Sigaccess fy’09 Annual Report



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Appendix D

SIGACCESS FY’09 Annual Report

July 2008 - June 2009

Submitted by: Vicki L. Hanson, Past Chair and Andrew Sears, Chair

SIGACCESS continues to expand its membership and activities to meet member needs. This report highlights SIGACCESS Awards as well and the SIG's conference, publication, and other activities.


Awards
ACM Student Research Competition (SRC)

First Place in this competition was awarded to Xu Liu. ASSETS'08 SRC winners competed in the ACM-wide SRC. Across all ACM SIGs and conferences participating, Xu was awarded first place in the Graduate Student Category for his paper "Mobile Currency Reader for People with Visual Impairments." He was invited to the ACM Awards ceremony in San Diego in June where the award was announced. For more information, see http://www.acm.org/src/


This is a tremendous honor for Xu. In addition, SIGACCESS is pleased that this is the second time in the past few years that the ASSETS SRC has produced the ACM 1st Place Winner. The previous recipient of this prize was Eugene Borodin in 2007.

ACM SIGACCESS AWARD for Outstanding Contributions to Computing and Accessibility


Two years ago the ACM SIGACCESS Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computing and Accessibility was created. The award, given every other year, recognizes individuals who have made significant and lasting contributions to the development of computing technologies that improve the accessibility of media and services to people with disabilities. Outstanding contributions through research, practice, or advocacy are recognized. The award recognizes members of the community for long-term accomplishments or those who have made a notable impact through a significant innovation. The inaugural award was presented in 2008 to Jim Thatcher. Nominations to begin the 2010 award process will be announced shortly.
2008 SIGACCESS Best Paper Award

Feng, J., Lazar, J., Kumin, L., and Ozok, A. 2008. Computer usage by young individuals with down syndrome: an exploratory study. In Proceedings of the 10th international ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, October 13 - 15, 2008). Assets '08. ACM, New York, NY, 35-42. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1414471.1414480


2008 SIGACCESS Best Student Paper Award

Borodin, Y., Bigham, J. P., Raman, R., and Ramakrishnan, I. V. 2008. What's new?: making web page updates accessible. In Proceedings of the 10th international ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, October 13 - 15, 2008). Assets '08. ACM, New York, NY, 145-152. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1414471.1414499




ASSETS Conference
ASSEST'08 was held in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. This was the first time ASSETS has been held outside the US since 2002. Conference attendance was excellent, exceeding attendance projections. Particularly notable was that the conference continues to expand areas of research, with a number of cognitive issues represented in this year's papers. This broadening of research interests attests to the growing importance of considering the needs of a diverse population.
For the fifth year, the conference featured an NSF-sponsored Doctoral Consortium (see http://www.sigaccess.org/news/2009/03/january-2009-sigaccess-newsletter-now.php). This consortium allowed advanced doctoral students to present their dissertation topics and receive feedback during formative stages of their work.
The conference also hosted its third Microsoft Student Research Competition (SRC) event. The SRC allows students from diverse ACM areas to present their work and get recognized for achievement. Award winners were:
1st Prize: Keith Trnka, University of Delaware, for 'Adapting word prediction to subject matter without topic-labeled data'
2nd Prize: Xu Liu, University of Maryland, for 'A Camera Phone Based Currency Reader for the Visually Impaired'
3rd Prize: Mohammed Hoque, MIT, for 'Analysis of Speech Properties of Neurotypicals and Individuals Diagnosed with Autism and Down Syndrome'
The SIGACCESS Business Meeting held at ASSETS updated attendees on SIG activities and discussed ideas for new activities. Key issues included accessibility of publications in the ACM Digital Library. Specifically, it was considered important to work with ACM to ensure that ASSETS Proceedings are accessible.

Publications
The inaugural issue of the ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS) appeared in May, 2008. Since May, four additional issues have been published. See http://portal.acm.org/toc.cfm?id=J1156&type=periodical&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=43106710&CFTOKEN=53985827 for details. TACCESS is a quarterly journal that publishes refereed articles addressing issues of computing as it impacts the lives of people with disabilities. It provides a technical forum for disseminating innovative research related to computing technologies and their use by people with disabilities. This journal is available online to SIGACCESS members.
The SIGACCESS newsletter continues with its regular online publications with Sri Kurniawan, Editor-in-Chief, see http://www.sigaccess.org/community/newsletter/.
Also available on the SIGACCESS website is the monthly 'left field' column (see http://www.sigaccess.org/community/left_field/) by Yeliz Yesilada. The goal of Left Field is to bring to the attention of members publications from the ACM Digital Library that are of interest, but published in venues typically outside the reading of SIGACCESS members.

In Cooperation Conferences

SIGACCESS provided financial support for the International Cross Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility 2009 (W4A) at the WWW Conference in Madrid this past April (see http://www.w4a.info/2009/).



SIGACCESS Website

The SIGACCESS website recently received a new look. This accessible site was created and is maintained by the new SIGACCESS webmaster, Darren Lunn of the University of Manchester.



In Memoriam

We note the passing on April 11 of our friend and colleague Noelle Carbonell. Those of you who knew her personally know of her great humanity, keen intellect, and dedication to high quality work. As Secretary-Treasurer of SIGACCESS these past three years she was a staunch advocate for people with disabilities and was a strong advocate for international cooperation on research in this area. We will greatly miss her energy and passion.



SIGACT FY’09 Annual Report

July 2008 - June 2009

Submitted by: Richard E. Ladner, Past Chair

1. Awards


  • 2009 Gödel Prize: For “Entropy waves, the zig-zag graph product and new constant degree expanders,” Omer Reingold, Salil Vadhan and Avi Wigderson, Annals of Mathematics,  Vol  155, (2002), 157-187 and “Undirected connectivity in Log-Space,” Omer Reingold, Journal of ACM,  Vol  55 (4) (2007). 



  • Knuth Prize: Volker Strassen for his seminal and influential contributions to efficient algorithms. The Knuth Prize is given jointly by SIGACT and IEEE TCMFCS.




  • Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award: Corinna Cortes and Vladimir Vapnik for their development of Support vector machines. This award is an ACM award sponsored in part by SIGACT.




  • Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing: Baruch Awerbuch and David Peleg for their paper “Sparse partitions” in the Proceedings of the 31st Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 1990). The Dijkstra Prize is given jointly by SIGACT and SIGOPS.




  • SIGACT Distinguished Service Award: To be awarded in 2010.




  • Best Papers Award at STOC 2009: Chris Peikert for “Public-key cryptosystems from the worst-case shortest vector problem” and Robin Moser for “A constructive proof of the Lovász local lemma.”




  • SIGACT Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award at STOC 2009: Robin Moser for “A constructive proof of the Lovász local lemma.”


