Sigaccess annual Report

SIGMOD sponsors several awards each year that recognize excellence in the database community. In 2016, these awards were given to the following researchers:

hortest Paths and Distances with

Differential Privacy

Electronic Information

As of early 2011, the SIG website and all physical information products outlined below are managed by our Information Director, Prof. Curtis Dyreson (Utah State University) and his team of six Associate Information Directors.

http://www.sigmod.org/) provides access to a wealth of content, including the proceedings of SIGMOD/PODS and other co-sponsored conferences, the newsletter issues, metadata for the ACM Collection on Digital Content (see below), and videos of interviews of distinguished database researchers. In 2016, we relaunched the website in order to incorporate more information and improve readability and searchability.

SIGMOD is committed to continue to support and expand these services.

Professional SIGMOD membership is distinguished between online (at $15 per year, with benefits such as conference registration discounts and web access to significant content, e.g., quarterly SIGMOD Record issues and Anthology & DiSC metadata, being now expanded to the ACM Collection on Digital Content, linking to the ACM DL) and print (at $35 per year, which includes the additional benefit of print copies of the SIGMOD Record issues). Finally, student SIGMOD membership (at $10 per year for online and $30 per year for print), has the same benefits as the professional membership.

We continue to be in close collaboration with our sister societies, such as VLDB Endowment, IEEE TCDE, EDBT Association, and ICDT Council. Especially with VLDB, we have a series of joint activities, i.e., the Summer Schools and the Traveling Speakers Program, the inclusion of VLDB material in the ACM DL, and others. We are also carefully observing the 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.

We are also cooperating closely with several other ACM SIGs on various activities, primarily conference co-sponsorship. Examples, include SIGKDD for the KDD Conference, SIGSOFT for the Distributed Event-Based Systems Conference (DEBS), and SIGKDD, SIGIR, and SIGWEB for the Web Search and Data Mining Conference (WSDM). A very successful relatively recent example is our collaboration with SIGOPS for the Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC), where both SIGs were instrumental in creating what promises to become an important annual conference.

Finances

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. For SIGMOD 2016, we were able to attract more than $250,000 in sponsorship, ensuring profitability of the individual conferences as well as financial security of the SIG overall. Given this financial flexibility, SIGMOD has subsidized student registrations heavily in recent SIGMOD/PODS conferences and provided a substantial number of travel grants to undergraduate and graduate students, enabling them to attend the SIGMOD/PODS conferences.

SIGMOD continues to be a thriving, healthy, and very active SIG. There are certainly areas where it can improve even further, but we feel that SIGMOD is a strong organization and have every expectation of it continuing to provide useful benefits to its members and the more general scientific community in Computer Science.

This was the first year for Robbert van Renesse (Cornell) as Chair, Shan Lu (University of Chicago) as Vice Chair, Kaoutar El Maghraoui (IBM Research) as Treasurer, and Håvard Johansen (University of Tromsø, Norway) as Information Director. We took these roles over from Jeanna Matthews (Clarkson University) as Chair, George Candea (EPFL) as Vice Chair, Dilma da Silva (Qualcomm) as Treasurer, and Muli Ben-Yehuda (Technion) as Information Director.

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.

The SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award 2015 committee was run by Emmett Witchel (Chair, UT Austin), Andreas Haeberlen (U. Penn.), and Edouard Bugnion (EPFL). The award went to Cristiano Giuffrida’s "Safe and Automatic Live Update" (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), advised by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. Nadav Amit (Technion–Israel Institute of Technology) got an Honorable Mention for "Alleviating Virtualization Bottlenecks", advised by Assaf Schuster and Dan Tsafrir. Cristiano Giuffrida was also the recipient of the EuroSys Roger Needham Ph.D. Award 2015.

• 
  SOSP 2015 was held in Monterey, CA in October 2015. It was 100% sponsored by SIGOPS. The General Chair was Ethan Miller (UC Santa Cruz) and the Program Chair was Steven Hand (Google).
  
• 
  Collocated with SOSP 2015, we sponsored the following workshops:
  
  • 
    In celebration of the 50^th Anniversary of SIGOPS we sponsored a History Day workshop. Chaired by Peter Denning, the organization committee consisted of Steve Bellovin, Ken Birman, Andrew Birrell, Matt Blaze, David Clark, Peter Denning, Jack Dennis, Virgil Gligor, Casey Henderson, Andrew Herbert, Frans Kaashoek, Butler Lampson, Barbara Liskov, Jeanna Matthews, David Mazières, Mark Miller, Peter Neumann, Dave Patterson, Robbert van Renesse, Mahadev Satyanarayanan, Margo Seltzer, Fred Schneider, Mike Schroeder, Andy Tanenbaum, Robert Watson, and Yuanyuan Zhou.
    
  • 
    The 2015 Workshop on Supporting Diversity in Systems Research.
    
  • 
    The Conference on Timely Results in Operating Systems (TRIOS).
    
  • 
    The 9th ACM SIGOPS Workshop on Large-Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware (LADIS).
    
• 
  Planning for the next ACM Symposium on Operating Systems (SOSP), which is scheduled for October 2017 in Shanghai, is underway. Haibo Chen and Lidong Zhou are serving as General Chairs, and Lorenzo Alvisi and Peter Chen as Program Chairs. We also put together as Steering Committee consisting of Andrew Birrell, Dilma Da Silva, Mike Dahlin, Peter Druschel, Steven Hand, Hank Levy, and Ethan Miller.
  
• 
  The 11^th Eurosys Conference (Eurosys 2016) was held in London in April. Sponsored by SIGOPS and Eurosys.
  
