Annual Report of the SIG Governing Board 
 
For the period 
1-July-13 through 30-June-14 

Submitted by: 
Erik Altman 
 
September 30, 2014
 
1. Governance 
 
1.1 The SIG Governing Board (SGB) 
 
The SGB is comprised of the chief executive officer or designee of each regular SIG.  The SGB is charged with forming SIGs, with managing them and setting policies for their management, and with recommending their dissolution. The SGB elects a Chair, Executive Committee and 3 additional representatives to Council.   
 
1.2 The SGB EC 
 
The SGB elects a Chair and an Executive Committee, which has full authority to act on behalf of the SGB between its meetings. The SGB EC is bound by the SGB’s actions and the SGB may override any decision of the SGB EC. The SGB EC is made up of the following positions which were approved following the review and approval of the restructuring task force recommendations: 
 
SGB Chair - Serves as SGB EC Chair, one of the four SIG Representatives on ACM Council, and as the SIG Representative on the ACM Executive Committee. Also responsible for SIG financial and budgetary issues and overseeing SGB committees and task forces.  
SGB EC Vice Chair for Operations – Presides over SGB and SGB EC Meetings, including SGB EC conference calls. Oversees SIG Liaisons to ACM Committees and Boards. 
SIG Development Advisor –. Identifies emerging technical areas and works with individuals and groups interested in forming SIGs. 
SGB Conference Advisor – Oversees developing conference activity to be sponsored by the SGB.  
New SIG Advisor – Acts as liaison for newly chartered SIGs and helps to nurture and support new SIG leadership as they develop programs and activities.         
SIG Viability Advisor – Oversees transitional SIGs and works with SIGS scheduled for program reviews. Also acts as the SIG election liaison.  
SIG Awards Advisor -. Acts as liaison for SIG leaders and Awards Committee and helps SIG leadership with proposals and approval process. 
Publications Advisor – Acts as liaison between SGB and Publications Board and oversees issues related to publications as directed by the SGB 
SGB Past Chair- Provides guidance and advice to the SGB EC and chairs the SGB EC nominating committee. 
Director of SIG Services – Staff liaison 

During FY’14 the following individuals held the positions indicated: 
Name        				Position     				Term End 
Erik Altman   				Chair      				July 1, 2014  
Vicki Hanson           			Past Chair     				July 1, 2014 
Will Tracz		    		SIG Viability Advisor    			July 1, 2015 
Pradip Bose         			SIG Development Advisor              	July 1, 2015
Renee McCauley   			New SIG Advisor    			July 1, 2015 
Patrick H. Madden              		SGB EC Vice Chair for Operations 	July 1, 2014 
Yannis Ionnidis   			SGB Conference Advisor   		July 1, 2014 
Elisa Bertino   				SIG Awards Advisor                  		July 1, 2014 
Patrick H. Madden  			Publications Advisor    			July 1, 2014 
Donna Cappo       			Staff Liaison 

1.3 Council Representatives 
 
The SGB elects 3 representatives to the ACM council for two-year terms.  
 
During FY’14 the following individuals held the ACM Council positions indicated: 
 
Name    				Position      				Term End 
Erik Altman         			SGB Chair     				July 1, 2014  
Joseph Konstan   			SGB Representative    			July 1, 2014 
Brent Hailpern   			SGB Representative    			July 1, 2014 
David Wood				SGB Representative			July 1, 2015
 
1.4 Standing Committees 
 
The SGB is responsible for the oversight of the Federated Computing Research Conference Steering Committee currently chaired by Dean Tullsen. Past Chairs Barbara Ryder and Daniel Menasce also serve on this committee.  Rajiv Gupta of UC Riverside was appointed FCRC’2015 Chair and Vivek Sarkar of Rice University was named Plenary Speaker Chair. 
 
1.5 Significant SGB actions 
 
SIG Nurturing Task Force – Patrick Madden provided an update on the decision making process with regard to SIGLOG. After a second review of the proposal, SIGLOG was chartered.
 