2. Significant papers on new areas published in proceedings
This second was prepared with help from Michael Mitzenmacher, Claire Mathieu, and Boaz Patt-Shamir, program chairs of STOC 2009, SODA 2009, PODC 2008, respectively.
STOC 2009

The ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2009) covers much of computer science theory.


Chris Peikert’s best paper at STOC 2009 represents a major advance in cryptography. In 1997 Ajtai published a breakthrough result: one-way functions based on the assumption that approximations for the shortest vector problem (SVP) in an integer lattice are intractable (for any lattice). One-way functions are the most basic building block in cryptography, as they yield commitment protocols and digital signatures. However, they do not yield full public-key encryption schemes. Thus, an obvious question emerged: base a public-key encryption scheme on the difficulty of approximating the size of the shortest vector. A year later Ajtai-Dwork in 1998 did base a public-key encryption scheme the worst case unique-SVP approximation problem. The unique-SVP problem is a special case of the general SVP problem and it was clear that this is a first result on the way to the general case. Can you build a public key cryptosystem based on the worst case difficulty of SVP? This has been open since 1998. Peikert finally resolves this question. His technique utilizes a clever reduction from the worst case of case SVP to learning with errors. Additionally, his stronger proof is simpler and more direct than previous works.

Robin Moser’s Best Paper and Best Student Paper at STOC 2009 represents a new and constructive way to find satisfying instances of complex satisfiable formulas. The Lovasz Local Lemma (LLL) provides a tool for showing the probability a set of events happens, even when there are non-trivial dependencies among the events. As an example, the LLL implies that any k-CNF formula in which each clause shares variables with at most 2k-2 other clauses is satisfiable. However, the proof is nonconstructive. This paper shows how to give an efficient algorithm that constructs the solution for such a problem. The proposed algorithm uses a drastically different approach from previous similar attempts and is extremely simple. The algorithm starts with a random assignment and tries to satisfy any violated clauses using local changes. If this procedure takes too long the algorithm simply chooses a new random assignment and starts again. The paper is elegant, both in terms of its algorithm and analysis. It promises to increase the applicability and the utility of the LLL throughout the fields of probability and randomized algorithms.
SODA 2009

SODA is a major conference that focuses on algorithms and combinatorics.


Bernard Chazelle’s Best Paper at SODA 2009, “Natural Algorithms,” analyzes the convergence of flocking algorithms. A flocking model consists of a set of entities that adapt their behavior depending on other entities in their neighborhood. In a discrete time version, the behavior is adapted in the next time step. Flocking comes down to the behavior that an entity will adapt its velocity by taking the velocities of entities nearby into account (basically, by averaging). This paper uses techniques from the analysis of algorithms to analyze convergence of models for flocking. The neighborhood of an entity (bird) is defined as the other birds within unit distance. For one recent model, the Cucker-Smale flocking model, convergence time is proved, with an upper bound on the number of time steps that is some tower-of-twos in the input size. A lower bound on convergence time is also given, again with a (much shorter) tower-of-twos. This analysis is from a point of view that control theorists have not looked at, when analyzing models of coordinated motion. It is a very fresh and welcome view of this style of algorithm.
Gabriel Nivasch’s Best Student Paper at SODA 2009, “Improved Bounds and New Techniques for Davenport-Schinzel Sequences and Their Generalizations”
Davenport-Schinzel sequences are fundamental to the analysis of a variety of geometric algorithms and their outputs: Davenport-Schinzel sequences appear in bounds for the complexity of lower envelopes of line segments, of the graphs of simple functions, of single faces of arrangements, of geometric partitions in higher dimensions, of transversals. An (n,s) Davenport-Schinzel sequence is a sequence of symbols (alphabet size n) that has no subsequences isomorphic to ababa... (length s+2). What is the maximum length of an (n,s) Davenport-Schinzel sequence? Although the paper is technical, it simplifies or improves all previous upper and lower bounds, comes up with a simplified construction, and obtains in several cases very nice definitive results (exact asymptotics for Davenport-Schinzel sequences of order 3, correct exponent for growth of Davenport-Schinzel sequences for even s). The best part of the results is their comparative simplicity. It will be a landmark for the experts on the topic.

PODC 2008

PODC is a major conference that focuses on the theory of distributed computing.


Armando Castañeda and Sergio Rajsbaum’s Best Student Paper Award for PODC 2008 “New Combinatorial Topology Upper and Lower Bounds for Renaming” reexamines the well known renaming problem. This paper throws surprising light on the central problem of Renaming. Specifically, it is shown that contrary to previous belief, there are some special values of n such that wait-free renaming of n processors into [1,...,k] names is possible for k < 2n-1. The paper goes on to characterize the precise set of numbers n for which renaming n processors into [1,...,k] names requires k ≥ 2n-1. Thus, using combinatorial topology analysis, the paper extends our understanding of the foundations of asynchronous distributed systems.

3. Significant programs that provided a springboard for further technical efforts
SIGACT sponsored or co-sponsored a number of important conferences including the Symposium on Theory of Computation (41st STOC), Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (27th PODC), Symposium on Computational Geometry (25th SOCG), Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures (21st SPAA), and Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (19th SODA). SIGACT also supports several conferences in-cooperation including Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS), Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL).
4. Innovative programs which provide service to our technical community
The Committee for the Advancement of Theoretical Computer Science (CATCS) sponsored by SIGACT has been very active this past year. The committee meets by conference call every two weeks and has developed and executed action plans to increase the visibility of theoretical computer science and to increase the funding base for theory of computation at the NSF. The Committee has helped advise the NSF CISE Assistant Director on several matters including recruiting for positions within CISE and restructuring the organization.
CATCS with funding from the Computing Community Consortium held the Visions for Theoretical Computer Science Workshop which consolidates theoretical research agendas into compact visions that are accessible to people outside of our field.
A new Ad Hoc Committee on STOC has been formed chaired by Shafi Goldwasser and Richard Ladner with the goal of finding alternatives to ensure that STOC continues to welcome interesting, path breaking submissions, regardless of whether or not they are mathematically hard.  More generally, the committee's charge is to explore alternatives that allow SIGACT to continue to publish contributions that introduce new topics, approaches, frameworks, and techniques to our field, without creating a new conference. A report from the Committee will be given to the SIGACT Executive Committee for possible action.
With the help of ACM headquarters SIGACT continues to produce press releases for the Gödel and Knuth Prizes. This effort is intended to make our research more accessible to the general public.
SIGACT continues to support student attendance at SODA and STOC by funding Student Best Paper Awards, travel, lunches, and reduced registration fees. This helps ensure that the maximum number of students can attend these conferences.
SIGACT, through ACM, has applied for and received funding from NSF for travel for students to attend STOC 2009. This program will continue from year to year as funds are available.
SIGACT continues to support the SIGACT web page, the theorynt listserv, and conference software through the SIGACT server.
SIGACT is in the process of building a new presence on the web. The new web page will have the property that individuals can manage different parts of the web page independently. This will turn the webmaster’s job into one of managing editors of the web page.


