Annual Report of the sig governing Board For the period 1-July-11 through 30-June-12 Submitted by: Vicki Hanson September 20, 2012
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| Annual Report of the SIG Governing Board
For the period 1-July-11 through 30-June-12 Submitted by: Vicki Hanson September 20, 2012 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 which were approved following the review and approval of the restructuring task force recommendations: SGB Chair - Serves as SGB EC Chair, one of the four SIG Representatives on ACM Council, and as the SIG Representative on the ACM Executive Committee. Also responsible for SIG financial and budgetary issues and overseeing SGB committees and task forces. SGB EC Vice Chair for Operations – Presides over SGB and SGB EC Meetings, including SGB EC conference calls. Oversees SIG Liaisons to ACM Committees and Boards. SIG Development Advisor –. Identifies emerging technical areas and works with individuals and groups interested in forming SIGs. SGB Conference Advisor – Oversees developing conference activity to be sponsored by the SGB. New SIG Advisor – Acts as liaison for newly chartered SIGs and helps to nurture and support new SIG leadership as they develop programs and activities. SIG Viability Advisor – Oversees transitional SIGs and works with SIGS scheduled for program reviews. Also acts as the SIG election liaison. SIG Awards Advisor -. Acts as liaison for SIG leaders and Awards Committee and helps SIG leadership with proposals and approval process. Publications Advisor – Acts as liaison between SGB and Publications Board and oversees issues related to publications as directed by the SGB SGB Past Chair- Provides guidance and advice to the SGB EC and chairs the SGB EC nominating committee. Director of SIG Services – Staff liaison During FY’12 the following individuals held the positions indicated:Name Position Term EndVicki Hanson Chair July 1, 2012 Alexander L. Wolf Past Chair July 1, 2012 Barbara Boucher Owens SIG Viabilty Advisor July 1, 2013 David M Pennock SIG Development Advisor July 1, 2013 Janice C. Sipior New SIG Advisor July 1, 2012 Andrew L. Sears SGB EC Vice Chair for Operations July 1, 2012 Klara Nahrstedt SGB Conference Advisor July 1, 2012 Erik R. Altman SIG Awards Advisor July 1, 2013 Joseph A. Konstan Publications Advisor July 1, 2013 Donna Cappo Staff Liaison 1.3 Council Representatives The SGB elects 3 representatives to the ACM council for two-year terms. During FY’12 the following individuals held the ACM Council positions indicated: Name Position Term EndVicki Hanson SGB Chair July 1, 2012 Andrew L. Sears SGB Representative July 1, 2013 Scott Owen SGB Representative July 1, 2012 Doug Terry SGB Representative July 1, 2012 1.4 Standing Committees The SGB is responsible for the oversight of the Federated Computing Research Conference Steering Committee currently chaired by Dean Tullsen. 1.5 Significant SGB actions Conference Practices Task force – A task force was chartered to look at opportunities for ACM to simplify life for conferences. The task force is working to identify opportunities to do things better and more effectively support the SIGs and conferences. Alternate SIG Structures (Nurturing) Task Force - ACM receives many SIG proposals with challenges such as: Major overlap with one or more existing SIGs; very small or narrow community or volunteer pool; no experience with ACM or broader SIG activities; self-sustaining revenue source unclear; SIG being too heavyweight for proposed activity (having only one conference); no other SIG activities such as awards, newsletters, student travel, CACM nominations A task force was chartered to examine ways to better nurture SIGs and determine if there is an appropriate alternative structure for groups that do not fit SIG the model? The task force proposed creating a new entity such as “ACM Steering Committee on X” which is similar to a steering committee to support a conference and/or community for building activities, (e.g. website). The steering committees would: be lightweight, often one activity only; be a formally named structure reporting to the SGB through the SGB EC; have a fund balance initially seeded by SGB; have a Chair who attends SGB meetings as a guest, but not vote; be drawn from the group proposing the new activity as well as related SIGs. The task force work will continue to evaluate this. ACM/AMIA Task Force - A steering committee will be named to oversee a joint annual conference sponsored by ACM and AMIA. The event is expected to start in 2013 with a three year commitment from each organization. The steering committee will be made up of representative from AMIA and the ACM SIGS and will initially be sponsored by the SGB. Once the conference is established the SIGs taking the most interest in the technical program will be asked to become co-sponsors. SIG proposals – The SGB EC considered several SIG proposals this year including one on Nano and Molecular Communication (SIGNANOCOM). Following discussions with the SIG Development Advisor and the Chair of the Alternate SIG Structure Task Force, the proposers are expected to start a conference which will be sponsored by the SGB in FY’13 or ’14. They’ll gauge interest of the community to determine if moving ahead with a SIG is viable. 1.6 Miscellaneous Appointments SIG leaders appointed as committee liaisons: Name Position Term EndJoseph A. Konstan Publications Board Liaison July 1, 2013 Dean Tullsen FCRC Steering Comm. Chair July 1, 2015 Erik R. Altman Awards Committee Liaison July 1, 2013 Brent Hailpern History Committee Liaison July 1, 2012 Emil Volchek USACM Liaison July 1, 2012 Jeanna Matthews USACM Liaison July 1, 2012 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 EndAlexander L. Wolf Past SGB Chair July 1, 2012 Vicki Hanson SGB Chair July 1, 2012 Donna Cappo Staff Liaison
ACM/SIG Members 31,877 31,166 30,975 SIG Only Members 9,345 7,739 8,147 Subscribers 1,738 1,575 2,090 Total SIG Memb/Subs 42,960 40,480 41,212 Total ACM Members 97,386 108,496 108,521 The SIGs overall member/subscriber count is 41,212 as compared to 40,480 in FY’11.