CSTA – The SGB-EC previously contributed $60,000 in support of a chapter mini-grant program. A CSTA interim committee was formed to establish grant criteria, create a project plan and a communications guideline, and develop an application form. The interim committee completed its work and a new committee was formed to review the applications. Mini-grants will be distributed in two rounds of application submission and review. Chapters will be expected to begin work as soon as the grants are announced.  

Newsfeeds – Erik Altman updated on efforts to implement a newsfeed feature for SIGs. A tool has been developed that extracts key words from the Digital Library to keep search terms current over time.  Wayne Graves is leading the implementation.

Citizen Science Movement – Simon Harper of SIGWEB introduced the Citizen Science Movement and proposed there might be an opportunity for the SIGs to be more inclusive of amateur scientists of all fields, from Astronomy to Zoology.  There was discussion in support of SIGs individually reaching out to amateurs on an individual basis, with some suggestions presented to the group, such as partnering with chapters, using contests and offering special memberships.

SIG Task Force on Full Inclusion – Simon Harper presented on the efforts of the Full Inclusion Task Force. The group’s charter includes, review and dissemination of best practices; development of definitions of full inclusion; and identifying technologies and research areas that can help. The group examined constraints found in accessibility and disability, age equality, orientation as a hobbyist or maker, cultural equality and race, economic disadvantage, gender equality and unconventional educational routes.  It examined how such constraints might limit people wishing to become members and how ACM can encourage participation and support those that do participate.
In its final recommendation, the group found that there are no significant constrains to people wishing to become members in the context of accessibility and disability.  It made several recommendations relating to encouraging SIG participation, including making a website that conforms to Web Accessibility Standards; using appropriate language on SIG websites and in SIG material; providing  accessible electronic copies of publicity materials. Other recommendations include creating accessible conferences by conforming to the SIGACCESS Accessible Conference Guide (http://www.sigaccess.org/welcome-to-sigaccess/resources/accessible-conference-guide/), asking conference organizers and paper authors to use the appropriate language when writing papers concerning disabled people; and creating accessible Adobe Acrobat/pdf and Word documents, as well as accessible presentations http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/frontpage-help/create-an-accessible-office-document-RZ006380094.aspx 
 
Webinar Program – Will Tracz presented an opportunity from the Professional Development Committee for SIGs to use On24, a webinar service at no-cost for events with less than1000 attendees. The webinars will be available through open-access in the ACM Professional Development Learning Center (http://learning.acm.org).  Topics, speaker and moderator selection will be left to the SIG. Schedule and logistics will be coordinated by the ACM Professional Development Webinar chair, Will Tracz.
 
Publications –   Patrick Madden provided an update on the selection and appointment of new EICs as well as a status update on the publishing model changes which were made in 2013. Joe Konstan reported that the Pubs Board is examining the overall Open Access structure and Article Processing Charges. 

Task Force on Retiree Policy - Erik Altman delivered an update on a new task force lead by Wolfgang Banzhaf (SIGEVO Chair). The task force has been charged with examining the establishment of a “Retiree Policy” that would give discounts to conferences for longtime members who meet a certain criteria related to age and years of membership.

Task Force on Journals-Conferences – This task force is charged with conducting an in-depth and coherent analysis of the publishing issues surrounding conferences and developing recommendations for fundamental changes to ACM’s conference model and related conference publishing model.

Task Force on ACM SIG Structure – This task force is charged with recommending changes that simplify, strengthen and empower the SIG communities; and addressing how ACM Technical Communities and their activities can achieve greater coherence and maintain more consistent level of quality.  
 
History Committee – On behalf of the History Committee, Erik Altman gave an update on the Archiving Workshop. The goal of the workshop is to gain knowledge of professional archiving policies and practices, traditional as well as digital.  The committee hopes to also build a network of ACM members within the US and overseas who are doing archiving projects. The Committee is also involved with selecting a winner for the 2014 History Fellowship Award. 

SIG Proposals – SIGLOG was chartered. 

