SIGSAM FY'04 Annual Report

July 2003 - June 2004
Submitted by: Emil Volcheck, SIGSAM Chair

The SIGSAM homepage is at http://acm.org/sigsam .

Membership

As of 30 June 2004, SIGSAM had 366 members, down from 424 members a year ago.

SIGSAM Bulletin: Communications in Computer Algebra

During the past year, we again published four 32-page issues of the Bulletin. David Jeffrey continued his service as Editor. He finished his term with the June issue, which was delivered on-time to ACM Headquarters. Mark Giesbrecht continued his service as Associate Editor for Formally Reviewed Articles and as the unofficial "web editor", posting issues on the Bulletin website. Mark has also finished his term with the June issue. I appointed Ilias Kotsireas (Wilfred Laurier) and Austin Lobo (Washington College) to succeed David, serving jointly as co-editors. They have been working with David over the past year, preparing for the transition. Austin and Ilias appointed Chris Brown (US Naval Academy) to succeed David as Associate Editor for Formally Reviewed Articles.

ISSAC Conferences

ISSAC 2004 (University of Cantabria, Santander, Spain -- Josef Schicho, General Chair) has successfully concluded. While final figures were not available in time for this report, there were over 170 registered participants, two tutorials, and three invited speakers. We expect a return of approximately 3000 USD, after accounting for the allocation of approximately 4300 USD.

ISSAC 2005 will be held in Beijing, hosted by the Mathematics Mechanization Research Center (MMRC), with Xiao-Shan Gao (MMRC) and George Labahn (Waterloo) as General Co-Chairs. SIGSAM will again sponsor ISSAC.

Genoa has been chosen for the site of ISSAC 2006. We expect to organize ISSAC 2006 to take place around the time of the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Madrid.

Executive Committee Activity

The officers of SIGSAM have finished the first year out of their two-year terms. The officers are

Emil Volcheck (Chair)
Manuel Bronstein (Vice Chair)
Mark van Hoeij (Secretary)
Wayne Eberly (Treasurer).
Rob Corless serves as Past Chair.

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

Awards

After some delay in processing, the ISSAC 2002 and 2003 awards were presented and prize money disbursed to the winners. For the Distinguished Paper awards, SIGSAM presented the authors with a citation describing the achievements in an effort to increase recognition and awareness of new developments in the field. We created a webpage featuring all the award winners and their citations:

http://www.acm.org/sigsam/ISSAC_Awards

The ISSAC 2004 awards were announced at the conference and are being processed. SIGSAM has submitted a nomination for ACM Fellow in the 2004-2005 cycle, and we are looking at other possible awards for which we can nominate members of our community.

Organization

The proposed revision to the SIGSAM Bylaws drafted last year received preliminary approval from the SGB EC Chair Alan Berenbaum. I expect to submit revised bylaws to the ACM Council for approval this coming year.

Membership

We were able to offer 54 complimentary SIGSAM memberships to ISSAC 2003 participants, with about half going to participants who paid the higher non-member registration fee, and half going to students. We expect to repeat this for ISSAC 2004.

With encouragement from our Secretary Mark van Hoeij, Bob Okajima in ACM IS developed a web application that displays current membership information. Mark hopes to use this service in the coming year to identify recently lapsed members, whom he will then contact to encourage them to renew.

No issues of "SIGSAM News and Announcements" appeared in the past year, although numerous event announcements were sent to the SIGSAM_Members mailing list.

Citations Project

Alexander Hulpke (Colorado State) made significant progress on this project, developing a website with bibliographic information on over 25 Computer Algebra Systems: http://acm.org/sigsam/citation .

ISSAC Proceedings on CD

Vice-Chair Manuel Bronstein led a team that included Tim Daly and Wen-Shin Lee to develop and produce a CD containing the ISSAC Proceedings as well as a number of free or open source software packages. The CD was distributed at ISSAC 2004 and is being sent to all Bulletin subscribers with the June issue.

Mathematical Reviews

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 our publications more widely known to mathematicians.

Financial Summary

The SIGSAM fund balance as of 30 June 2004 is 4,185 USD, down almost 12,000 USD from the opening balance of 15,938 USD. Our projected budget for FY 2005 shows that we expect to break even in the coming year. The reasons for our improved financial situation include the reduction in the minimum SIG Services Allocation, mailing members the ISSAC Proceedings on CD instead of hardcopy, and eliminating scanning charges when producing the Bulletin.