SIGPLAN Annual Report
July 2000 - June 2001
Submitted by: Ron K. Cytron, Chair
This year ACM SIGPLAN has continued its active sponsorship of many conferences and workshops as well as its two newsletters: SIGPLAN Notices, a monthly publication and Fortran Forum, published three times a year. SIGPLAN's financial situation is very strong, exceeding the guidelines set by ACM for all SIGs. Therefore we continue to undertake special activities.
A good resource for monitoring our activities is our web page, found
at http://www.acm.org/sigplan/
I. Conferences
July 00:
APL (incooperation)
September 00:
ICFP (International Conference on Functional Programming) (sponsor);
PPDP (Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming) (sponsor);
TIC (International Workshop on Types in Compilation) (sponsor);
Haskell (sponsor);
RULE (International Workshop on Rule-Based Programming ) (sponsor);
HOOTS (International Workshop on Higher Order Operational
Techniques in Semantics ) (sponsor);
SAIG (Semantics, Applications and Implementation of Program Generation) (sponsor);
HLCL (International Workshop on High-level Concurrent Languages) (sponsor);
Scheme (Workshop on Scheme and Functional Programming) (sponsor);
EDOC (International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing) (incooperation);
October 00:
OOPSLA Object Oriented Programming Systems, Languages,and Applications) (sponsored);
ISMM (International Symposium on Memory Management) (sponsor);
November 00:
FSE (Foundations of Software Engineering) (incooperation);
SigAda (incooperation);
ASPLOS (Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages
and Operating Systems) (cosponsor);
December 00:
FDDO (Workshop on Feedback-directed Optimization) (incooperation);
January 01:
POPL Principles of Programming Languages (co-sponsored with SIGACT);
CW (Continuations) (sponsor);
FOOL (Foundations of Object-Oriented Languages) (sponsor)
SPACE (Workshop on Semantics, Program Analysis, and Computing
Environments for Memory Management ) (incooperation);
April 00:
MASPLAS (Midatlantic Student Workshop on Programming
Languages and Systems) (incoop);
ETAPS (Europeant Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software) (incooperation);
May 01:
PADO (Symposium on Programms as Declarative Objectives) (incooperation);
ICSE (International Conference on Software Engineering) (incooperation);
June 01:
PLDI (Conference on Programming Languages Design and
Implementation) (sponsor);
LCTES (Workshop on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems) (sponsor);
OM (Workshop on Optimization of Middleware and Distributed Systems) (sponsor);
PASTE (Workshop for Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering) (cosponsor);
PPOPP (Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming) (sponsor);
AICCSA (ACS International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications) (incooperation);
Java Grande (sponsor);
We offer 4 annual conferences, POPL, PLDI, ICFP, OOPSLA;
PPoPP, PEPM held every 2 years; and our
18 month cycle conference ASPLOS, co-sponsored with SIGARCH and SIGOPS.
As was the case in the past few years, we continue to co-locate SIGPLAN
workshops and conferences. This arrangement allows the parent
conference, aided by the conference management and registration
support currently offered by SIGPLAN to our sponsored conferences, to
assume major responsibility for local arrangements for the workshop.
We also are 'in-cooperation" with a number of conferences and
workshops.
The SIGPLAN EC recently moved to set up steering committees for
PLDI and POPL -- the EC itself had been the steering committee previously. The new structure was established to provide for longer institutional memory about these important conferences.
We continue to have separate steering committees for
OOPSLA, ICFP, PPOPP, PEPM,
PASTE, LCTES, JAVA, and ISMM.
We have also established a standing agreement with SIGSOFT to be incooperation regularly with their FSE and ICSE conferences.
We continue to update and improve our guidelines for conference chairs,
program chairs, steering committee formation, and workshop organizers.
We have initiated the development of a web-based database of our
past program committee members, pc chairs and conference chairs to aid
in developing future program committees for our conferences.
SIGPLAN continues to foot the bill for conference management, so that
the budget and registration fees for our conferences are not adversely
affected by such costs. By our providing funds of this nature, we find
it easier to solicit volunteers to chair our conferences. Such chairs work on the creative aspects of their events without having to spend much time on the administrative aspects.