1.6 Miscellaneous Appointments 
SIG leaders appointed as committee liaisons: 
Name     				Position      				Term End 
Joseph A. Konstan           		Publications Board Liaison   		Jan 1, 2014 
Dean Tullsen                			FCRC Steering Comm. Chair   		July 1, 2015 
Tao Xie     				History Committee Liaison   		July 1, 2015 
Emil Volchek    				USACM Liaison     			July 1, 2013 
Jeanna Matthews   			USACM Liaison     			July 1, 2013 
Pradip Bose    				Distinguished Speaker Comm Liaison  	July 1, 2014 

1.7 SGB Nominating Committee 
 
The SGB Nominating Committee nominates candidates for the SGB EC, in addition to nominating candidates for SGB Chair and SGB Representatives to ACM Council. The nominating committee:  
 
Name     				Position      				Term End 
Vicki Hanson    				Past SGB Chair     			July 1, 2014 
Erik Altman                     		SGB Chair     				July 1, 2014 
Donna Cappo               			Staff Liaison      
 
2. SIGs and SIG Membership 
 
Appendix A summarizes basic SIG Statistics for FY’14. Included are member and subscriber totals, newsletter and proceedings activity, and conference involvement.  

2.1 Membership Counts by class of membership: 
 
FY’12 			FY’13 		FY’14
ACM/SIG Members	30,975			30,102 		29,234	
SIG Only Members	 8,147   		 9,829 		 9,013
Subscribers		 2,090			    923 		    780
Total SIG Memb/Subs	41,212			40,854 		39,027
Total ACM Members    108,521        	           111,176 	           109,166

The SIGs overall member/subscriber count is 39,027 as compared to 40,854 in FY’13. 

2.2 Membership Renewal Rates 
 
Membership renewal rates are indicators of several realities, including 1) the degree to which members are satisfied with the services they are receiving as a result of membership and 2) the rate at which individuals are leaving the technical specialty. 
 
DA	 83.68		MM 	   42.52
ADA  	 80.08 		APP	   51.74
MICRO	 79.08  		GRAPH   52.47
ITE	 78.46		DOC	   53.54    

3.  New SIG Formation and Dissolution 
SIGLOG was chartered.  
SIGACT was renamed SIGAI.

4. SIG Program Reviews and Annual Reports 
 
 4.1 Program Reviews 
 
Every 4 years the SIG Chairs are required to provide a short presentation including a question and answer period during the SIG Chairs meeting. This presentation is intended to show that the SIG is viable and meeting its mission. The endorsement from the SGB to continue the SIG’s status is based on a growing or stable membership, solid finances, healthy conferences, and publications or other member benefits being delivered and well received by members. 
 
The SGB conducted 11 full program reviews during the year. SIGACCESS, SIGACT, SIGAPP, SIGCSE, SIGDA, SIGOPS, SIGSOFT, and SIGWEB were deemed viable for 4 years under existing criteria.  
 
SIGUCCS was deemed viable for the next 2 years with the understanding that leadership prepare a set of plans and activities along with a redefined mission to present to the SGB EC in 1 year. Will Tracz will mentor and work with leadership.

SIGAda was deemed viable for the next 2 years. In 1 year, SIGAda leadership is expected to report to the SGB EC on its plans for the future. The plan may include becoming a sub-unit of an existing SIG or completely de-chartering. Will Tracz will mentor and work with leadership. 

SIGCAS was deemed viable for the next (1) year.  After a year, SIGCAS leadership is expected to bring the newsletter up to date, develop a prepared set of plans and activities to include a social media presence and present to the SGB-EC. If the newsletter is not brought up to date at the time of the next viability review, the SIG will be automatically placed in transition. Will Tracz will mentor and work with leadership.

In addition, SIGBio was congratulated on its transitional program performance and found viable to move out of initial transitional status. SIGBio was granted full SIG status for the next 4 years.  

A proposal was made to charter SIGLOG. SIG status was given contingent upon the submission of a petition, and the preparation of bylaws, a budget, and a statement of member benefits.  
 
 4.2   Annual Reports 
 
5.0 SIG Technical Highlights 
 
The strength of the SIGs lies in their technical excellence. Once again we have seen a continued growth in conferences, improvements in publications, innovations in many areas, expansion of the awards program, increased attention to educational activities and increased cooperative efforts among the SIGs. The following excerpts from the FY’14 SIG Annual Reports detail only some of the outstanding activities going on in the SIG Community. I urge you to review the individual SIG Annual reports, which can be found in Appendix D. 
 
