ACM SIGART 2012 Review
Chair: Yolanda Gil, University of Southern
California
Vice-Chair: Qiang Yang, Hong Kong University of
Science and Technology
Treasurer: Gautam Biswas, Vanderbilt University
SIGART Organization
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Elections held in 2009: two new officers, one continuing
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Established an Advisory Board (includes current president of IJCAI and
immediate past-president of AAAI)
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Chair: Yolanda Gil, University of Southern California
Vice-Chair: Qiang Yang, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Treasurer: Gautam Biswas, Vanderbilt University
Past Chair: Maria Gini (University of Minnesota)
Tom Dietterich (Oregon State University)
Jim Hendler (Rensselaer Polytechnic University)
Haym Hirsh (Rutgers University)
Eric Horovitz (Microsoft Research)
Craig Knoblock (University of Southern California)
Established Liaisons for Educational Activities
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Mehran Sahami (Stanford University)
Peter Norvig (Google Labs)
Finances and Membership
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Very healthy fund balance: $745K
DL revenue stable
Membership
 Around
1,000 members
 Retention
 1st
year retention around 40%
 2nd year retention around 80%
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Discussing investments of funds that would allow
SIGART to gain and retain members
Member Benefits
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Member benefits:
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Reduced registration at the conferences sponsored by SIGART:
Conference proceedings from AAMAS, HRI, and IUI (all on CD-ROM).
Reduced registration at many conferences held "in cooperation" with
SIGART
Access to the following contents in the ACM Digital Library:
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Proceedings of all the SIGART sponsored conferences and some incooperation (doubled articles in 2010, maintained in 2011)
Community Benefits Provided by SIGART:
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Sponsorship and support of conferences relevant to the AI community.
Autonomous Agents Research Award.
Travel support for students to SIGART sponsored conferences.
Support for AAAI/SIGART Doctoral Consortium.
SIGART Web site (14K unique visitors, 2K repeat visitors) (2.5K
visits/month)
SIGART Conferences
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Sponsored Conferences:
ASE: Automated Software Engineering, Sept.
 HRI: Human Robot Interaction, Mar.
 IUI: International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces,
Jan.
 K-CAP: Knowledge Capture, Oct. (odd years)
 WI/IAT: Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology,
Oct.
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Special agreement with AAMAS
Many in-cooperation conferences
Cooperation with AAAI on Doctoral Consortium
SIGART GOALS (I)
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Continue to support conferences, strong
organization committees, many volunteers, high
quality papers
 Major
issues this period
 Negotiated
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 IUI
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a renewed agreement with AAMAS
now indefinitely
governance and continuity
Worked with SIGCHI to resolve it
 Set up an Oversight Committee chaired by Alain Chesnais
Autonomous Agents Research Awards annually
 M.
Veloso (2009), J. Gratch & S. Marsella (2010), J.
Halpern (2011), M. Tennenholtz (2012)
SIGART GOALS (II)
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Outreach to the community
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Student support
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AAAI/SIGART Doctorial Consortium
Travel grants for conference attendance $25K/year
Education
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New web site with advertisement of conferences and other
community events
Article to reach out to Chinese Computer Federation
Involved with the IEEE/ACM CS2013 Curriculum Initiative
Educational Activities Liaisons
Currently discussing new activities focused on recent
graduates and early career researchers