Sigaccess fy’10 Annual Report

Summary of key issues that SIGSIM membership will have to deal with in the next 2-3 years

SIGSIM’s mission continues to promote and disseminate the advancement of high quality state of-the-art in Modeling and Simulation (M&S) across a broad range of interests and disciplines. The expansion of the M&S Knowledge Repository’s content to provide better technical service to the SIGSIM membership stands to be the most important issue. This expansion is very important for SIGSIM to accomplish its mission. Contributions are expected from all SIGSIM members as well as M&S community in general to expand the M&S Knowledge Repository’s content. How to motivate people to submit multimedia contributions for publication in the M&S Knowledge Repository remains to be a challenge.

The numerous conferences and workshops we sponsor and co-sponsor continue to be strong, both intellectually and financially. Our flagship conference, ESEC/FSE 2009, was held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, with Hans van Vliet serving as General Chair and Valerie Issarny serving as Program Chair. Our largest conference, ICSE 2010 (co-sponsored with the IEEE Computer Society), was held in Cape Town, South Africa, with Judith Bishop and Jeff Kramer as General Co-Chairs, and Prem Devanbu and Sebastian Uchitel as Program Co-Chairs. The main social event at ICSE was the Awards Banquet, where the SIGSOFT Chair presented several important SIGSOFT awards and recognised the new ACM Distinguished Members and Fellows from the software engineering community.

FSE 2010 will be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, with Catalin Roman as General Chair and Andre van der Hoek as Program Chair, and ESEC/FSE 2011 will be held in Szeged, Hungary, with Tibor Gyimothy as General Chair and Andreas Zeller as Program Chair. Given the increasing number of submissions to FSE and the consequent increased workload for the Program Chair, for FSE 2012 we decided to name two Program Co-Chairs, with Tevfik Bultan and Martin Robillard filling these roles; a General Chair for FSE 2012 is expected to be named soon. ICSE 2011 will be held in Honolulu, Hawai'i, USA, with Richard Taylor as General Chair, and with Harald Gall and Nenad Medvidovic as Program Co-Chairs. Planning is underway as well for ICSE 2012, which will be held in Zurich, Switzerland, with Martin Glinz serving as General Chair, and with Gail Murphy and Mauro Pezze as Program Co-Chairs.

The problems and topics addressed in the papers presented at SIGSOFT meetings remain tremendously varied and timely, with papers on testing and analysis being predominant. This past year saw several papers on new and emerging topics, including several papers presenting important insights that can be gleaned through mining software repositories (such as source code and defect databases), increasing numbers of papers on probabilistic reasoning, and three papers at ICSE 2010 on legal and regulatory issues in software engineering.

The biggest challenge facing SIGSOFT and its membership in the coming years is conference budgeting. Operating and venue costs for conferences are rising, while the funds prospective attendees have for travel to conferences are decreasing. We recently began reducing the contingencies required of our more mature conferences, but more needs to be done. Maintaining financial viability involves an intricate series of tradeoffs among a number of goals that are not always compatible with each other, including, among other things, the desire to keep student registration fees low, to maintain the SIG services fee at an appropriate level to support the provisioning of services by ACM, and to allow SIGSOFT members to enjoy the benefit of our increasing Digital Library revenue.

Among the awards presented at the ICSE 2010 Awards Banquet were our annual service, research and education awards. This year's ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award was presented to Mary Lou Soffa of The University of Virginia. The ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award was presented to a group of recipients this year, the so-called "Gang of Four" responsible for the Design Patterns movement--Erich Gamma of IBM, Richard Helm of BCG, Ralph Johnson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and (posthumously) John Vlissides. As in past years, the awardees will be provided the opportunity to deliver a keynote address at FSE 2010, with Ralph Johnson expected to make the presentation. And now in its second year, the ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award was presented to Leon Osterweil of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who at the Awards Banquet was greeted by the sight of a few dozen of his academic "descendants" standing in his honour. We also continued to present a number of ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards at our sponsored meetings.