5.1 Electronic Community 
 
SIGACCESS supported a workshop held in conjunction with ECRC in May 2013 in Paris, titled Towards an Inclusive Europe: Reflections on the Digital Agenda for eAccessibility.  It attracted participants from numerous countries and featured a presentation by ACM President Vint Cerf. The purpose of the workshop was to consider what progress has been made towards the eAccessibility aspirations in Europe and propose ways in which European stakeholders can push the digital agenda for eAccessibility further forward.

SIGHPC hosted two webinars. Bill Gropp’s “Changing How Programmers Think about Parallel Programming” broke all previous ACM record for attendance (826 live attendees, with 938 on-demand attendees later).  Mark Ebersole’s “Achieve Massively Parallel Acceleration with GPUs” was almost as successful (over 750 people attended live). SIGHPC also chartered the first ACM “virtual chapter” which focuses on education. 

5.2 Publications  

Near the end of FY2014, SIGGRAPH’s Communications Committee launched a new, responsive version of the ACM SIGGRAPH Interactions newsletter. The updated newsletter is clean, visually appealing, and in alignment with the color scheme and design for the new website.

SIGLOG began the publication of its newsletter called SIGLOG news (SIGLOG was newly chartered as a provisional SIG in April, 2014.) 

SIGMOBILE has introduced an epub format for making content more easily accessible using popular mobile devices. MobiSys 2014 provided epub files for all accepted papers and made them available to attendees via the conference website. These files were added to the ACM Digital Library as well. 
 
5.3 Technical Meetings  

In September, 2013, SIGBio held its fourth ACM International Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Biomedical Informatics (ACM BCB) in Washington DC. It had 276 attendees, 148 paper submissions, 43 regular papers and 28 short papers accepted. The conference was preceded by 7 international workshops on emerging topics of bioinformatics, systems biology, and biomedical informatics, and by 5 tutorials. 

SIGCOMM’s flagship conference (SIGCOMM 13) was held in Hong Kong in August 2013. The conference was very successful with a record high attendance of 777 participants, strong fundraising, and a large overall surplus that helped the SIG maintain its exceptionally strong financial position.

SIGGRAPH 2013 welcomed 17,162 artists, research scientists, gaming experts and developers, filmmakers, students and academics from 77 countries to Anaheim, California. 180 industry organizations exhibited and a total of 15 countries were represented on the show floor. More than 1,354 speakers and contributors participated in the conference through a variety of talks, sessions, panels, papers, presentations, tutorials, and screenings. 

KDD 2013 was held in Chicago in August 2013. It was preceded by an extra day for the Big Data Camp, as well as a day for Workshops and Tutorials. The conference attracted a total of 1176 registrants, an all-time high representing a 16% growth over KDD-2012. It included 4 world-class keynote speakers: Raghu Ramakrishnan, Technical Fellow and CTO Information Services, Microsoft; Andrew Ng, Stanford University and Coursera; Stephen J. Wright, Computer Sciences Dept., University of Wisconsin-Madison and Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google. 

ACM SIGMETRICS’14 was held in University of Texas at Austin in June 2014. Approximately 160 people attended the main conference and its related tutorials and workshops, which lasted five days. SIGMETRICS 2014 received 237 submissions, the second highest number since the founding of this SIG. 40 papers were accepted, the largest in the history of the conference, with an acceptance rate of 16.8%.

ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2013 was held in Orlando.  There were 229 paper submissions over three tracks with a technical program that lasted for two and half days. The conference attracted 322 attendees, close to a 100% increase from when SIGSPATIAL started. 

5.4 Professional Recognition/Awards 

Sponsors	Award	Awardee	

ACCESS	
SIGACCESS Best Paper Award   

SIGACCESS Best Student Paper Award 

SIGACCESS Paper Impact Award              	
Kotaro Hara, Shiri Azenkot, Megan Campbell, Cynthia L. Bennett, Vicki Le, Sean Pannella, Robert Moore, Kelly Minckler, Rochelle H. Ng, and Jon E. Froehlich.

