SIGSAM Annual Report July 2006 - June 2007 Submitted by: Emil Volcheck, Chair, volcheck@acm.org The SIGSAM homepage is at http://sigsam.org/ . Membership As of 30 June 2007, SIGSAM had 311 members, up from 296 a year ago. Financial Summary The SIGSAM fund balance as of 30 June 2007 is estimated to be 18470 USD, up from an opening balance of 4450 USD. The improved financial situation of SIGSAM is primarily due to three cost-saving measures: (1) saving on production and distribution costs for our quarterly publication by printing and mailing two double issues per year, while electronically publishing four issues per year as before, (2) reduced storage costs, (3) discontinuing ISSAC complimentary memberships. The ISSAC award endowment has a balance of approximately 50000 USD, and the Jenks prize endowment has a balance of about 27000 USD. Note that endowment funds have use restricted to their purpose. The total assets of SIGSAM are about 95000 USD, including both general and restricted funds. Viability SIGSAM was found to be viable at the February 2007 meeting of the SGB, and its status was extended for an additional two years. The next viability review for SIGSAM is due to be around February 2009. ACM Communications in Computer Algebra Volume 40 for the year 2006 was the first year with the new title of "ACM Communications in Computer Algebra" or "CCA" for short. Volume 40 had a total of 128 pages. During the past year, we changed to our new format of publishing four electronic issues and printing two combined issues per year. The first combined issue was September/December 2006. This has resulted in significant savings in our production and distribution costs. The first combined issue cost 3200 USD to print and mail, including an additional 300 copies to distribute as promotions. Ilias Kotsireas and Austin Lobo served as co-Editors, and Chris Brown served as the Associate Editor for Formally Reviewed Articles. New Associate Editors joined the editorial staff, including Jean-Guillaume Dumas (France), Massimo Caboara (Italy), and Manuel Kauers (Austria). ISSAC Conferences ISSAC 2005 in Beijing, China posted a loss of approximately 3900 USD, revised upward from the previous loss estimate of 2800 USD. ISSAC 2006 in Genoa, Italy was hosted by the Department of Mathematics of the University of Genoa and was a successful event, returning about 1500 USD. ISSAC 2007 will be held at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada and is sponsored by ACM. The General Chair is Dongming Wang (Paris 6, France/Beihang University, China). The Program Committee Chair is Bernard Mourrain (INRIA). The Local Arrangements Committee is co-chaired by Drs. Geddes, Giesbrecht, Labahn, and Storjohann. ISSAC 2008 will be held at the Research Institute for Symbolic Computation (RISC) of the Kepler University of Linz, Austria. J. Rafael Sendra (Madrid) is General Chair. Franz Winkler (Linz) is the Local Arrangements Chair. Laureano Gonzalez-Vega (Cantabria) is the Program Committee Chair. Sendra has requested "in cooperation" status with ACM SIGSAM. Organization Elections were held in 2007, and the new officers of SIGSAM serving the term July 2007 - June 2009 are Mark Giesbrecht (Chair) Peter Paule (Vice Chair) Wen-Shin Lee (Secretary) Daniel Lichtblau (Treasurer) Emil Volcheck succeeds Rob Corless as Past Chair and continues to serve on the Executive Committee. The Nominating Committee for the 2007 elections consisted of three past chairs of SIGSAM: Bob Caviness, Rob Corless, and Erich Kaltofen. The past officers were Emil Volcheck (Chair) Werner Krandick (Vice Chair) Fabrice Rouillier (Secretary) Wayne Eberly (Treasurer) The SIGSAM Executive Committee receives advice from an Advisory Board consisting of the officers, editors, and ten members at large (as of June 2007). The current membership is listed at this URL: http://acm.org/sigsam/officers/advisory-board.html . Annual General Meeting The 2007 Annual General Meeting (AGM) of SIGSAM will be held at ISSAC 2007 in Waterloo, Canada. Executive Committee Activities SIGSAM made progress on several initiatives this year. Awards SIGSAM nominated Anthony Hearn to be named an ACM Fellow, and our nomination was successful. Hearn is the second SIGSAM member whom we have nominated for this honor. The ACM SIGSAM Richard Jenks Memorial Prize was awarded to John Cannon for his work on the Magma computer algebra system. The award was presented at ISSAC 2006 and accepted by Wieb Bosma, one of the founding developers of the system. SIGSAM funds the ISSAC Distinguished Paper and Distinguished Student Author awards from an endowment. At ISSAC 2006, two paper awards and three student author awards were presented. The Distinguished Paper Awards were presented to Ziming Li (KLMM, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing), Michael Singer (North Carolina State University), Min Wu (East China Normal University, Shanghai), and Dabin Zheng (KLMM, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing), co-authors of "A recursive method for determining the one-dimensional submodules of Laurent-Ore modules", and to Guénaël Renault (UPMC, Paris 6), author of "Computation of the splitting field of a dihedral polynomial". The Distinguished Student Author awards were presented to Arno Eigenwillig (MPI-Saarbruecken), Guillaume Moroz (LIP6, Paris), and Vikram Sharma (New York University). Conference Activities ACM SIGSAM is sponsoring ISSAC 2007 and is working in cooperation with three smaller conferences or workshops this year: the East Coast Computer Algebra Day (ECCAD) 2007, Symbolic-Numeric Computation (SNC) 2007, and Parallel Symbolic Computation (PASCO) 2007. Research Funding Initiative SIGSAM has formed a committee with the goal of promoting awareness of the significance and need to fund research in computer algebra. At ECCAD 2007 in April, SIGSAM sponsored a panel discussion on the future of symbolic computation. At the NSF in May, Volcheck and Krandick met with NSF Program Officer Robert Grafton to discuss holding a workshop on the future of symbolic computation. Grafton believes he could fund such an event. Grafton also requested a "white paper" on funding research in the design and implementation of computer algebra systems, and we are working to produce that. Outreach to the Mathematics Community SIGSAM has strengthened our cooperation with the American Mathematical Society in two ways. First, we are working to disseminate research in computer algebra presented at mathematics conferences to the broader computer algebra community. Abstracts from three AMS special sessions were published in an issue of CCA this year. In appreciation, we offered the AMS a complimentary full-page advertisement in that issue. Second, we are working with the AMS Mathematical Reviews to improve coverage of ISSAC conference proceedings. Volcheck met with MR staff members, including Executive Editor Kevin Clancey and Associate Editor Suzanne Zeitman, and got a commitment to provide quicker and more thorough coverage and an invitation to the computer algebra community to serve as reviewers to expand coverage. Support to the ISSAC Community SIGSAM sponsored ISSAC 2006 and ISSAC 2007 and produced DVDs of the proceedings for both conferences which also included open source computer algebra systems. SIGSAM retains half of the return from sponsored ISSAC conferences for use at the discretion of the ISSAC Steering Committee. The amount available to the ISSAC Steering Committee is maintained by the SIGSAM Treasurer as part of the SIGSAM fund balance. This amount is 1552 USD, as of June 30, 2007. SIGSAM Bylaws A proposal for revising SIGSAM bylaws was approved for release to the SIGSAM membership by the SGB EC.