MICRO 80% APP 52% Ada 79% CHI 62% CSE 79% HIT 62 % DA 78% WEB 62%
3. New SIG Formation and DissolutionThe SGB granted SIG status to SIGHPC – the Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing effective November 1, 2011. 4. SIG Program Reviews and Annual Reports4.1 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 is intended to show that the SIG is viable and meeting its mission. The endorsement from the SGB to continue the SIGs status is based on a growing or stable membership, solid finances, healthy conferences, and publications or other member benefits being delivered and well received by members. The SGB conducted 3 full program reviews during the year: SIGEVO, SIGGRAPH and SIGMOBILE were deemed viable under existing criteria. In addition, reports were presented by SIGBioinformatics and SIGDOC. SIGDOC will continue to work with a mentor to define its community and work on volunteer development. SIGBioinformatics was congratulated on the success of the BCB conference. The SIG leaders were encouraged to continue their efforts with a focus on their plans for growth and mission. 4.2 Annual Reports Annual reports for FY’12 were received from all SIGs: SIGACCESS, SIGACT, SIGAda, SIGAPP, SIGARCH, SIGART, SIGBED, SIGBioinformatics, SIGCAS, SIGCHI, SIGCOMM, SIGCSE, SIGDA, SIGDOC, SIGecom, SIGEVO, SIGGRAPH, SIGHIT, SIGHPC, SIGIR, SIGITE, SIGKDD, SIGMETRICS, SIGMICRO, SIGMIS, SIGMOBILE, SIGMOD, SIGMM, SIGOPS, SIGPLAN, SIGSAC, SIGSAM, SIGSIM, SIGSOFT, SIGSPATIAL, SIGUCCS, SIGWEB. 5. SIG Technical HighlightsThe 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’11 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 CommunitySIGSIM’s Modeling and Simulation (M&S) Knowledge Repository (MSKR) at http://www.acm-sigsim-mskr.org/ has been an innovative program which provided services to the SIGSIM technical community. The SIGBED web site was re-designed from scratch and updated its content. The SIG also created an @sigbed Twitter account. The web site includes a blog for announcements. They also plan to use the blog and twitter account for real-time postings during CPSWEEK and ESWEEK. SIGMOBILE helped to launch ACM’s new Learning Webinar series, when on January 26, 2012, David B. Johnson, SIGMOBILE’s Past Chair, served as the moderator for the pilot webinar in the series. This webinar, entitled “The Cloud in Your Hands: Marriage of Cloud Computing with Smart Devices,” was presented by Arjmand Samuel and Danny Dalal of Microsoft Research. There were more than 4700 registrations for this pilot webinar, 816 live attendees, and over 956 on-demand attendees. The ACM Learning Webinars are provided as a part of ACM’s Learning Center. Several health informatics PhD and Master's theses have been newly added into the SIGHIT theses repository at http://www.sighit.org/thesis.php. 5.2 PublicationsThe SIGPLAN Research Highlights Nominating Committee, chaired by Ben Zorn, nominates papers appearing in SIGPLAN conferences to the Communications of the ACM to appear in their Research Highlight track. Ten papers were nominated in the last year. As of January 2011, out of 23 papers that the SIGPLAN CACM Research Highlights Committee has nominated, 7 have now appeared in the CACM.