5. Summary of key issues that the membership of the SIGACT will have to deal with in the next 2-3 years
Funding and articulating the importance of theoretical computer science are perennial issues that are being addressed by the Committee for the Advancement of Theoretical Computer Science (CATCS).
The funding situation has improved greatly at NSF, but there is a need for the theory community to submit more high quality proposals in order to maintain or improve the funding levels.
There continues to be concern about the academic job market which in the past was affected by the lack of growth in computer science majors, but is now caused by the economic recession and lack of funds in academia. Hiring freezes and cutbacks are common place this last academic hiring season.
There was a SIGACT election in spring 2009. The new officers will serve 3 year terms instead of the current 2 + 2 (2 years plus 2 renewable). There is the feeling that 3 year terms will attract the strongest candidates because 4 years is too long and 2 years is too short.


SIGAda FY’09 Annual Report

July 2008 - June 2009

Submitted by: Ricky E. Sward, Chair

SIGAda Awards
Started in 1994, the ACM SIGAda Awards recognize individuals and organizations that have made outstanding contributions to the Ada community and to SIGAda. The Outstanding Ada Community Contribution Award is given for broad, lasting contributions to Ada technology and usage. The Distinguished Service Award is given for exceptional contributions to SIGAda activities and products.
This year the Outstanding Ada Community Contribution Award was awarded to two individuals:
Peter Amey - Peter was closely involved in the Ada community and was intimately involved in a number of high-profile Ada projects. In particular, he was responsible for the continued success of SPARK Ada. Peter also had a large role in the development of Praxis' software development methodology built around SPARK, which is called "Correctness by Construction". Sadly, Peter passed away this year after a long battle with cancer.
John McCormick - John has been active in many aspects of Ada as a teacher, user of Ada and as an Ada promoter. He is a well-known author of Ada books conducting courses, tutorials and lectures. His textbook Ada Plus Data Structures: An Object-Oriented Approach is a popular text for Ada courses. He is an internationally recognized educator, well known for his work with real-time scheduling using model trains.
The Distinguished Service Award was awarded to Greg Gicca this year:
Greg Gicca - Greg has been active in the Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS) effort and represents ASIS at International Standards Organization meetings. Greg has worked extensively on the commercialization and growth of Ada. He has been a dependable resource at SIGAda conferences organizing workshops and serving as exhibits co-chair and conference co-chair for SIGAda 2006 and 2009.
SIGAda also makes the Outstanding Student Paper Award at its annual conference. At SIGAda 2008 this award was presented to Elaheh Safari-Sharifabadi for the paper "Dynamic Analysis of Ada Programs for Comprehension and Quality Measurement." Constantinos Constantinides and Kung-Kiu Lau coauthored this paper.
Significant Papers published in proceedings
This year's conference celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Ada programming language. The keynote speakers each presented on a topic related to the birth of Ada 30 years ago, including:
"From Strawman to Ada 2005: A Socio-Technical Retrospective" from Dr. Benjamin Brosgol, Senior Technical Staff, AdaCore Corporation.
"30 Years after Steelman: Does DoD Still Have a Software Crisis?" from Dr. Joyce Tokar, President of Pyrrhus Software.
"The Ada Paradox(es)" from Dr. Jean-Pierre Rosen, President of ADALOG Corporation.
The papers reflected the different applications of Ada that have evolved over the past 30 years. For example:
"Ada and Software Engineering Education: One Professor's Prospective" by John McCormick. This paper shows empirical evidence that students complete software engineering projects when using Ada versus C-based languages.
"Implementing the Extended Return Statement for Ada 2005" by Tucker Taft. This paper discusses a new feature of the Ada language that has been included in the 2005 language standard. This work exemplifies that fact that Ada continues to grow as a language.
"Anima: A Language for Real-Time Embedded Software Development" by Steven Doran. This paper shows that Ada is being used for real-time applications.
"A Distributed, Multi-Language Architecture for Large Unmanned Ground Vehicles" by Cynthia Cicalese, Richard Weatherly, Joel Sherrill, Robert Bolling, Kevin Forbes, Robert Grabowski, Keven Ring, and David Seidel. This paper was a great experience report on how Ada was used to control an autonomous ground vehicle that competed in the DARPA grand challenge.
Overall, the papers being submitted to the SIGAda conference continue to be of high quality.
Significant Programs that provided a springboard for further technical efforts
A formal liaison exists between SIGAda and WG9. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22 WG9 is that body of international representatives responsible for the maintenance and evolution of the Ada International Standard. The National Bodies represented on WG9 are Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
In March 2007 the ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) in Geneva, Switzerland announced the formal completion of the process to revise the Ada 95 language, with the publication of the Ada 2005 standard - officially named ISO/IEC 8652:1995/Amd 1:2007. This announcement culminates a collaborative international effort under ISO's Ada Working Group (WG9) to enhance the 1995 version of the Ada language.
At least one SIGAda Officer participates and represents the membership at the WG9 meetings held twice each year.
Innovative Programs which provide service to some part of our technical community
Since 1994 SIGAda has conducted an "Ada Awareness Initiative". Its centerpiece has been our 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. This year we developed several new posters that are displayed prominently in the Ada booth. We brought the booth to the SIGCSE conference and the Software and Systems Technology Conference (SSTC). Attendance at the SSTC conference continues to decline, so we need to reconsider if this is the right conference to bring our booth to.
Via this exhibiting, SIGAda sustains Ada visibility ("name recognition"), provides various Ada-advocacy materials 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 continues to be extremely successful and viewed as a highly important thrust by the SIGAda membership. SIGAda graciously acknowledges and thanks the Ada Resource Association (ARA), a consortium of Ada vendors, for their financial support of SIGAda's Ada Awareness Initiative and our booth activities.
Summary of key issues to deal with in the next 2-3 years
One of the key issues for SIGAda is continuing to host a financially successful conference. Last year was one of the first years in several years that the conference was not profitable. We will continue to encourage our SIGAda members to participate in and to attend the conference.
To help with this issue, our Vice Chair for Liaison will poll each of the local chapters to see if they are viable or not. He will also work to see if we should establish new local chapters in other areas of the country. He will also determine which conferences are the best ones to bring our booth to. Our Vice Chairman for Liaison also has great ideas about how to market SIGAda better including changes to our SIGAda web site and the conference web site. These marketing efforts are aimed at increasing the participation and attendance at our conference.
In order to ensure the conference revenue is appropriate, the Chair and Treasurer will examine the current fee structure and compensation policy for the SIGAda conference. We will establish a clear policy that is fair and reasonable and enforce that policy.
We will continue to publish three issues of the Ada Letters journal and seek participation in the form of contributing articles and papers. We will replace the current Managing Editor because he has moved up to Vice Chair for Meetings and Conferences.