We think that it is very important to have students attend conferences as full participants, even though they pay a much reduced registration fee. SIGPLAN agrees to subsidize some of the expenses for the students if the conference or workshop cannot handle the extra expense. We agreed to subsidize students for FCRC.
SIGPLAN established guidelines that detail setting up steering
committees. Every workshop or conference that SIGPLAN sponsors
on a regular basis must have a steering committee. These
guidelines have been posted on SIGPLAN's web page.
We also developed documents to help program committee chairs during
the paper review. We also developed a document that spelled out
the responsibilities and ethical behavior of committee members.
These are all posted on the SIGPLAN web pages.
II. Publications
SIGPLAN publishes 2 newsletters on a regular basis. SIGPLAN Notices is sent to all SIGPLAN members monthly. Four of the twelve issues
this past year were conference/workshop proceedings. Seth Bermann continues to serve as our assistant editor. Cindy Norris and Jay Fenwich, of Appalachian State University, have been doing a fine job as coeditors, and Notices is running very smoothly.
Our other regular newsletter, Fortran Forum, had 3 issues.
To help reward our columnists, we instituted travel awards so
they can attend conference. One such award has been given out.
III. Awards
Four years ago, we established two ACM SIGPLAN Awards:
the Distinguished Service Award awarded on the basis of the degree of
services to the programming languages community and the Programming
Languages Achievement Award, awarded to an individual
who has made a significant and lasting contribution to the field of programming languages. We presented the 2001 programming languages achievement award to Robin Milner (UK) and the 2001 Distinguished Service Award to Barbara Ryder (Rutgers U). The awards will actually be presented in 2002 at PLDI in Europe, where Robin Milner will address the conference. An article detailing the many accomplishments of the two awardees will appear in an issue of SIGPLAN Notices.
We have approved a number of new awards, and these have recently been
approved by the SGB. Two of these awards recognize the influence of
papers presented at past PLDI and POPL conferences. Such awards are
considered from papers presented ten years prior to the current conference year. The best-paper from PLDI ten years ago was awarded to Monica Lam and Michael Wolf; the best-thesis award was given to Ras Bodik.
IV. Activities and programs
One of our goals is to enrich the electronic presence of SIGPLAN and
programming-language-related materials on the Internet. We have begun
the development of an idea dubbed SIGPLANet, which would serve as a portal to papers, tools, and projects related to programming languages.
As an early step in that direction, we have funded Rick Snodgrass's efforts to obtain past issues of our proceedings into the digital library. Our Information Director continues to update our Web page. Besides pointers to SIGPLAN and ACM information, we have pointers to additional sources on programming language and compiler research.
We continue our Professional Activities Program, PAC, which was instituted a number of years ago to provide funding to graduate students who participate in a SIGPLAN sponsored conference. We provided funds to support students to attend programming languages conferences and workshops. We continued our activity of giving $50K to OOPSLA to sponsor travel and attendance of professors from 2-4 year colleges at the tutorials and conference.
IV. Key Issues for next 2-3 years
Our Executive Committee has been concerned over the last decade with
member attrition, which we have mostly attributed to multi-sig-members
decreasing their sig affiliation. We have also perceived that we may
not serve the "practical" segment of our community in a way that
encourages them to join SIGPLAN. We have further concerns about the
future of our most popular conference, OOPSLA, as the newness of
object-orientation fades.
While these remain key issues, we have begun a better self-examination
of whom we serve and how well. Our conferences continue to be top-notch, and the attendance at POPL and PLDI has only grown over the last 5 years. We see two challenges in the future: improving the valuable services we provide to the reseach community and growing the ways in which we can serve the practitioner.
Other key issues given last year continue to be issues this year.
In the last three to four years, universities have seen a dramatic
increase in the numbers of students enrolled in computer science courses. Some universities have seen their number of majors double in this time period. This sudden increase has stressed the computer science
departments and faculty as they struggle to cope with the need
for additional resources.
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