Kathrin M. Gerling, Regan L. Mandryk, and Michael R. Kalyn

Chieko Asakawa and Takashi Itoh	
ACT
	Distinguished Service Prize

Godel Prize (with EATCS) 

Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award     

Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing (with SIGOPS)

Knuth Prize              	Lance Fortnow

Ronald Fagin, Amnon Lotem, and Moni Naor

Paul F. Christiano

Kanianthra Mani Chandy and Leslie Lamport  

Richard Lipton	
Ada
	SIGAda Outstanding Ada Community Contribution

 	Mordechai "Moti" Ben Ari and Jorge Real	
AI
	Autonomous Agents Research Award                                 	Michael Wellman	
ARCH
	Eckert-Mauchly Award  (co-sponsored with IEEE CS)       

 Maurice Wilkes Award    

 Distinguished Service Award

Influential ISCA Paper 

ASPLOS Influential Paper                                                                                                                                                         	Trevor Mudge

Ravi Rajwar

Doug DeGroot

Seth Copen Goldstein, Herman Schmit, Matthew Moe, Mihai Budiu, Srihari Cadambi, R. Reed Taylor, and Ronald Laufer

Gookwon Edward Suh, Jae W. Lee, David Zhang, and Srinivas Devadas	
APP	SIGAPP Distinguished Service Award	Chih-Cheng Hung	
BED
	SIGBED-EMSOFT Best Paper Award         
                                	Parasara Duggirala and Ashish Tiwari	
BIO	Best Paper

Best Student Paper
	Michael Dejesus and Thomas Ioerger

Noah Daniels, Andrew Gallant, Norman Ramsey and Lenore Cowen 
	
CAS
	SIGCAS Outstanding Service Award                                                               	Netiva Caftori	

CHI
	
CHI Lifetime Practice Award                                                

CHI Lifetime Research Award                

CHI Lifetime Service Award                                                                            

CHI Social Impact Award  

CHI Academy      	
Gillian Crampton Smith

Steve Whittaker

Wendy Mackay, Tom Hewett

Richard E. Ladner

John C. Tang, Jeff A. Johnson, Susan Dray, Jodi L. Forlizzi, Keith Edwards, Ken Hinckley, Richard H. R. Harper, Gary Marsden	
COMM
	SIGCOMM Lifetime Achievement Award       

SIGCOMM Rising Star Award               

SIGCOMM Test-of-Time Paper Award  

SIGCOMM Best PhD Thesis Award                                                                                 	George Varghese

Sachin Katti

Dina Katabi, Mark Handley,  and Charlie Rohrs

Neil Spring, Ratul Mahajan, and David Wetherall

Aaron Schulman 	
CSE

	SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education            

The SIGCSE Lifetime Service Award                                   
                                	Robert Panoff

Andrea Lawrence	

DA
	        
ACM Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award in EDA  

SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award  

ACM/IEEE A. R. Newton Award   

ACM SIGDA/IEEE CEDA William J. McCalla ICCAD Best Paper Award
                                                             	
Wangyang Zhang

Yiran Chen

Subhasish Mitra, Kee Sup Kim

Stephan Eggersglüß, Robert Wille, and Rolf Drechsler	
eCOM	SIGeCOM Best Paper

SIGeCOM Best Student Paper

SIGeCOM Doctoral Dissertation Award
	P. Frazier, D. Kempe, J. Kleinberg and R. Kleinberg

A. Procaccia and J. Wang

Balasubramanian Siva	
EVO	SIGEVO GECCO Impact Paper Award                               	Zhou Ji and Dipankar Dasgupta
	
GRAPH
	SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award 

SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award                                      
 
SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for
Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art 

SIGGRAPH Outstanding Service Award                                                                    	Holly Rushmeier

Niloy Mitra

Manfred Mohr

Mary Whitton	
IR	
SIGIR Best Paper Award

SIGIR Best Student Paper Award

Vannevar Bush Award (with SIGWEB)	
Ryen W. White

Karthik Raman

Kazunari Sugiyama and Min-Yen Kan	
KDD	SIGKDD Distinguished Dissertation Award                 

SIGKDD Innovation Award 

SIGKDD Service Award                                                                                                             	Yizhou Sun

