SIGSAM Annual Report

July 2002 - June 2003

Submitted by: Robert M. Corless, Chair

Treasury

The SIGSAM fund balance as of 30 June 2003 is 15,900 USD, down 18,000 USD from the opening balance of 33,900 USD. The increase in the SIG services allocation fee ("Reallocation") has substantially aggravated our difficult financial situation.

Membership

As of 30 June 2003, SIGSAM had 424 members.

SIGSAM Bulletin: Communications in Computer Algebra

During the past year, we published four 32-page issues of the Bulletin. David Jeffrey continued his service as Editor. Mark Giesbrecht continued his service as the Associate Editor for Formally Reviewed Articles and as the unofficial "web editor", posting issues on the Bulletin website.

ISSAC Conferences

ISSAC 2002 (Lille, France -- Marc Giusti, Chair) had 141 registered participants, with 29 student registrations. The conference nearly broke even, thanks in part to a special grant from the MEDICIS group.

ISSAC 2003 (Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA -- Hoon Hong, General Chair) has successfully concluded. There were 146 registered participants, including 40 students and 6 invited speakers. The conference appears to have closed with a positive balance of about 3000 USD. This balance reflects a payment of about 5500 USD to ACM/SIGSAM as the 16 percent organizational fee.

ISSAC 2004 will be held at the University of Cantabria in Santander, Spain. The General Chair is Josef Schicho (University of Linz/RISC, Austria) and the Program Committee Chair is Michael Singer (North Carolina State University, USA).

Beijing has been chosen for the site of ISSAC 2005.

Executive Committee Activity

The officers of SIGSAM have finished their terms of office. The new officers elected are Emil Volcheck (Chair), Manuel Bronstein (Vice Chair), Mark van Hoeij (Secretary), and Wayne Eberly (Treasurer). Rob Corless now replaces Bruce Char as Past Chair.

The SIGSAM Executive Committee (EC) made progress on several initiatives this year.

Awards We implemented the ISSAC Distinguished Paper and Distinguished Student Author awards, awarding prizes for both ISSAC 2002 and ISSAC 2003.

Organization

The Secretary drafted a substantial revision to the SIGSAM Bylaws that corrected one glaring error, established an Advisory Board to be appointed by the Membership at the annual Business Meeting, and made other minor revisions. The draft revision is currently under review at ACM Headquarters.

The EC established the SIGSAM_Officers mailing list to replace the Officers_SIGSAM alias previously used for contacting all officers. The archiving provided by the ACM LISTSERV mailing list server will provide an ongoing record of official business and enhance SIGSAM organizational memory.

Membership

We continued to send more issues of "SIGSAM News and Announcements" to the SIGSAM-Members mailing list and have found this to be an effective tool to reach our members. The Secretary made arrangements to obtain a membership roster on a monthly basis to improve our record-keeping for members. This allows the Secretary to provide membership verification, for example, contacting Elsevier to confirm that a member was eligible for the discounted subscription to the Journal of Symbolic Computation.

To encourage ISSAC 2003 nonmember registrants to join SIGSAM, the EC worked with the ISSAC organizers to place a link on the registration page that would allow a registrant to join SIGSAM and immediately qualify for the reduced member rate. For those who did not join SIGSAM and paid the higher nonmember registration fee, the EC hopes to once again provide them with complimentary memberships.

Citations Project

Michael Wester provided the EC with a list of bibliographic citations to computer algebra systems. There was otherwise little progress on this project this year.