For the second year we presented the SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award to recognize a paper published in a SIGSOFT conference at least 10 years earlier that has had exceptional impact on research or practice. The 2009 SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award committee, led by John Knight, selected the paper "Yesterday My Program Worked. Today It Does Not. Why?" by Andreas Zeller, from the Proceedings of ESEC/FSE 1999. The Award was presented at ESEC/FSE 2009 to Andreas, who gave a keynote presentation reflecting on the origins and impact of his paper. We also presented Retrospective Impact Paper Awards to papers from the first 23 years of SIGSOFT's history of conference sponsorship. For the 2009 Retrospective Impact Paper Awards, ACM Fellow Richard Adrion once again chaired the selection committee, which selected the following five papers:

McCabe, T.J. 'A Complexity Measure.' In Proc. Second International Conference on Software Engineering (San Francisco, California, USA, 13-15 October 1976).

Rapps, S., and Weyuker, E.J. 'Data Flow Analysis Techniques for Test Data Selection.' In Proc. Sixth International Conference on Software Engineering (Tokyo, Japan, 13-16 September 1982).

Reiss, S.P.'PECAN: Program Development Systems That Support Multiple Views.' In Proc. Seventh International Conference on Software Engineering (Orlando, Florida, USA, 26-29 March 1984).

Boehm, B.W.'A Spiral Model of Software Development and Enhancement.' In Proc. International Workshop on the Software Process and Software Environments (Coto de Caza, Trabuco Canyon, California, USA, 27-29 March 1985).

Royce, W.W. 'Managing the Development of Large Software Systems: Concepts and Techniques.' In Proc. Ninth International Conference on Software Engineering (Monterey, California, USA, 30 March-2 April 1987).

As in past years, we made dozens of awards totaling around $50,000 to support travel by students to SIGSOFT-sponsored conferences, under our CAPS Conference Attendance Program for Students (CAPS). We also continued to make CAPS awards to undergraduates and provided awards for childcare support at conferences. Regrettably we were unable to identify a suitable recipient this year from the SIGSOFT community for the SIGBED/SIGSOFT Frank Anger Memorial Award, and so we are developing plans to attract more nominees. One incentive we plan to introduce is to identify and assign a host to the awardee at the awardee's chosen conference. This host will be a senior member of the SIGBED community who will welcome the awardee to the conference, introduce him or her to other attendees, and generally try to integrate the awardee into the conference activities. We have suggested to our colleagues in SIGBED that they follow a similar practice for the awardees they send to SIGSOFT conferences.

This past year Will Tracz continued his outstanding service as editor of our newsletter, Software Engineering Notes (SEN). To maintain and increase SEN and SIGSOFT's relevance to the community, Will initiated plans for the dissemination of content through a blog, with Eric Bodden volunteering to manage the blog.

This year a new SIGSOFT Executive Committee (EC) took office, and the new Chair decided to make a more formal delegation of responsibilities for specific activity areas to individual EC members. In accordance with the SIGSOFT Bylaws, Laura Dillon, who was re-elected as Member At Large, was appointed as the new Secretary/Treasurer. Two new Members At Large, Gail Murphy and Joanne Atlee, were assigned responsibility for Awards and Educational Initiatives, respectively. Almost immediately after taking office, Bashar Nuseibeh, the fourth elected Member At Large, decided to resign his position in order to assume the heavy responsibilities of Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. Bashar's departure was a great loss to the EC but also provided an opportunity to appoint a replacement who could serve the role of Practitioner Liaison. Thus, in accordance with the SIGSOFT Bylaws and ACM Policies on SIG governance, Mark Grechanik of Accenture was appointed as the replacement Member At Large. Mark has begun developing initiatives to increase practitioner participation in SIGSOFT's activities, including the creation of discussion groups on two social network sites, Linkedin and Facebook. He also was also instrumental in facilitating significant industrial involvement in a Workshop on the Future of Software Engineering Research to be held at FSE 2010, which helped dramatically increase industrial financial support for the conference.

In addition to the elected members of the EC, SIGSOFT continues to be supported by a cadre of unelected volunteers. Nels Beckman completed several years of dedicated service as our Information Director and turned the reins over in May 2010 to Greg Cooper. Roshanak Roshandel continued her excellent service as our CAPS Coordinator. And Tao Xie continues his role as History Liaison. As a result of the amazing energy and passion Tao has for historical initiatives, he was recently invited onto the ACM History Committee. This year Tao put together a SIGSOFT Chronology, modeled on SIGPLAN's successful Chronology, to document in as much detail and with as much completeness as possible the full history of SIGSOFT, including its officers, conferences and awardees, and its ACM Fellows and Distinguished Members and Turing Award winners. More recently Tao organised a SIGSOFT Community Directory that will soon be made public, allowing people to keep track of the doings of members of the SIGSOFT community. Finally, Tao completed the drafting of a proposal for a SIGSOFT Outstanding Dissertation Award, for which we hope to obtain approval from the ACM Awards committee in the coming year.