SIGAPP FY’09 Annual Report

July 2008- June 2009

Submitted by: Barrett R. Bryant, Past Chair
The SIGAPP mission is to further the interests of the computing professionals engaged in the development of new computing applications and applications areas and the transfer of computing technology to new problem domains.
SIGAPP Officers
Chair - Barrett R. Bryant, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA

Vice Chair - Sung Shin, South Dakota State University, USA

Secretary - Ronaldo P. Menezes, Florida Institute of Technology, USA

Treasurer - Lorie Liebrock, New Mexico Institute of Technology, USA

Web Master - Hisham Haddad, Kennesaw State University, USA

ACM Program Coordinator, Irene Frawley, ACM HQ


Status of SIGAPP
The main event that took place within SIGAPP over the past year was the return of the Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) to the U. S. after premiering in Asia and South America the last 2 years. This year's SAC was very successful. More details about SAC will follow in the next section. We also supported several additional conferences with in-cooperation status, and will continue supporting additional conferences in the coming year.
The Student Travel Award Program continues to be successful in assisting SIGAPP student members in attending conferences sponsored by or in-cooperation with SIGAPP. 49 students were granted awards to attend SAC 2009, representing 14 countries. This was much more than last year and the amount of these awards was increased as well. We supported all qualified applicants. We also implemented a Developing Countries Travel Award for researchers from developing countries who would otherwise have difficulty attending the SAC conference. For 2009, this award was sued exclusively for students from developing countries but in 2010 and beyond, we also hope to support faculty-level researchers from such countries.
SIGAPP continues to have a stable membership. SIGAPP's and SAC's strength and uniqueness among ACM SIGs continues to be the opportunity for scientific diversity and crosscutting multiple disciplines within the ACM community. The officers look forward to continue working with the ACM SGB to further develop the SIG by increasing membership and developing a new journal on applied computing. Development of a SIGAPP logo is also planned.
Status of SAC
SAC 2009 was held in Honolulu, Hawaii, March 8-12, 2009, hosted by Chaminade University of Honolulu and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Thanks to a great organizing committee, it was extremely successful. The number of SAC papers submitted was 1084, the second highest ever, in 45 tracks with 316 papers accepted based upon extensive Track reviews, for a 29% ratio. The poster session featured 97 posters, the most number ever.
SAC 2010 will be held in Sierre, Switzerland, March 22-26, 2010, and will be hosted by the University of Applied Sciences, Western Switzerland (HES-SO) in Sierre and Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL). The web site http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2010 has further details such as symposium committee, technical tracks, and track chairs.
SAC 2011 is being planned for Taiwan which will be only the second time SAC has been held in Asia.

Summary
1. Awards that were given out

a. Distinguished Service to SAC - Ronaldo Menezes

b. Student Travel Awards - 49 awards granted, totaling $28,982

c. Developing Country Participant Travel Awards - $10,196 to 13 recipients from Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, China and Malaysia

2. Significant papers on new areas that were published in proceedings - new tracks in SAC 2009 on Autonomic and Cloud Computing, Agreement Technologies, Human Computer Interaction, Operating Systems, Relational Learning, Service-Oriented Architectures and Programming, Universally-Accessible Systems, and Wireless Sensor Networks


3. Significant programs that provided a springboard for further technical efforts - SAC continues to have tracks that represent application areas which are not covered by other SIGs (e.g., bioinformatics, computer forensics, etc.).
4. Innovative programs which provide service to some part of your technical community - expansion of Student Travel Award Program for SIGAPP student members, initiation of Developing Countries Travel Award Program
5 A very brief summary for the key issues that the membership of that SIG will have to deal with in the next 2-3 years - continuation of awards and development of a refereed journal in Applied Computing

SIGARCH FY’09 Annual Report

July 2008 - June 2009

Submitted by Doug Burger, Chair

Overview
The primary mission of SIGARCH continues to be the forum where researchers and practitioners of computer architecture can exchange ideas. SIGARCH sponsors or cosponsors the premier conferences in the field as well as a number of workshops. It publishes a quarterly newsletter and the proceedings of several conferences. It is financially strong with a fund balance of over two million dollars. The SIGARCH bylaws are available online at http://www.acm.org/sigs/bylaws/arch_bylaws.html.
Officers and Directors
During the past fiscal year Doug Burger served as SIGARCH Chair, David Wood served as Vice Chair, and Kevin Skadron served as Secretary/Treasurer. Margaret Martonosi, Krste Asanovic, Bill Dally, and Sarita Adve served on the board of directors, and Norm Jouppi also served as Past Chair. In addition to these elected positions, Doug DeGroot continues to serve as the Editor of the SIGARCH newsletter Computer Architecture News, and Nathan Binkert was appointed as the new SIGARCH Information Director, providing SIGARCH information online. Rob Schreiber serves as SIGARCH’s liaison on the SC conference steering committee.
The Eckert-Mauchly Award, cosponsored by the IEEE Computer Society, is the most prestigious award in computer architecture. SIGARCH endows its half of the award, which is presented annually at the Awards Banquet of ISCA. Joel Emer of Intel received the award in 2009, "For pioneering contributions to performance analysis and modeling methodologies; for design innovations in several significant industry microprocessors; and for deftly bridging research and development, academia and industry.” Last year, SIGARCH petitioned ACM to increase the ACM share of the award to $10,000, using an endowment taken from the SIGARCH fund balance, which ACM has approved. The increase will happen when IEEE approves a matching increase, which will increase the amount of the award to $20,000.
SIGARCH has endowed the Maurice Wilkes Award, an award established to recognize computer architects early in their careers, named after one of the pioneers of computer architecture who began making significant contributions early in his career. The award is selected by a vote of the Executive Committee and Board of SIGARCH, from a list of nominees supplied by a three person nominating committee. The 2009 award went to Shubu Mukherjee of Intel, "for outstanding contributions to modeling and design of soft-error tolerant microarchitectures."

SIGARCH also cosponsors, along with the IEEE-CS TCCA, the Influential ISCA Paper Award which is presented annually at the ISCA conference. This award recognizes the paper, presented at the ISCA conference 15 years previously, which has had the most impact on computer architecture. The fifth Influential ISCA Paper Award was presented to Jeffrey Kuskin, David Ofelt, Mark Heinrich, John Heinlein, Richard Simoni, Kourosh Gharachorloo, John Chapin, David Nakahira, Joel Baxter, Mark Horowitz, Anoop Gupta, Mendel Rosenblum, and John Hennessy for their paper "The Stanford FLASH Multiprocessor" which appeared in the proceedings of the 21st ISCA (1994).


