steven Anson Coons Award	Pat Hanrahan
KDD	SIGKDD Innovation Award	Heikki Mannila
	SIGKDD Services Award	Usama M. Fayyad
METRICS	SIGMETRICS Achievement Award	Kenneth C. Sevcik
MIS	Magid Igbaria Outstanding Conference Paper Award	Maren Simonsen, Maung Sein
MOD	SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award	Ronald Fagin
OPS	Mark Weiser Award	Michael Burrows
PLAN	ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award	Ron Cytron
	ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award	John Backus
SOFT	ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award	Will Tracz
	Outstanding Research Award	Nancy Leveson
UCCS	SIGUCCS Penny Crane Award	Russell S. Vaught
WEB	Vannevar Bush Award	Mor Naaman, Yee Jiun Song, Andreas Paepcke, Hector Garcia-Molina
	Douglas C. Engelbart Award	Jocelyne Nanard, Marc Nanard, Peter King
	Theodor Holm Nelson Award	Einat Amitay, David Carmel, Adam Darlow, Ronny Lempel, Aya Soffer

5.5 Educational Programs and Special Projects

SIGKDD launched three new programs that will further technical advances in the KDD field: chapters program, curriculum program, and standards program. The chapters program aims to create overseas, US regional, and US student chapters, and fund their technical efforts, including seminars, workshops, and KDD tracks in more encompassing conferences. The curriculum aims to develop and recommend college and graduate school level curriculum for KDD and related courses. The ultimate objective is to strengthen and standardize the training of students in KDD and related subjects. The standards program is to monitor and report (to the KDD community) on standards activities related to knowledge discovery and data mining.

STOC 04 initiated a reduced registration fee for postdoctoral students. This was in response to feedback that the conference was too expensive for many postdocs. The program was sponsored by NEC Laboratories of America. In addition they continued the (recently started) STOC Developing Country Travel Awards and STOC Student Travel Awards, providing financial support to conference attendees who are from nontraditional countries and who are students, respectively.

SIGMM organized a strategic retreat as part of MM03 to assess the current state of multimedia research and suggest directions for future research. The people invited to the retreat were nominated by anyone in the research community and selected by votes of the Executive Committee. The major observation is that research in the past decade has significantly advanced hardware and software support for distributed multimedia applications and that future research should focus on identifying and delivering applications that impact users in the real-world.

In the 2002-2003 fiscal year, SIGCSE initiated a new program of Special Project Grants to help its members investigate and introduce new ideas in the learning and teaching of computing. The maximum funding level is $5,000 per proposal, and the level of funding is subject to the quality of proposals received and the availability of funds targeted for such projects. Four grants were given in 2002-2003, the first year of the program. In 2003-2004, the SIGCSE Board continued this program. As expected, the number of proposals increased, and 7 of the 17 new proposals were funded.

Since 1994 SIGAda has conducted an "Ada Awareness Initiative". Its centerpiece has been the SIGAda professional booth display unit in exhibition halls at important software engineering conferences. 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. Via this exhibiting, SIGAda sustains Ada visibility ("name recognition"), provides various Ada-advocacy materials such as dozens of "Ada Success Stories" and the Walnut Creek Ada CD-ROM, 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 has been extremely successful and viewed as a highly important thrust in a recent fall 2002 survey of the SIGAda membership.

SIGCHI is in the early stages of two significant programs in the area of membership and communications. First, they are rejuvenating their volunteer development and recognition program. This program has three goals: (a) being more effective at getting volunteers involved in SIGCHI; (b) fostering the transition between "casual volunteers" and future volunteer leadership; and (c) developing a volunteer recognition program to improve the volunteer experience and make the role of volunteers more visible to prospective volunteers. SIGARCH annually gives travel grants to students who attend ISCA or ASPLOS. The grants are restricted to student members of SIGARCH, following several votes of the SIGARCH membership. The precise amount of the grants depends on the number of students who apply, but they have made an attempt to give at least a little to every student coauthor who applied. SIGARCH has also funded significant education programs at SC'03 and SC'04.

SIGART co-sponsored the eighth SIGART/AAAI/IJCAI Doctoral Consortium, which was held in Acapulco, Mexico, in conjunction with the IJCAI conference. The doctoral consortium provided an opportunity for 15 Ph.D. students to discuss and explore their research interests and career objectives with a panel of established AI researchers.

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

Under the guidance of new SIGDA Advisory Board member Sung Kyu Lim, the University Booth at DAC provides an opportunity for faculty and students to demonstrate university electronic design automation tools, design projects, and instructional materials. Held in a prime location on the Exhibit Floor at DAC, the University Booth provided a great place for DAC attendees to meet and interact with university researchers.

5.6 International Activities

SIGCHI chapters continue to serve thousands of members in dozens of countries on six continents. Their chapters range from small gatherings of HCI students or practitioners at a university or in a city to large national and regional chapters with hundreds of members and extensive calendars of monthly or weekly activities. For many years, SIGCHI has focused its energy on supporting individuals wishing to form chapters and in providing practical support to chapter leaders. They are now extending their reach to approach individual chapter members and provide them with better access to information about SIGCHI's other opportunities (conferences, publications, membership, and volunteer opportunities).

ACM SIGGRAPH and Eurographics have an affiliation agreement that allows for discounted joint membership. In February 2004 an ACM SIGGRAPH-Eurographics delegation visited six countries in South East Asia. South East Asia includes a vast geographical region, so a follow up delegation after their initial delegation to Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, was essential to ascertain a fuller extent of computer graphics activity in the region and extend this to include parts of the Indian subcontinent, including India and Bhutan. The direct beneficiaries of this mission will be computer graphics researchers, educators, developers and enthusiasts.

SIGMOD has been attempting to be more international by undertaking a number of initiatives. It has established close relationships with societies in Europe (EDBT, ICDT, Moscow ACM SIGMOD Chapter) and the Far East (China CCF DBS, SIGMOD Japan Chapter). There are ongoing efforts to establish similar linkages with Latin American countries (a Latin American Liaison Committee has been formed). There is an ongoing library donation program that is international in scope.

5.7 Collaborative Efforts

SIGITE's Accreditation Committee has successfully completed preparation of the draft criteria for professional accreditation that was submitted to CSAB. CSAB and CAC (Computing Accreditation Commission) have approved the draft and passed the recommendation to the Board of ABET that the criteria be approved and posted for first reading.

In conjunction with representatives of the Association for Information Technology Professionals (AITP) and the Association for Information Systems (AIS), SIGMIS has been involved in the development of model curriculum for education in information systems both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. SIGMIS continues to fund the attendance of the ACM's representative for one of the annual meetings of IFIP to promote involvement among the membership of SIGMIS and IFIP.

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