Jon Kleinberg

Gabor Melli	
METRICS	SIGMETRICS Achievement Award

SIGMETRICS Rising Star Researcher Award     

Kenneth C. Sevcik Outstanding Student Paper Award     

SIGMETRICS Test-of-Time Paper Award                                                                                 	François Baccelli

Florian Simatos

Nicolas Viennot, Edward Garcia, and Jason Nieh 

Stephen Blackburn, Perry Cheng, and Kathryn McKinley	
MIS
	Magid Igbaria Outstanding Conference Paper Award       	Deborah Armstrong and Cindy Riemenschneider	
SIGMOBILE	SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contributions Award

MobiSys Best Paper Award

MobiCom Best Paper Award

MobiHoc Best Paper Award	Victor Bahl

Ardalan Amiri Sani, Kevin Boos, Min Hong Yun, and Lin Zhong

Jie Liu, Gerald DeJean, Bodhi Priyantha, Yuzhe Jin, and Ted Hart

Qifan Pu, Sidhant Gupta, Shyamnath 
Gollakota, and Shwetak Patel

Melissa Duarte, Siddhartha Brahma, Ayan Sengupta, Christina Fragouli, and Suhas Diggavi	
MM	SIGMM Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions

SIGMM Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis
	Dick Bulterman

Xirong Li	
MOD	SIGMOD Contributions Award    

SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award  

Alberto Mendelzon Test of Time Award     

SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award

SIGMOD Test of Time Award                                                                                                                                               	Kyu-Young Whang

Martin Kersten

Ronald Fagin, Phokoin Kolaitis, Lucian Popa, and Wang-Chiew

Claudio Gutiérrez, Carlos Hurtado, and Alberto Mendelzon.

Aditya Parameswaran and Andrew Pavlo 

Rakesh Agrawal, Jerry Kiernan, Ramakrishnan Srikant, and Yirong Xu	
OPS	Mark Weiser Award  

SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award

Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing

ASPLOS Influential Paper Award      

Dennis M. Ritchie Award                                                    	Stephan Savage

Daniel G. Bobrow, Jerry D. Burchfiel, Daniel L. Murphy and Raymond S. Tomlinson; Joel Bartlett; K. Mani Chandy and Leslie Lamport; Kenneth P. Birman and Thomas A. Joseph; Eddie Kohler, Robert Morris, Benjie 

Chen, John Jannotti and Frans Kaashoek

Nati Linial

Gookwon Edward Suh, Jae W. Lee, David Zhang, and Srinivas Devadas

Mona Attariyan	
PLAN	ACM SIGPLAN PL Achievement Award   

SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award 

SIGPLAN PL Software Award  

John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award 

SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award

Vlissides Award

Most Influential ICFP Paper Award  

Most Influential OOPSLA Paper Award 

Most Influential POPL Paper Award                        

Most Influential PLDI Paper Award

ASPLOS Influential Paper Award                                                                                                                                                                                 	Neil D. Jones

Simon Peyton Jones

GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)

Aaron Turon

Sumit Gulwani

Zalia Shams

Ralf Lammel and Simon Peyton Jones

Tim Harris and Keir Fraser

Thomas Henzinger, Ranjit Jhala, Rupak Majumdar, and Kenneth McMillan 

 Maged M. Michael

Gookwon Edward Suh, Jae W. Lee, David Zhang, and Srinivas Devadas
	
SAC	SIGSAC Outstanding Contribution Award  

SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award	Peter G. Neumann

Whitfield Diffie	
SAM	ISSAC Distinguished Paper Prize

ISSAC Distinguished Student Author Prize	Francois Le Gall

Shiyun Yang; Carlos Arreche  
	
SIM	Distinguished Contribution Award  	Richard Fujimoto	
SOFT	ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award

Outstanding Research Award

SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award  

SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award

SIGSOFT Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award
	Leon J. Osterweil