As a final note, SIGSOFT enthusiastically supported the successful re-appointment of David Notkin as Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology.

SIGSPATIAL FY'10 Annual Report

July 2009-June 2010

Submitted by: Hanan Samet, SIGSPATIAL Chair
1. SIGSPATIAL CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS
SIGSPATIAL's mission is to address issues related to the acquisition, management, and processing of spatially-related information with a focus on algorithmic, geometric, and visual considerations. The scope includes, but is not limited to, geographic information systems (GIS). These issues have become increasingly important in terms of public awareness with the growing interest and use of online mapping

systems such as Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google Maps and Google Earth as well as the integration of GPS into applications and devices such as, but not limited to, the iPhone. Presently, SIGSPATIAL is

fulfilling this mission by sponsoring high quality research conferences and workshops. As indicated by its mission, SIGSPATIAL's domain is much more than just geographic information systems and with

this in mind it tries to differentiate its conferences and workshop from others by focusing on the computer science aspects of the field rather than on the available commercial products. In addition, a major concern and focus of the SIGSPATIAL leadership is keeping its flagship conference, the ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS), affordable so that it can continue to be of good value to its attendees and be

competitive price-wise with related conferences which are priced at considerably lower levels than most ACM SIG conferences. SIGSPATIAL has been able to achieve this goal by being very active in soliciting sponsor contributions as well as being vigilant at minimizing SIGSPATIAL's financial exposure in terms of contractual obligations when planning the conference by building reserves that can be used in years when the financial climate is not so healthy.
2009 was the second year of SIGSPATIAL and its main activity was its flagship conference (ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS) that was held in Seattle, Washington, USA, on November 4-6, 2009. ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2009 was the seventeenth event of an annual series of symposia and workshops with the mission to bring together researchers, developers, users, and practitioners carrying out research and development in novel systems based on geo-spatial data and knowledge. The conference fosters interdisciplinary discussions and research in all aspects of Geographic Information Systems and Science (GIS) and provides a forum for original research contributions covering all conceptual, design, and implementation aspects of GIS and ranging from applications, user interface considerations, and visualization to storage management, indexing, and algorithmic issues.
This was the second time that the conference was held under the auspices of the new ACM Special Interest Group on Spatial Information (SIGSPATIAL). The conference program attracted a record number of 210 attendees. The technical program lasted for two and half days, and based on the feedback of the participants, we can conclude that the conference was very successful in terms of new ideas presented and level of interaction provided.

The call for papers led to 212 paper submissions over four tracks: research, industry, PhD showcases, and demos. The research paper track attracted 185 research paper submissions, of which 38 were accepted as full papers and another 39 were accepted as poster papers. The industry track attracted five submissions, of which one was accepted as a full paper and another one as a poster paper. The Ph.D. Showcase track received 8 Ph.D. showcase submissions, of which 3 were accepted, while

the demonstrations track received 14 submissions, of which 10 were accepted. The submissions were reviewed by a program committee of 117 members. These numbers indicate the continued health, interest, and growth of the research field of geographic information systems, and the need to bring its researchers, students, and industrial practitioners together.

The conference program featured two outstanding invited speakers:

2. Gur Kimchi, Microsoft Virtual Earth, for a talk titled "History and Lessons from Microsoft Virtual Earth"

work to the audience. This was followed by a poster reception in the evening where the conference participants had an opportunity to interact with the poster authors. Poster paper authors were

encouraged to do a good job by having two awards: one for best fast forward presentation and one for the actual poster. The poster component of the conference proved to be very popular with both the

conference audience and the poster authors.

