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We typically offer 4 annual conferences, POPL, PLDI, ICFP, OOPSLA; PPoPP and PEPM are held every 2 years; and ASPLOS is held every 18 months, 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. This year, we were in-cooperation with about eight conferences or workshops.
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.
This year, SIGPLAN set up 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.
To help reward our columnists, we instituted travel awards so they can attend a conference.
As a special project, we have been developing conference software. The software can handle paper submissions, reviewer selection and reviews. We intend to make the software available.
SIGPLAN & SIGSOFT cooperation: SIGPLAN and SIGSOFT are co-sponsoring a workshop on analysis, PASTE. It was co-located in 98 with SIGPLAN's PLDI and will be co-located with SIGSOFT's FSE in September, 1999. We are also incooperation with a number of their conferences and they with ours. The chair of SIGSOFT, David Notkin, and myself wrote an article about the close ties between the software engineering community and the programming languages community. This article was published in both SIGPLAN Notices and SIGSOFT Notes. There was a plan to have PASTE and the SIGSOFT conference ISSTA merge for one instantiation but the plans fell through.
Interaction with Industry: To establish more interaction with industry, we continue 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. We had an industrial panel at PLDI'99. 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.
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.
We, with the help of NSF, funded faculty from institutions with large proportions of women and minority undergraduates to attend our tutorial program associated with PLDI'99 and PLDI. The purpose of this program is to try to increase the number of minority and women students enrolled in computer science. The goal is to provide current and exciting information to faculty who will then teach it to their students.
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.
To help attract student membership, we designed and produced a poster. We also bought an mailing list which we will use to sent the poster to colleges and universities in the USA. We are trying to get lists so we can send them to Europe and Canada.
We also had a very successful election. We have an exceptionally strong EC for the next two years.
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.
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'99 Annual Report. Last Update: 7/15/99
by Rachael Barish
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