Alexander L. Wolf

Barbara A. Kitchenham, Tore Dybå, Magne Jørgensen

Mary Lou Soffa

Jeff Huang

UCCS
	
Penny Crane Award for Distinguished Service	
Terris Wolff	

WEB

	Vannevar Bush Award (with SIGIR)    

Douglas C. Engelbart Award 

Theodor Holm Nelson Award       

DocEng Best Paper Award                                                        	Kazunari Sugiyama and Min-Yen Kan

David Millard, Charlie Hargood, Michael Jewell, and Mark Weal

Dominic Rout, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, Kalina Bontcheva, and Trevor Cohn

Thanh-Ha Do, Salvatore Tabbone, and  Oriol Ramos Terrade	

5.5 Educational Programs and Special Projects 

SIGAI co-sponsored with AAAI the 2014 SIGAI/AAAI Doctoral Consortium, which is held each year during the AAAI conference. It provides an opportunity for Ph.D. students to discuss in depth their research interests and career objectives with the other participants and a group of established AI researchers that act as individual mentors.  Presentations and discussions take place over two days of intense meetings prior to the AAAI conference.

SIGCSE coordinated efforts with the first ACM Learning at Scale Conference to help springboard that conference, which was held two days before the SIGCSE Symposium 2014. Due to its success it will be held again in March 2015. SIGCSE also funded a New Educator's Workshop for ten participants the day before the Symposium. The Workshop featured six speakers presenting on both teaching tips and how to succeed in such careers. SIGCSE plans to run this workshop every other year. 

SIGITE members, led by Bill Paterson of Mount Royal University, contributed to a preliminary study by the ACM Ed Council to gauge the extent to which the 2008 IT Curriculum Guidelines were in need of revision.  Other SIGITE members will participate in drafting revisions for 2016. 

SIGPLAN held the 2014 Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop (PLMW) immediately before the 41st edition of POPL, in San Diego this past January. The goal of PLMW is to introduce newcomers (mainly young PhD students, along with some MSc and undergraduate students) to the field of programming language theory and formal verification, with a particular emphasis on women and under-represented minorities. 

SIGSIM began funding travel for PhD students to both the Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) and its flagship ACM SIGSIM-PADS Conference. 

The SIGSOFT Webinar Series was instituted this year. It is open to the general software engineering community. Webinars will be based on the Future of Software Engineering Track at ICSE 2014.  

SIGUCCS established a mentoring program in 2013.  This program allows members of the SIGUCCS community to both be mentored and to mentor their colleagues.  In the program’s second year, 42 people applied and 21 pairs of mentors/mentees were matched. This is a 61% increase in participation from the first year of the program. 

5.6 International Activities 
 
The 29th Annual edition of SAC has marked another successful event for SIGAPP of the Symposium on Applied Computing. This international gathering attracted over 411 attendees from over 50 countries. It was hosted and held on the campus of Dongguk University, Gyeongju, Korea, in March 2014. 

SIGARCH, with the encouragement of ACM, has begun exploring the creation of a European SIGARCH, Chapter.  Goals of a European SIGARCH Chapter include: promote student research and education activities to make the computer architecture community grow long term; promote networking events; offer conferences, workshops and summer schools. It also aims to promote collaboration with other SIGs (e.g. SIGPLAN, SIGOPS, SIGBED) within Europe as well as globally. Still in its early stages, the hope is to emulate a successful Chapter in other regions, especially India, China, and South Korea. 

SIGCHI created a series Regional Workshops to help HCI communities in Asia, Latin America, and Africa become better involved in the SIGCHI community.  SIGCHI sponsors selected local events including speaker exchanges, professional development, student competitions, community connecting activities and various mentoring efforts, and local meetings aimed at growing the community. For example, the annual flagship CHI conference will be held in Korea in 2015. To better prepare local communities, SIGCHI sponsored various activities in 2014 in China, Indonesia-Maylaysia and India.

ACM SIGDA encouraged EDA community leaders to set up local chapters from Asian countries, and this year, six SIGDA local chapters were successfully established. Chapter leaders attended the 2014
SIGDA Volunteer meeting at Design Automation Conference and shared their first-year experiences. The new chapters are: ACM SIGDA Hong Kong Chapter, ACM SIGDA Korea Chapter, ACM SIGDA Northern China Chapter, ACM SIGDA Singapore Chapter, ACM SIGDA Southern China Chapter and ACM SIGDA Taiwan Chapter. 