In 2007 the ACM Awards Committee approved the establishment of the SIGARCH Distinguished Service Award, for “important service to the Computer Architecture community.” The second recipient was Mark Hill of Wisconsin, who spent many years serving on the SIGARCH board/executive positions, and served as program chair for ISCA 2005. Nominations each year are due February 15th, and can be sent to the SIGARCH Secretary/Treasurer at any time.
All four awards, the Eckert-Mauchly Award, the Maurice Wilkes Award, the Influential ISCA Paper Award, and the Distinguished Service Award were presented at ISCA 2009 in Austin, TX. SIGARCH is also a partial sponsor of the new Ken Kennedy Award.
Conferences
SIGARCH is a 50% cosponsor of ISCA, the International Symposium on Computer Architecture, which is the premier conference in the field of computer architecture. The 36th annual ISCA (ISCA 2009) was held in Austin, TX. Stephen Keckler was the General Co-Chair and Luiz Barroso was Program Chair. ISCA 2010 will be held in Saint Malo, France, with Andre Seznec as General Chair, along with Uri Weiser and Ronny Ronen as Co-Program Chairs. ISCA 2011 will be held in San Jose as a part of FCRC, with Ravi Iyer and Qing Yang as Co-General Chairs. The location of ISCA 2012 has not yet been set.
The SC'XY Conference is jointly sponsored by SIGARCH and the IEEE Computer Society. Formerly known as the Supercomputing Conference, the conference has successfully evolved away from its focus on supercomputers and is now the High Performance Networking and Computing Conference. In addition to its technical success, SC'XY is large enough that it must be scheduled many years in advance. SC 2008 was a large success in Austin. SC 2009 will be held in Portland, OR.
SIGARCH is a cosponsor of the Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, commonly known as ASPLOS, along with SIGPLAN and SIGOPS. The conference had been held biannually since 1982, alternating its location between San Jose and Boston. Starting in 2008 the conference has been held annually. ASPLOS 2009 was held in Washington D.C., with Mary Lou Soffa serving as General Chair and Mary Jane Irwin serving as Program Chair. ASPLOS steering committee representatives of SIGPLAN and SIGOPS pointed out that their premier conferences are historically held within a week of ASPLOS' recent date in the fall. This conflict created a danger of ASPLOS degenerating into merely another architecture conference. This problem and a decision by the ASPLOS steering committee to move the 2008 conference to a date between but not including President's Day week and the first week with a significant number of spring breaks (the second week of March) was discussed at ASPLOS 2006. This time window allows papers rejected from OOPSLA or SOSP to be revised and resubmitted to ASPLOS, and papers rejected from ASPLOS to be revised and resubmitted to ISCA. Unfortunately, since there are over a dozen architecture conferences a year, moving any conference creates conflicts. The steering committee has done their best to minimize conflicts given the constraints above, and picked the dates furthest from HPCA within the window described above. ASPLOS 2010 will be held in Pittsburgh, PA, with Vikram Adve of Illinois serving as General Chair and James Hoe and Todd Mowry of CMU serving as co-Program Chairs. ASPLOS 2011 will be held in southern California with Rajiv Gupta serving as General Chair.
SIGARCH sponsors the International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS). ICS 2009 took place at the IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. Michael Gschwind and Alex Nicolau were the General Co-Chairs, and Valentina Salapura and Jose Moreira were the Program Co-Chairs.
The nineteenth Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA 2009), jointly sponsored by SIGARCH and SIGACT, was held in Calgary, Canada in August. Friedhelm Meyer auf der Heide of the University of Paderborn was General Chair and Michael Bender of SUNY Stony Brook was Program Chair.
SIGARCH is one-half cosponsor of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing. Grid Õ09 will be held in Banff, Colorado. Dieter Kranzimueller of LRU and LRZ, Germany, and Jill Kowalchuk of Cybera, Canada, will be the General Co-Chairs, and Paul Lu of the University of Alberta will be the Program Chair.
SIGARCH is one-half cosponsor of the International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing.

HPDC ‘09 was held in Munich, in June. Dieter Kranzimueller of LRU and LRZ, Germany was the General Chair, with Arndt Bode of TUM and Heinz-Gerd Hegering of LRZ as the General Co-Chairs. Michael Gerndt of the Technische Universitat Munchen and Henri Casanova of the University of Hawaii are the Program Co-Chairs.


SIGARCH is one-third cosponsor of the Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compiler Techniques (PACT), along with the IEEE Computer Society and IFIP, and annually held in the fall. PACT 2009 will take place in Raleigh, North Carolina in September. Sally McKee of Chalmers University and Martin Schulz of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will be General Co-Chairs. Bronis R. de Supinski and Frank Mueller of North Carolina State University will be the Program Co-Chairs.

SIGARCH is one-fourth co-sponsor of the Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems (ANCS). The fifth ANCS, ANCS 2009, will be held in Princeton, NJ in October. Peter Onufryk of IDT and K.K. Ramakrishnan of AT&T Labs are the General Co-Chairs, and Patrick Crowley of Washington University and John Wroclawski of USC are the Program Co-Chairs.