2. IWCTS 2009: The 2nd International Workshop on Computational Transportation Science

3. LBSN 2009: The 1st International Workshop on Location Based Social Networks

4. SPRINGL 2009: The 2nd ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS International Workshop on Security and Privacy in GIS and Location Based Service (LBS)

arrangements and managed the conference logistics in their entirety including manning onsite registration. The sponsors also contributed to the conference program by participating in a very lively

Sponsor Demo session preceding the conference banquet.

The SIGSPATIAL leadership is currently planning for the 2010 ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS Conference which will be held in San Jose, California on November 3-5, 2010 with as many as 7 workshops on November 2. It has already secured a commitment from Google to be a sponsor at the Silver Level and also additional financial aid in the form of sponsorship for women to attend the conference. In addition, ESRI and Microsoft will also be sponsoring the conference at the Bronze Level. SIGSPATIAL has also been successful in securing $20,000 from the National Science Foundation for holding a Doctoral Symposium in conjunction with the flagship conference. This will augment the Ph.D. Showcase track of the conference.

conference in 2009.

Similarly, SIGSPATIAL participated in the 2009 International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM '09) on an in cooperation basis and will also do so in 2010 and 2011.

SIGSPATIAL also participated in the 6th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval on February 18-19, 2010 in Zurich, Switzerland on an in cooperation basis.

In addition, SIGSPATIAL is exploring sponsoring other conferences in the field as well as cooperating with other conferences (e.g., UBICOMP'11 which has already been approved on an in cooperation

basis), SIGs, and professional organization in the GIS area.

of the SIG continues to be on maintaining the quality of the flagship conference, and getting the workshops organized. The model is based on the anticipation that the papers published in the workshops and conferences would be expanded upon and submitted to the Transactions for consideration for possible publication.

and Peter Scheuermann. They made the following four awards:

Runner-Up for Best Paper Preventing Velocity-based Linkage Attacks in Location-Aware Applications by Gabriel Ghinita (Purdue University, USA), Maria Luisa Damiani (University of Milan, Italy), Claudio

Silvestri (University of Venezia, Italy), and Elisa Bertino (Purdue University, USA)
Two Best Student Paper Awards:
1. An Agenda for the Next Generation Gazetteer: Geographic Information Contribution & Retrieval Carsten Kessler (University of Munster, Germany), Krzysztof Janowicz (University of Munster, Germany), and Mohamed Bishr (University of Munster, Germany)
2. Reducing the Memory Required to Find a Geodesic Shortest Path on a Large Mesh by Vishal Verma (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA) and Jack Snoeyink (University of North Carolina at

Chapel Hill, USA)

Michael Klafft (Fraunhofer ISST, Germany), Tobias Krntzer (Fraunhofer ISST, Germany), Ulrich Meissen (Fraunhofer ISST, Germany), and Agnes Voisard (Fraunhofer ISST and FU Berlin, Germany),

Ashish Bindra (University of Washington at Tacoma, USA), Ankur Teredesai (University of Washington at Tacoma, USA), Mohamed Ali (Microsoft Corporation, USA), and Walid Aref (Purdue University, USA)

Tsz-Yam Lau (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA), You Li (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA), Zhongyi Xie (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA), W Randolph Franklin (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA)

Sabine Hofmann (IKG, Leibniz Universitt Hannover, Germany) and Claus Brenner (IKG, Leibniz Universitt Hannover, Germany)

Mark McKenney (Texas State University, USA) and Tynan McGuire (Texas State University, USA)

2. SIGSPATIAL Australia

more sponsors and try to devise activities that will increase its attractiveness to the potential sponsors. It will try to continue to maintain, as well as build on, the momentum of its first two years of existence.

The Executive Committee members for 2009-2010 (Chair, Bob Haring-Smith; Vice Chair/Fall Conference Liaison, Kelly Wainwright; Secretary/Spring Conference Liaison, Tim Foley; Treasurer, Alex Nagorski; Information Director, Patti Mitch; and Past Chair Leila Lyons) completed the second year of a three-year term of office to which they were elected in the spring of 2008. Continuing to serve as appointed members of the board are Karen McRitchie (Tutorial Chair), Greg Hanek (coordinator of the Communication Awards program), and Christine Vucinich (chair of the Membership and Marketing Committee). Other volunteers too numerous to name individually contribute their energy and ideas to the organization through service on conference and program committees, on the Awards Committee, on the Membership and Marketing Committee, and as judges for the Communication Awards.