The SIGSAM homepage is at http://acm.org/sigsam .
Membership
As of 30 June 2004, SIGSAM had 366 members, down from 424 members a year ago.
SIGSAM Bulletin: Communications in Computer Algebra
During the past year, we again published four 32-page issues of the
Bulletin. David Jeffrey continued his service as Editor. He finished
his term with the June issue, which was delivered on-time to ACM
Headquarters. Mark Giesbrecht continued his service as Associate Editor
for Formally Reviewed Articles and as the unofficial "web editor",
posting issues on the Bulletin website. Mark has also finished his term
with the June issue. I appointed Ilias Kotsireas (Wilfred Laurier) and
Austin Lobo (Washington College) to succeed David, serving jointly as
co-editors. They have been working with David over the past year,
preparing for the transition. Austin and Ilias appointed Chris Brown
(US Naval Academy) to succeed David as Associate Editor for Formally
Reviewed Articles.
ISSAC Conferences
ISSAC 2004 (University of Cantabria,
Santander, Spain -- Josef Schicho, General Chair) has successfully
concluded. While final figures were not available in time for this
report, there were over 170 registered participants, two tutorials, and
three invited speakers. We expect a return of approximately 3000 USD,
after accounting for the allocation of approximately 4300 USD.
ISSAC 2005 will be held in Beijing, hosted by the Mathematics
Mechanization Research Center (MMRC), with Xiao-Shan Gao (MMRC) and
George Labahn (Waterloo) as General Co-Chairs. SIGSAM will again
sponsor ISSAC.
Genoa has been chosen for the site of ISSAC 2006. We expect to organize
ISSAC 2006 to take place around the time of the International Congress
of Mathematicians (ICM) in Madrid.
Executive Committee Activity
The officers of SIGSAM have finished the first year out of their two-year terms. The officers are
Emil Volcheck (Chair)
Manuel Bronstein (Vice Chair)
Mark van Hoeij (Secretary)
Wayne Eberly (Treasurer).
Rob Corless serves as Past Chair.
The SIGSAM Executive Committee (EC) made progress on several initiatives this year.
Awards
After some delay in processing, the ISSAC 2002 and 2003
awards were presented and prize money disbursed to the winners. For the
Distinguished Paper awards, SIGSAM presented the authors with a
citation describing the achievements in an effort to increase
recognition and awareness of new developments in the field. We created
a webpage featuring all the award winners and their citations:
http://www.acm.org/sigsam/ISSAC_Awards
The ISSAC 2004 awards were announced at the conference and are being
processed. SIGSAM has submitted a nomination for ACM Fellow in the
2004-2005 cycle, and we are looking at other possible awards for which
we can nominate members of our community.
Organization
The proposed revision to the SIGSAM Bylaws
drafted last year received preliminary approval from the SGB EC Chair
Alan Berenbaum. I expect to submit revised bylaws to the ACM Council
for approval this coming year.
Membership
We were able to offer 54 complimentary SIGSAM
memberships to ISSAC 2003 participants, with about half going to
participants who paid the higher non-member registration fee, and half
going to students. We expect to repeat this for ISSAC 2004.
With encouragement from our Secretary Mark van Hoeij, Bob Okajima in
ACM IS developed a web application that displays current membership
information. Mark hopes to use this service in the coming year to
identify recently lapsed members, whom he will then contact to
encourage them to renew.
No issues of "SIGSAM News and Announcements" appeared in the past year,
although numerous event announcements were sent to the SIGSAM_Members
mailing list.
Citations Project
Alexander Hulpke (Colorado State) made
significant progress on this project, developing a website with
bibliographic information on over 25 Computer Algebra Systems:
http://acm.org/sigsam/citation .
ISSAC Proceedings on CD
Vice-Chair Manuel Bronstein led a team
that included Tim Daly and Wen-Shin Lee to develop and produce a CD
containing the ISSAC Proceedings as well as a number of free or open
source software packages. The CD was distributed at ISSAC 2004 and is
being sent to all Bulletin subscribers with the June issue.
Mathematical Reviews
The Executive Editor of Mathematical
Reviews (MR) Jane Kister has expressed interest in indexing SIGSAM
content and working with ACM to electronically transmit metadata for
our publications, saving effort by MR staff. This is a significant
initiative that has the potential to make our publications more widely
known to mathematicians.
Financial Summary
The SIGSAM fund balance as of 30 June 2004
is 4,185 USD, down almost 12,000 USD from the opening balance of 15,938
USD. Our projected budget for FY 2005 shows that we expect to break
even in the coming year. The reasons for our improved financial
situation include the reduction in the minimum SIG Services Allocation,
mailing members the ISSAC Proceedings on CD instead of hardcopy, and
eliminating scanning charges when producing the Bulletin.