In 2007 SIGARCH was a founding co-sponsor of the International Symposium on Networks-on-Chips (NOCS). NoCS 2009 was held in May in San Diego, California, with Bill Yin of UCSD and Partha Kundu of Intel as General Co-Chairs, and Radu Marculescu of CMU and Axel Jantsch of KTH as Program Co-Chairs. SIGARCH also became a cosponsor of the International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC) in 2007. ICAC 2009 was held in Barcelona, Spain in June. Simon Dobson of UCD Dublin and John Strassner of Waterford Institute of Technology were the General Co-Chairs, and Manish Parashar of Rutgers and Onn Shehory from IBM Research Haifa were Program Co-Chairs.
In addition to the above conferences, SIGARCH has taken a small sponsorship position, or in-cooperation status, with several other conferences. SIGARCH has ceased to be been a minor sponsor of the International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC), held annually in December and alternating between Bangalore and Hyderabad, India, but is now in cooperation with HiPC. SIGARCH also has a small sponsorship position in SenSys, a conference on Sensor Systems. In addition, SIGARCH has in-cooperation status with TridentCom, DOCSS, Euro-Par, GridNets, and Nano-Net.
Travel Grants
In the past, SIGARCH supported travel grants to students who attended ISCA or ASPLOS. SIGARCH has now broadened travel grants to other SIGARCH-sponsored conferences, although the exact policy of how much to allocate to each conference has not yet been finalized. 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 we have made an attempt to give at least a modest grant to every student coauthor that applied. For ISCA 2009, SIGARCH combined NSF funding of $15K with matching funding from IEEE TCCA ($10K), and used these funds to support a pool of 110 applications for student travel grants.
In 2007 SIGARCH sponsored a companion travel grant program for ISCA, which includes child-care costs for SIGARCH-sponsored conferences This program provides funds for travel grants to attend ISCA 2007 for a companion care-provider for a SIGARCH member who are either (1) a person with a physical disability necessitating a companion, or (2) a parent of an infant less than one year old who cannot travel without the infant and a care-provider for the infant. This program is similar to SIGPLAN's child care/companion travel grant program. This program was presented to other SIGs at a SIG Governing Board (SGB) meeting, and may be adopted by other SIGs in the future as a best practice. In 2009, SIGARCH had four applications for such travel grants.
SC Conference Grants
In 2008, the SC leadership requested $426,779 in funds for special projects related to the SC community, and for FY'09, $308,489 has been budgeted.
Publications
CAN (Computer Architecture News), SIGARCH's newsletter, is published 4 times a year. In addition, the ISCA Proceedings form a special fifth issue, and the ASPLOS Proceedings is likewise distributed as a special sixth issue. The newsletter consists of technical contributions, reports of panels, Internet nuggets (the most interesting or controversial articles from the comp.arch newsgroup), book reviews, and calls for papers. There are occasional single topic special issues. Proceedings of SC, SPAA and ICS are available through the Member Plus program. This year SIGARCH is offering a new electronic membership for regular members and students, at reduced cost with no proceedings mailed.
Finances
SIGARCH enjoys a healthy fund balance that is currently larger than the roughly one million dollar fund balance required by the ACM for sponsorship of SIGARCH conferences. SIGARCH actually loses money on each member, but makes money on average from conferences. The SC conference often has a large surplus due to its exhibition component. SIGARCH and the SC Steering Committee have an agreement that some of the future profits from SC'XY will be in large part returned to the SC community, in the form of a series of large project-oriented grants (to be matched by the other sponsor of SC'XY, the IEEE Computer Society). The grant amounts are capped by the average surplus over the first two of the previous three years. In 2008 the grants provided $426,779.
Bylaws
In 2008 the SIGARCH Chair submitted proposed changes to the SIGARCH Bylaws, making leadership positions gender-neutral, and including the role and title of the SIGARCH Information Directory. The Bylaw changes were approved in 2009.

Membership
SIGARCH membership has been declining gradually since 1999, dropping from 1452 in 2005 to 1315 in 2008. However SIGARCH's membership retention rate was the highest among all of ACM’s SIGs in 2007, at 80%, with the number of SIG-only members gradually increasing, even as student and professional members gradually drop, and as ISCA, SIGARCH’s flagship conference, continues to grow.
Innovative Programs
SIGARCH was a partial supporter of an NSF-sponsored workshop on Computer Architecture and Parallel Computing held at Brown University in August, 2008. This workshop, aimed primarily at women and under-represented minority undergraduates, is intended to interest young students in the field of computer architecture and to encourage their pursuit of graduate school and a research career. 40 students the program, and SIGARCH funding (along with NSF and industry support) supported their travel and workshop expenses.

Summary
SIGARCH remains a financially healthy institution with an enthusiastic membership. The interest of its members can be gauged by the health of all of its major conferences in the past year. The challenges remain as they have in previous years: how to better serve our members, how to encourage other members of the architecture community to join, how to help steer the community as the nature of our field changes, and how to use our fund balance most effectively.


SIGART FY’09 Annual Report

July 2008 - June 2009

Submitted by: Maria Gini, Chair

The scope of SIGART consists of the study of intelligence and its realization in computer systems. These include areas such as autonomous agents, intelligent user interfaces, knowledge discovery, human-language

technology, cognitive modeling, knowledge representation, planning, scheduling, logic programming, problem solving, search, connectionist models, machine learning, robotics, and computer vision.
During 2008/2009:
1. Viability
SIGART was reviewed in October 2008 by the Sig Governing Board and found viable to continue its status for the next four years.
2. Awards
The ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award is an annual award for excellence in research in the area of autonomous agents.
The 2009 SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award was presented in May 2009 to Dr. Manuela Veloso,

of Carnegie Mellon University. Prof. Veloso has made significant and sustained contributions to

Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems in the areas of planning and control learning in multi-agent systems.

Prof. Veloso's research is particularly noteworthy for its focus on the effective construction of

teams of robot agents where cognition, perception, and action are seamlessly integrated to address planning, execution, and learning tasks. She has made significant contributions to agents in uncertain and dynamic

environments, including distributed robot localization and world modeling, strategy selection in multiagent systems in the presence of adversaries, planning by analogical reuse, and more recently, robot learning from

demonstration. Her research contributions have also been realized concretely in the form of teams of robot soccer playing agents that have won several international championships at the annual RoboCup robot soccer

competitions. Her impact and visibility has been consistently high over the past two decades for her technical contributions, for her impressive robot teams, and for her leadership within the research community.

Prof. Veloso gave an invited presentation on "Teams of Robots: A Fascinating Multiagent Research Adventure" at the AAMAS 2009 conference.
3. Conferences
SIGART co-sponsored the following conferences:

ASE (Automated Software Engineering, September 2008, L'Aquila, Italy), IUI (Intelligent User Interfaces, February 2009, Sanibel Island, USA), HRI (Human Robot Interaction, March 2009, San Diego, USA), and IAT (Intelligent Agent Technology, December 2008, Sydney, Australia).


In addition, SIGART cooperated with many international conferences, such as:

AAMAS (Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, May 2008, Budapest, Hungary), BIOSTEC (Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies, January 2009, Porto, Portugal), CIA (Cooperative Information Agents, September 2008, Prague, Czech Republic), ICAART (Agents and Artificial Intelligence, January 2009, Porto, Portugal),

ICEC (Electronic Commerce, August 2008, Innsbruck, Austria), IEA/AIE (Industrial & Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence & Expert Systems, June 2009, Tainan, Taiwan), IVA (Intelligent Virtual Agents, September 2008, Tokyo, Japan), PerMIS (Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems, August 2008, Washington, DC),

RuleML (RuleML Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications, October 2008, Orlando, Fl),

SAMT (Semantics and Digital Media Technology, December 2008, Koblenz, Germany), SASO (Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, October 2008, Venice, Italy), SMART GRAPHICS (August 2008, Rennes, France)

4. Educational Activities
a. SIGART awarded a number of scholarships to students to attend the conferences co-sponsored by SIGART. The amounts of scholarships varied from $1,000 to $20,000 per conference, depending on the conference size. Funding students is a good way of ensuring long term growth and vitality of the AI community.
b. SIGART co-sponsored, with AAAI, the annual SIGART/AAAI Doctoral Consortium. The Doctoral Consortium, held in conjunction with the 2008 AAAI conference, 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 took place over two days of intense meeting prior to the AAAI conference.