GECCO 2013 was held in Amsterdam at the Free University of Amsterdam outside of the city center. It was very successful, receiving almost 570 submissions and having an attendance of 523 individuals.

Through its “Friends” program, SIGIR offered a limited amount of funding (up to $5,000) to a number of events, including  European Conference on Information Retrieval held in Amsterdam, the  Australiasian Document Computer Symposium held in Brisbane, Australian and the MediaEval Benchmarking Initiative for Multimedia Evaluation Workshop which took place in Barcelona, Spain. 

SIGMICRO’s Computing Frontiers Conference (CF 2014) was held again in Cagliari Italy in May 2014. Keynotes were given by Bruce Jacob, University of Maryland; Gabriel Loh, AMD Corp. and David Bailey, University of California, Davis.

The SIGMIS CPR Conference was held in Singapore in May 2014. Among its activities were an Industry Panel, a Journal Editor’s Panel and the SIGMIS Computers and People Doctoral Consortium.

The 4th ACM international conference on Multimedia Retrieval sponsored by SIGMM took place in Glasgow during April 2014.. Based on the Chinese Computing Federation Conference Ranking (2013), ACM ICMR is the 1st ranked Multimedia Retrieval conference in the world and the 4th ranked conference in the category of multimedia and graphics. This year, it also attracted the largest number of attendants in its history.

SIGSAC’s ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2013) was held in Berlin, Germany. This edition received more than 560 submissions – the highest number of submissions ever received by a CCS edition.  In addition, over 700 attendees participated in the conference, justifying the decision to hold CCS in Europe.

The 14th International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation (ISSAC) was sponsored by SIGSAM in Kobe, Japan. Awards were given for Distinguished Paper and Distinguished Student Author. 

The 25th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media will be held in Santiago Chile. HT 2014 is the first SIGWEB conference where attendees can apply for childcare support. 
 
5.7 Collaborative Efforts 

This year SIGACT co-sponsored a three-day workshop, Women in Theory (WIT), together with NSF, Princeton, Google and IBM. It was held in New York City immediately prior to STOC, SIGACT’s flagship conference, and brought together 60 women graduate and undergraduate students interested in theoretical computer science. The workshop featured technical talks and tutorials by senior and junior women in the field, as well as social events and activities. 

A formal liaison exists between SIGAda and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) WG9, the body responsible for the maintenance and evolution of the Ada International Standard. At least one SIGAda Officer represents the membership at the WG9 meetings held twice each year. Other representatives are from Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. 

SIGCAS has been supporting the movement to promote “The Pledge of the Computing Professional”. It has been welcomed by the leaders of the Pledge committee as a key element of its steady growth and initial success both within ACM and in universities around the US.

In 2013, SIGDOC began working with the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication (CPTSC) to explore opportunities for the two organizations to forge effective partnerships through each organization’s annual conference activities. Members of SIGDOC participated in a SIGDOC panel session at CPTSC’s 2013 annual conference and other collaborations are planned for 2014 and 2015. 

SIGecom sponsored the Fifteenth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'14) June 8-12, 2014 in Palo Alto, CA.  In order to serve as a hub for the growing number of researchers and venues at the intersection of computer science and economics, a notable feature of this year's conference was collaboration with the NBER Market Design conference and the NSF Decentralization conference. Both draw attendees from microeconomic theory and find a lot of synergy with many of the problems studied by the SIGecom community.

SIGMOD continues to be in close collaboration with its sister societies, such as VLDB Endowment, IEEE TCDE, EDBT Association, and ICDT Council.  SIGMOD has a series of joint activities with VLDB, i.e., the Summer Schools and the Traveling Speakers Program, the inclusion of VLDB material in the ACM DL, and others. 

 

 
Appendix A – Membership & Technical Activity	 Summary  Appendix C – Conference Summary 
Appendix B – Financial Summary    			Appendix D – Individual SIG Reports