SIGSAM Annual Report
July 2002 - June 2003
Submitted by: Robert M. Corless, Chair
Treasury
The SIGSAM fund balance as of 30 June 2003 is 15,900 USD, down 18,000
USD from the opening balance of 33,900 USD. The increase in the SIG
services allocation fee ("Reallocation") has substantially aggravated
our difficult financial situation.
Membership
As of 30 June 2003, SIGSAM had 424 members.
SIGSAM Bulletin: Communications in Computer Algebra
During the past year, we published four 32-page issues of the
Bulletin. David Jeffrey continued his service as Editor. Mark
Giesbrecht continued his service as the Associate Editor for Formally
Reviewed Articles and as the unofficial "web editor", posting issues
on the Bulletin website.
ISSAC Conferences
ISSAC 2002 (Lille, France -- Marc Giusti, Chair) had 141 registered
participants, with 29 student registrations. The conference nearly
broke even, thanks in part to a special grant from the MEDICIS group.
ISSAC 2003 (Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA -- Hoon Hong, General
Chair) has successfully concluded. There were 146 registered
participants, including 40 students and 6 invited speakers. The
conference appears to have closed with a positive balance of about
3000 USD. This balance reflects a payment of about 5500 USD to
ACM/SIGSAM as the 16 percent organizational fee.
ISSAC 2004 will be held at the University of Cantabria in Santander,
Spain. The General Chair is Josef Schicho (University of Linz/RISC,
Austria) and the Program Committee Chair is Michael Singer (North
Carolina State University, USA).
Beijing has been chosen for the site of ISSAC 2005.
Executive Committee Activity
The officers of SIGSAM have finished their terms of office. The new
officers elected are Emil Volcheck (Chair), Manuel Bronstein (Vice
Chair), Mark van Hoeij (Secretary), and Wayne Eberly (Treasurer).
Rob Corless now replaces Bruce Char as Past Chair.
The SIGSAM Executive Committee (EC) made progress on several
initiatives this year.
Awards
We implemented the ISSAC Distinguished Paper and Distinguished Student
Author awards, awarding prizes for both ISSAC 2002 and ISSAC 2003.
Organization
The Secretary drafted a substantial revision to the SIGSAM Bylaws that
corrected one glaring error, established an Advisory Board to be
appointed by the Membership at the annual Business Meeting, and made
other minor revisions. The draft revision is currently under review
at ACM Headquarters.
The EC established the SIGSAM_Officers mailing list to replace the
Officers_SIGSAM alias previously used for contacting all officers.
The archiving provided by the ACM LISTSERV mailing list server will
provide an ongoing record of official business and enhance SIGSAM
organizational memory.
Membership
We continued to send more issues of "SIGSAM News and Announcements" to
the SIGSAM-Members mailing list and have found this to be an effective
tool to reach our members. The Secretary made arrangements to obtain
a membership roster on a monthly basis to improve our record-keeping
for members. This allows the Secretary to provide membership
verification, for example, contacting Elsevier to confirm that a
member was eligible for the discounted subscription to the Journal of
Symbolic Computation.
To encourage ISSAC 2003 nonmember registrants to join SIGSAM, the EC
worked with the ISSAC organizers to place a link on the registration
page that would allow a registrant to join SIGSAM and immediately
qualify for the reduced member rate. For those who did not join
SIGSAM and paid the higher nonmember registration fee, the EC hopes to
once again provide them with complimentary memberships.
Citations Project
Michael Wester provided the EC with a list of bibliographic citations
to computer algebra systems. There was otherwise little progress on
this project this year.
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