5. Plans for the future
* Increase services for members. We will continue adding contents to the Web page and look for other ways to increase member interactions.
* Continue supporting communities related to AI in a broad sense. SIGART is actively expanding the areas covered by co-sponsored and in-cooperation conferences to ensure that communities that work in AI or find inspiration from AI topics maintain ties with AI. This increases the visibility of SIGART and helps the growth of new communities.
* Establish connections with AI societies in other countries. The effort will start with a meeting at the IJCAI 2009 conference of representatives from all the AI societies.
* Continue discussion with AAAI to start the activities of the CACM Research Committee that AAAI and SIGART have agreed to establish. AAAI has not yet appointed the chair of the committee, so no work has started.

SIGBED FY’09 ANNUAL REPORT

July 2008 - June 2009

Submitted by: Lothar Thiele, Past Chair
1. Awards that were given out

-----------------------------


In 2006, ACM SIGBED established a student award in the name of late Dr. Frank Anger to promote cross-disciplinary research between embedded systems and software engineering. SIGBED solicited applications from qualified student members also in 2008. The submission deadline was beginning of August and the call has been distributed to all SIGBED members well in advance. In 2008, the recipient of the Frank Anger Memorial ACM SIGBED/SIGSOFT Student Award was Georgios Fainekos (University of Pennsylvania).
In 2008, SIGBED established a new SIGBED-EMSOFT Best Paper Award. The SIGBED EMSOFT Best Paper Award will be presented to the individual(s) judged by the award committee to have written the best paper appearing in the EMSOFT (Embedded Software) conference proceedings. The selection criteria are the scientific quality of the paper and the exposition of the ideas. The first award has been presented at the ESWEEK (Embedded Systems Week) 2008:
Authors:

Rajeev Alur, Aditya Kanade, S. Ramesh and K. C. Shashidhar


Title:

Symbolic analysis for improving simulation coverage of

Simulink/Stateflow models.

2. Significant papers on new areas that were published in proceedings

-----------------------------------------------------------------


We consider the paper that received the best paper award at EMSOFT as a significant contribution to the area of embedded systems. In addition, we would like to highlight a major contribution to the area of sensor networks which received the IPSN best paper award:
Author:

Haifeng Yu (National University of Singapore)


Title:

Secure and Highly-Available Aggregation Queries in Large-Scale

Sensor Networks via Set Sampling.

3. Innovative programs which provide service to some part of your technical community

-----------------------------------------------------------------


From 2006 to 2008, SIGBED has made a conscious effort to bring together related meetings. ESWEEK is now established as the major event in embedded systems research by hosting EMSOFT as well as CODES-ISSS (a conference focused on low-level issues of design and implementation of embedded systems) and CASES (a

conference with emphasis on architecture and compiler aspects of embedded systems).


In addition, SIGBED is sponsoring the major conferences at the CPSWEEK (Cyber-Physical Systems Week) which attempts to continue the success of ESWEEK in a related area. Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are the ones that integrate computation, communication and storage capabilities with the monitoring and/or control of the physical and engineering systems. ACM SIGBED sponsors and co-sponsors HSCC (International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control) and IPSN (International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks).
ACM SIGBED completely renewed its web presence by establishing a new website at www.sigbed.org. It is now hosted by ACM and uses ZOPE. The major improvements are:
- Much more detailed information about benefits to ACM SIGBED members.

- Information about SIGBED-related conferences, journals and web-sites.

- SIGBED News.

- Information about upcoming events related to ACM SIGBED.

- Extension of SIGBED Newsletter towards (a) the quarterly

SIGBED REVIEW and (b) SIGBED community information that is

provided by SIGBED members.
This way, we intend to improve our service to SIGBED members.

4 A very brief summary for the key issues that the membership of that SIG will have to deal with in the next

2-3 years

-----------------------------------------------------------------


Going forward, we will continue to be a catalyst for integrating various research themes in embedded systems into a coherent academic subdiscipline. We would like to focus on attracting more young researchers and student members. This issue has also been discussed at the SIGBED business meeting in 2008.

Currently, several ideas are under investigation like providing a year of free SIGBED membership when registering to one of the SIGBED-sponsored conferences.



SIGCAS FY’09 ANNUAL REPORT

July 2008 - June 2009

Submitted by: Flo Appel, Chair
1. Awards

The nomination process for the 2009 SIGCAS "Making a Difference" and "Outstanding Service" awards is in progress. Mark Perry, SIGCAS Executive Committee member, is responsible for its oversight.

2. Significant papers on new areas that were published in proceedings

3. Significant programs that provided a springboard for further technical efforts



4. Innovative programs which provide service to some part of your technical community

Although SIGCAS has not historically sponsored its own conferences, we have been proactive in forging relationships with other organizations, and continue to find venues in which to present and publicize the good work of our membership:

SIGCAS has continued to collaborate with SIGCSE, and through our very popular Birds of a Feather (BOF) session, we have had a formal and visible presence at the SIGCSE Symposium for the past four years. In addition, this year we offered a Special Session at the SIGCSE Symposium to commemorate SIGCAS’ 40th anniversary. The session, From The Man On The Moon To 2001 And Beyond: The Evolving Social And Ethical Impact Of Computers drew an audience of approximately 50 participants.

SIGCAS has continued to build a collegial relationship with the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology (INSEIT), and had a representative at the 2009 CEPE conference in Greece this past June. We are also presenting SIGCAS panels, workshops and tutorials at CCSC conferences (Consortium for Computer Science in Colleges). And, we have been approached by IEEE’s Society for the Social Implications Technology (SSIT) to co-sponsor their ISTAS 2011 conference.

Carol Spradling from Northwest Missouri University continues in the capacity of SIGCAS representative to the newly- formed ACM Education Council, while Don Gotterbarn from Eastern Tennessee State University represents SIGCAS on the USACM. Don is also the ACM representative to IFIP’s TC9 Group on computers and society.

Finally, our September 2009 issue, which is currently in production, will feature a retrospective of SIGCAS’ last 40 years. We have invited past award recipients to respond to a set of questions regarding the history and future of the social and ethical impact of computing.



5. Brief summary of key issues that the SIG membership will have to deal with in the next 2-3 years.

The SIGCAS Executive Committee is beginning its second year of leadership: Flo Appel, Saint Xavier University, is in her second term as Chair; Diana Burley, George Washington University, last year was newly elected to the Vice-Chair position; Mark Perry, University of Western Ontario, was re-elected to the position of Executive Committee Member-at-large; and Tom Jewett, California State University, Long Beach, serves on the EC as past Chair.

The challenges identified over the past years continue to exist. While we have made sustained and important inroads into collaboration at the leadership level with other organizations, we continue to struggle to mobilize our membership to become more actively involved in these liaisons.

The continued lack of a Computers & Society (C&S) editor-in-chief, still with nobody stepping forward to fill the position, places an undue burden on the leadership to edit and produce the newsletter. We have been successful, however, in recruiting and retaining a talented and effective editorial board, whose members work well together and are in the process of determining an appropriate format for and character of the newsletter. Our newsletter, online since 2002, must be stabilized from the perspective of both its editorship board and its publication. The migration to electronic format-only has had a great cost-saving benefit, but we have lost our ability to provide our members with a cohesive and tangible quarterly publication, and until last year, we have had difficulty with timely publication. We continue to discuss plans to leverage the online character of the newsletter.

