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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.
SIGPLAN set up guidelines that detail the responsibilities of the conference chair and program chair. These guidelines are sent to every new conference and program chair. We are currently considering putting these out on the web. We also plan to develop guidelines for program committee members to avoid problems when papers are being reviewed.
We completed our CD-ROM project, which was to put the first ten years of POPL proceedings on a CD-ROM. The project was expertly coordinated by volunteer Dr. John Field from IBM Yorktown. The CD-ROM is given to all new members and all current members who renew their SIGPLAN membership. The response from our membership to this CD-ROM has been very positive. We plan to publish the remaining fifteen years of POPL proceedings on the CD-ROM.
SIGPLAN is also incooperation with FSE.
Interaction with Industry:
To establish more interaction with industry, we have started to organize panels at our conferences that address joint issues that exist between academia and industry. The panels include people from both industry and research institutions. At the last PLDI, we had an architecture panel that consisted of experts from industry. The panel and the following discussion were well received by the PLDI attendees. We are also working with industry to fund some of the activities at our conferences. At PLDI, TI funded a reception. ICFP also has received funding from industry. To help coordinate our efforts, an EC member is responsible for keeping track of the companies that have contributed funding, and who in the company is the contact person. This information will be helpful when conference organizers are trying to find funding.
Ties with international programming languages organizations:
Another priority is to strength our ties with the international programming languages organizations. Since we have someone on the EC from Europe, we have focused on Europe this year.
We have a liaison who serves on SIGPLAN EC and the European organization, EAPLS. We are trying to coordinate our conferences with EAPLS to eliminate conference date conflicts. SIGPLAN and EAPLS also have pointers to each other's web page.
A new column, entitled "The European Scene" will become a regular feature in SIGPLAN Notices. This column will be written by Neil Jones.
Ron Cytron, 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 nine students to attend programming languages conferences and workshops for a total cost of $6K. 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.
We also sent a $5,000 contribution to the SIG Discretionary Fund, which funds projects of joint interest and benefit to the SIGS. We contributed $1,000 to the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award.
We started and funded a project to produce software to support unified electronic conference submissions and refereeing procedures for our conference submissions. The software was used for PLDI'98 and is being revised this summer.
To help attract student membership, we are in the process of producing a poster that details the advantages of SIGPLAN membership.
In the last two to three 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.
Coupled with this increase, is the difficulty of hiring computer science faculty, especially those in systems. Industry is hiring many of the Ph.D.s being produced at salaries that universities cannot come close to matching.
One big issue is the low number of computer science graduates that are being produced, even with the sudden increase, compared to the demand. This situation affects our industrial members, as it is impossible to fill all their vacancies.
Another issue is the decreasing number of graduate students who are going on for Ph.D. degrees. The recent Taulbee study shows a drop in Ph.D. production in 1997 and the drop is expected to be larger in 1998. Students are lured away from universities by industry. For the same reason, it is becoming more and more difficult to attract domestic graduate students.
A very important and puzzling situation is the decreasing percentage of women who enroll in B. S. programs in computer science. In 1984, about 36% of the students in computer science were women; in 1997, that figure has fallen to 16%. It is unclear why this decrease is happening and there is no indication that the drop is stabilizing. Certainly the amount of information on the web and the filtering of information remains a problem to all.
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SIGPLAN FY'98 Annual Report. Last Update: 9/11/98
by Rachael Barish
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