SIGSAM ANNUAL REPORT
July 1994 - June 1995

Submitted by: Erich Kaltofen

1. Elections:

SIGSAM held elections. The position for vice-chair was tied and each of the candidates will serve 1 year. Bruce Char conceded the election and Hoon Hong will resign in a year. This step has the approval of Doris Lidtke. SIGSAM also changed into an Open SIG.

2. Publications:

SIGSAM's Bulletin has appeared with a small delay due to lack of contributions. However, the issues contain some timely material such as the advance program of ISSAC'95 in Montreal. The unrefereed research contributions are of good quality. Since the Bulletin editor has been in office for several years and wishes to step down, the appointment of the new editor is a key step for the new board. SIGSAM has also published the Proceedings of ISSAC'95 (314 pages).

3. Electronic Services:

SIGSAM's homepage on acm.org and its archive on ftp.ccs.neu.edu/pub/sigsam are being actively maintained. Cooperative links with other symbolic computation information services such as Symbol Net are installed.

4. Conferences:

SIGSAM is sponsoring the International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation (ISSAC '95) in Montreal with SIGNUM (25%). The Montreal meeting was successful, with over 140 attendees. At Montreal, Bylaws for organizing ISSAC'95 for voted into effect. These Bylaws give SIGSAM a seat on a 6 member Steering Committee by virtue of sponsoring ISSAC. Two other seats are held by cooperating national organizations. The alternate proposal of establishing and international society in symbolic computation that would be in competition with SIGSAM failed. The 1994 PASCO meeting was "in cooperation" with SIGSAM. Due to the lateness of approval, this status was unfortunately not acknowledged in the conference material.

5. Membership:

End of November 1993, SIGSAM had a total of 1004 members. End of May 1995, SIGSAM has a total of 738 members. This decline is somewhat higher than the SIG average (36% for SIGSAM and 27% for SIG average) and runs counter to the growth of our field in the applications and educations sectors. Measures such as giving conference registration discounts for instant membership can boost membership. It is also hoped that "Open Status" will attract more members outside North America. Nonetheless, the membership decline is the most challenging problem for the new SIGSAM executive board, now that the ISSAC control question is settled in a reasonable fashion for SIGSAM.

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