Our website, which was renovated last year, requires ongoing work to become more interactive, and has proven to be a vast improvement over our previous web presence. It has definitely been more effective in its ability to mobilize our membership. We routinely receive responses to the “Volunteer Opportunities” page, and this is gradually resulting in a more active & engaged membership.

New leadership must be nurtured for the next election period when the chair will step down and new blood must come forward. A particularly important administrative task that must be carried out in the coming year is a revisiting of the SIGCAS bylaws regarding elections and leadership.



SIGCHI FY’09 ANNUAL REPORT

July 2008 - June 2009

Submitted by Julie Jacko, Past President

1. Awards

1.1 SIGCHI made the following awards in 2008-2009:




  • Lifetime Achievement Award: Sara Kiesler



  • CHI Academy Inductees: Mark Ackerman, Bill Gaver, Clayton Lewis, Wendy Mackay, Aaron Marcus, Elizabeth Mynatt and Tom Rodden




  • Lifetime Service Award: Clare-Marie Karat and Steven Pemberton






  • Five SIGCHI members were inducted as ACM Fellows: Gregory Abowd, Bill Buxton, Alan Kay, Joe Konstan, and Judy Olson. One SIGCHI member, Andreas Girgensohn, was recognized as an ACM Distinguished Scientist. One SIGCHI member, Susan M. Dray, was recognized as an ACM Distinguished Engineer.

1.2 SIGCHI Conference awards:
CHI 2009 awarded seven best paper awards:

1. Predicting Tie Strength With Social Media

Eric Gilbert, Karrie Karahalios, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

2. Undo and Erase Events as Indicators of Usability Problems

David Akers, Stanford University, USA, Matthew Simpson, Robin Jeffries, Google, Inc., USA, Terry Winograd, Stanford University, USA

3. From Interaction to Trajectories: Designing Coherent Journeys Through User Experiences

Steve Benford, The University of Nottingham, UK, Gabriella Giannachi, The University of Exeter, UK, Boriana Koleva, Tom Rodden, The University of Nottingham, UK

4. Musink: Composing Music through Augmented Drawing

Theophanis Tsandilas, Catherine Letondal, Wendy E. Mackay, INRIA / Université Paris-Sud, France

5. Sizing the Horizon: The Effects of Chart Size and Layering on the Graphical Perception of Time Series Visualizations

Jeffrey Heer, Stanford University, USA, Nicholas Kong, Maneesh Agrawala, University of California, Berkeley, USA

6. Social Immersive Media: Pursuing Best Practices for Multiuser Interactive Camera/Projector Exhibits

Scott S. Snibbe, Sona Research, USA, Hayes S. Raffle, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

7. Ephemeral Adaptation: The Use of Gradual Onset to Improve Menu Selection Performance

Leah Findlater, Karyn Moffatt, Joanna McGrenere, Jessica Dawson, University of British Columbia, Canada

CHI 2009 awarded four best notes awards:


1. Fast Gaze Typing with an Adjustable Dwell Time

Päivi Majaranta, Ulla-Kaija Ahola, Oleg Špakov, University of Tampere, Finland

2. Awareness, Training and Trust in Interaction with Adaptive Spam Filters

Henriette S.M. Cramer, Vanessa Evers, Maarten W. van Someren, Bob J. Wielinga, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

3. Graph Sketcher: Extending Illustration to Quantitative Graphs

Robin Stewart, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, mc schraefel, University of Southampton, UK

4. Finding Canonical Behaviors in User Protocols

Walter C. Mankowski, Peter Bogunovich, Ali Shokoufandeh, Dario D. Salvucci, Drexel University, USA




2. Significant Programs and Key Issues
2.1 Membership:

4,845 total members

2,980 professional members

718 student members

1,146 affiliate members

1 institutional member


 2.2 Member Benefits Provided to SIGCHI Members


  • Subscription to interactions magazine, published six times per year

  • On-line subscription to SIGCHI Bulletin

  • Reduced registration at conferences sponsored and co-sponsored by SIGCHI

  • Access to proceedings of SIGCHI-sponsored and co-sponsored conferences in the ACM Digital Library, as well as selected conference proceedings for other conference held in-cooperation with SIGCHI

 
2.3 Community Benefits Provided by SIGCHI


  • Sponsorship of the leading conferences in the field

  • Support for students through student volunteer and scholarship programs

  • A wide range of electronic forums including over a dozen popular e-mail lists on topics ranging from public policy to HCI for the Web

  • Support for activities worldwide, including over 60 chapters on 5 continents and programs to support HCI in developing countries

  • SIGCHI's awards program that recognize outstanding contributions to the field

  • SIGCHI's Web site and other on-line resources

  • Support for a variety of volunteer activities addressing issues ranging from public policy to education to mentorship

2.4 Conferences:


SIGCHI continues to sponsor a mix of long-running and newer conferences which provide the highest-prestige outlets for research while also serving as venues for emerging work (e.g., the workshop programs and poster sessions in many of our conference), promoting student education (e.g., the doctoral colloquia and student volunteer programs in our conferences), and promoting continuing professional education and networking (e.g., the tutorial and course programs and our special interest group gatherings and recruiting and networking events). Most of our conferences are stable, and are well run by the communities they serve. We put substantial direct effort into our flagship CHI conference, which has undergone continuous redesign and evaluation.
CHI 2009. CHI 2009 was again a successful conference.  No doubt location and a recovering technology sector play a role in our continued success. The four day conference model which was implemented in 2006 (with more diversity in the program and courses incorporated into the conference has proven to be working well. A new venue this year is the video showcase, providing an opportunity for many different kinds of design, innovation, opinion and futurism. Some highlights include: 

  • Attendance has been growing till CHI 2007, numbers are stable from 2007, around 2200 – 2300

  • Conference revenue is systematically at, or over, the budgeted allocation and overhead

  • CHI 2009 shows an all times high in student attendance: where we “normally” meet 700 students, this time we registered 900.

  • Feedback from conference survey continues to be positive

  • Attendance is diverse and communication across disciplines is noted by attendees

Conference attendance for 2009 largest categories in detail: 904 members; 419 non members; 624 student members; 274 student non members; Plus doctoral consortium; exhibitor and sponsor registries, and press. Total attendees 2300; of which 312 comp. Fee structure (category, early, late, on site): Member, $760, $960, $1160; Non-Member, $960, $1160, $1360; Student Member, $350, $370, $390; Student Non-Member, $450, $470, $490.

Conference sponsors: 4 champion sponsors, 4 contributors, 4 friends of CHI.


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