SIGDOC plans to transition from the newsletter of the past 12 years to a newer journal-like format, the Communication Design Quarterly Review. The first new format newsletter will be made available in September 2012. See, http://sigdoc.acm.org/publications/ 5.3 Technical MeetingsThe 2012 SIGAda conference included three outstanding keynote speakers; Grady Booch. IBM Fellow. Chief Scientist for Software Engineering, IBM Research. Everything I Know I Learned from Ada; Martin Carlisle, Ph.D. US Air Force Academy. Why I Came Back To Ada; and Jim Rogers. MEI Technologies, Inc. Software Safety, and Related Language Considerations The 27th Annual edition of SAC has marked another successful event for the Symposium on Applied Computing. This international gathering attracted over 389 attendees from over 61 countries. It was hosted and held in the conference center in Riva del Garda, Italy in March 2012.
In all, over 300 presentations as well as panel discussions and talks were held across the programs, generating robust discussions and deep insights on current and future developments in the field of computer graphics and interactive techniques. The annual ACM SIGMETRICS conference is the premier forum for performance evaluation research, which spans a wide range of application domains in computer and communication systems. This year, it was a joint conference with IFIP WG 7.3 and the joint conference ACM Sigmetrics/Performance was held in London, from June 11-15, 2012. The KDD 2011 annual conference maintained SIGKDD position as the leading conference on data mining and knowledge discovery, with a new all time record of 714 submissions of full papers in the academically oriented Research and Industry/Government Applications tracks. Of these, the program committee accepted 126 full papers representing an acceptance rate of 17.6% overall. We also added a new form of track in the conference: The Industry Experience Expo – which attracted a very selective set of 12 presentations on actual deployed and significant applications or systems presented by industry leaders. The Thirteenth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'12) was held June 4-8, 2012 in Valencia, Spain, and co-located with the Eleventh International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS’12). This was our first co-location with AAMAS and our first EC conference held outside of North America. Over 170 people attended, only slightly fewer than in 2011 when the conference was held in conjunction with FCRC in San Jose. The conference attracted 219 submissions, a record, from authors in academia and industry around the world. A paper “The Groupon Effect on Yelp Ratings: A Root Cause Analysis,” by J. Byers, M. Mitzenmacher and G. Zervas, studied the (negative) effect of Groupon deals on Yelp ratings, and attracted significant media attention including NPR, the NY Times and Time magazine. 5.4 Professional Recognition/Awards
5.5 Educational Programs and Special ProjectsASSETS offers a mentoring program to authors who are new to the conference as well as authors who are new to presenting research or are submitting work to a new category. Authors who are not familiar with preparing papers in English can also seek assistance. Mentors are experienced ASSETS authors, providing advice to the prospective authors about how their work may fit with the conference and how to effectively present their ideas. Normally, mentoring does not include detailed copyediting. This year the mentoring program received 12 requests. To provide some context, the conference normally receives approximately 100 full paper submissions. This year, SIGBioinformatics organized a special program, Women in Bioinformatics, sponsored by the US National Science Foundation during the BCB2011 conference. It featured one keynote speech by Nancy Cox, a special panel moderated by the panel chair, Cathy Wu, from the University of Delaware. The SIG was able to support 21 female and minority students to participate in the BCB11 conference, many of whom wouldn’t have been able to attend otherwise. SIGCAS and COPE (Committee on Professional Ethics) jointly ran a one-day workshop on the teaching of computer ethics, before the main SIGCSE conference in Raleigh, NC on Feb 28th 2012. SIGCAS Vice-Chair Netiva Caftori and former Chair Flo Appel ran the morning “SIGCAS” element while SIGCAS rep to COPE, Don Gotterbarn ran the afternoon COPE workshop, which attracted around 25 attendees. The SIGCOMM Education Director Olivier Bonaventure, continues to maintain an education website (http://education.sigcomm.org), where members of the community are able to share education-related resources. The SIGCOMM conference in August 2011 featured a workshop on computer networking education. Olivier also ran a Shadow PC for the CoNEXT conference as a way to educate the current generation of graduate students in the best practices of technical paper reviewing and program committee operation. Following the meetings with NSF last year, the SIGDA board prepared a visioning workshop proposal for CRA; this was funded, with Prof. Alex Jones as the lead PI. Members of the prior board are now actively working on organizing a series of three workshops