• 
  The 21^st ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) was held in Atlanta, GA, April 2–6, 2016. ASPLOS is sponsored 25% by SIGOPS, 50% by SIGARCH, and 25% by SIGPLAN.
  
• 
  The 12^th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual Execution Environments was collocated with ASPLOS in Atlanta. VEE is sponsored 50% by SIGPLAN and 50% by SIGOPS.
  
• 
  The 34^th Annual ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) was in in Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain in July 2015. PODC was sponsored 50% by SIGOPS and 50% by SIGACT.
  
• 
  The 6^th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC) was held in Hawaii in August 2016. SOCC is sponsored 50% by SIGOPS and 50% by SIGMOD.
  
• 
  The 13^th ACM SenSys (SenSys) was held November 2015 in Seoul, Korea. Sensys is sponsored 10% by SIGOPS, SIGARCH, SIGMETRICS and SIGBED, 30% by SIGMOBILE, and 30% by SIGCOMM.
  
• 
  The 6^th SIGOPS Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (APSys) was held in July 2015 in Tokyo, Japan. SIGOPS is 100% sponsored by SIGOPS
  
• 
  The 9^th ACM International Systems and Storage Conference (SYSTOR) was held in Haifa in June 2016. It is 100% sponsored by SIGOPS.
  
• 
  We sponsored the 2016 CRA-W Grad Cohort Workshop, held in San Diego, April 10-11, 2016 at the Bronze level sponsorship. A record 511 women masters and Ph.D. students attended, representing 159 institutions from the United States and Canada and 60 had research interests in Operating Systems.
  
• 
  In-cooperation events included Usenix events OSDI 2016, FAST 2016, and NSDI 2016.
  
• 
  We are considering adopting the HotOS workshop, which has been run by USENIX.
  

• 
  SIGOPS is in the process of considering sponsorship of childcare services at major systems conferences in order to promote diversity. We have agreed to sponsor childcare at OSDI 2016 for up to 12 children.
  
• 
  SIGOPS approved providing registration discounts to SOSP 2015 for retirees.
  
• 
  Eric Eide (U. Utah) has agreed to participate on the ACM SGB Replication Taskforce (on independent verification of results) on behalf of SIGOPS.
  

Robin Milner Young Researcher Award

2015 David Walker, Princeton University

Citation:

David Walker has made deep and varied contributions to programming language research, but always with an eye towards emerging and surprising applications of foundational theory. He was one of the co-authors of the work on Typed Assembly Language (TAL), which showed how conventional type systems could be brought to bear on low-level machine code, and which forms the basis for today’s typed virtual machines such as Microsoft’s .NET. Focusing on the need for better reasoning principles for pointers, he helped develop Alias Types, the Calculus of Capabilities, and region-based formalisms that influenced the design of type systems for modern languages like Cyclone, Vault, and Rust. Walker also provided semantic foundations for secure program monitoring, and used his insights to develop new tools for enforcing security policies on legacy code. Long before “big data” was a hot topic, he and his co-authors designed languages for processing large, ad-hoc data collections. Recognizing trends in hardware, he developed new techniques for verifying the safety of programs executing on faulty processors. And, most recently, foreseeing the rise of software-defined networking, he has worked with people from both the networking and PL communities to develop new, high-level languages (Frenetic, Pyretic) for programming networks. In summary, Prof. Walker is a groundbreaking researcher in programming languages, connecting foundations to novel applications.

John Vlissides Award, given to a doctoral student participating in the OOPSLA Doctoral Symposium showing significant promise in applied software research.

2015 Chang Liu, University of Maryland

Advisors: Michael Hicks and Elaine Shi

Citation:

Chang Liu’s work explores programming language support for oblivious applications, an important dimension of security in the presence of side channels. His work bridges two disjoint efforts on opposite ends of the hardware-software design spectrum – oblivious RAM and oblivious algorithms – and adopts a language design approach to facilitate users in their development of efficient oblivious applications. The new language is endowed with a type system providing formal guarantees of obliviousness, and can support both sequential and parallel applications. The promising approach Chang proposed may significantly improve development productivity and performance of oblivious applications.

The 2016 winners of the Programming Languages Achievement Award, the Distinguished Service Award, and the Programming Languages Software Award will be given out later in 2016.

Most influential paper (MIP) designations are awarded to papers presented at the POPL, PLDI, ICFP, and OOPSLA conferences held 10 years prior to the award year. A designated committee judges papers according to their influence over the past decade.

ICFP 2005: Manuel M. T. Chakravarty, Gabriele Keller, and Simon Peyton Jones for Associated Type Synonyms

OOPSLA 2005: Philippe Charles, Christian Grothoff, Vijay Saraswat, Christopher Donawa, Allan Kielstra, Kemal Ebcioglu, Christoph von Praun, and Vivek Sarkar for X10: An Object-Oriented Approach to Non-Uniform Cluster Computing

POPL 2006: Xavier Leroy for Formal certification of a compiler back-end or: programming a compiler with a proof assistant

PLDI 2006: Emery Berger and Benjamin Zorn for DieHard: probabilistic memory safety for unsafe languages

Nothing to report.

SIGPLAN submitted an application to the Publications Board for a series in the newly created Proceedings of the ACM (PACM). This series would include the proceedings of OOPSLA, starting in 2017, with the expectation of including other SIGPLAN conferences, such as POPL and ICFP. As of late June 2016, the publications board approved the proposal and details will be firmed up during the latter half of 2016.

SIGPLAN has been a leader in supporting reproducible research, with its conferences increasingly using an "artifact evaluation committee" (AEC) to judge artifacts upon which published results are based. All major SIGPLAN conferences now use an AEC. ACM has more generally begun to support such efforts, and SIGPLAN will continue to work with them on this important issue.