to chart the course for design automation research. Because of heavy industrial activity in the Information Retrieval community, the SIGIR conference has run an “industry track” at the conference. The track started as a separate event in 2007 and was integrated into the main conference starting in 2009. The track has been very popular, highlighting key industrial issues and challenges as well as attracting industrial researchers to the main technical conference. This year SIGMOD has revived dbjobs (http://www.dbjobs.org), a searchable collection of database jobs offered as a free service to the database community by SIGMOD. It is intended for use by job seekers that have a background in databases. Job postings are moderated, so they are guaranteed to be database-related. Job postings are automatically scraped and pulled in from DBWorld and other resources, so job seekers need only check dbjobs. Since 2006, SIGMIS has held the Computer Personnel Doctoral Consortium. This year’s CPR Doctoral Consortium was held on Thursday, May 31, 2012 at the SIGMIS CPR Conference May 31-June 2, 2012 in Milwaukee, WI USA. Beginning with the CPR 2011 conference, SIGMIS is providing travel grants to Doctoral Consortium participants. Through the efforts of its History Liaison, Tao Xie, SIGSOFT continues to provide valuable resources to the community documenting the history of its field and the people involved in that history. Begun in 2008, SIGMICRO has been expanding the Micro Hall of Fame: http://newsletter.sigmicro.org/micro-hof.txt/view. The Micro Hall recognizes those authors with 8 or more papers since the conference inception in 1967. The Hall of Fame currently has 36 members, with three new members inducted in 2011. SIGSAM sponsored the East Coast Computer Algebra Day (ECCAD’12), in cooperation with ACM, on May 12, 2012, at Oakland University in Oakland MI. Poster abstracts from ECCAD’12 were published in the CCA issue 180. In looking for ways to expand its professional development opportunities for its membership, SIGUCCS is exploring the establishment of a mentoring program. This program would allow members of the SIGUCCS community to both be mentored and to mentor their colleagues. By supporting the community, SIGWEB feels it is performing a vital role in encouraging up and coming research areas and agendas which may well be beneficial to both SIGWEB and the wider community in the future. It also has a program to confer small grants to new conference and workshop initiatives – the first being the Social Network Working Group. 5.6 International ActivitiesInternationalization is expected to continue to be a major focus of SIGCSE. SIGCSE representatives are working with Informatics Europe representatives to discuss the possibility of formation of a new SIGCSE-like education conference in Europe. The ICER conference already moves from the US to Europe to Australasia on a rotating 3-year basis. In 2012, SIGSAC held the seventh instance of its third major conference, namely ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (AsiaCCS), in Seoul, Korea, on May 02-04, 2012. The 2012 edition of the conference received 159 submissions and accepted 35 regular papers and 14 short papers yielding an acceptance rate of 30% and 22% for full papers. The increased number of submissions suggests that there is a sustained interest in the information security area outside North America. 2012 saw the growth of two of SIGSPATIAL Chapters: SIGSPATIAL China and SIGSPATIAL Australia with SIGSPATIAL China reaching over 30 members. A new SIGSPATIAL Taiwan Chapter has been initiated and approved. In order to better anticipate the possibility of SIGCHI events in Asia and Latin America, SIGCHI organized two SIGCHI sponsored workshops on HCI in developing regions. The first was held in Asia (a three-day event held in Beijing, China in March 2011), and the second was a three day even in Latin America (a three day event held in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in July of 2012). 5.7 Collaborative EffortsSIGARCH was one of the 11 SIGs to sponsor the ACM Turing Centenary celebration, providing $22,800 to support this very successful and highly-visible event. As part of this support, SIGARCH selected 7 computer architecture students to receive student scholarships to attend the celebration. The Simons Foundation has announced a new $6mil/year Center for the Theory of Computing at Berkeley and also supports a number of researchers and postdocs. Many SIGACT members participate closely in these activities and SIGACT hopes to play a major role in the Center’s activities. SIGART co-sponsored with AAAI the 2012 SIGART/AAAI Doctoral Consortium. The Doctoral Consortium is held each year during the AAAI conference, and provides an opportunity for Ph.D. students to discuss in depth their research interests and career objectives with the other participants and a group of established AI researchers that act as individual mentors. Presentations and discussions take place over two days of intense meetings prior to the AAAI conference. Appendix A – Membership & Technical Activity Summary Appendix C – Conference Summary Appendix B – Financial Summary Appendix D – Individual SIG Reports |