SIGART Program Review, 2008

Maria Gini

SIGART Financial Aspects Healthy financial situation despite the

loss of the AAMAS conference Significant investment in community:

Funding Summer Schools in developing countries.

Awarding scholarships for students to attend conferences (currently $20-25k/year).

Sending conference proceedings to SIGART members.

SIGART Membership Relatively stable but decreasing. Improved

retention rates after 1st year. The existence of other choices (AAAI) is

making it difficult to attract new members and start new conferences.

The AAMAS conference has become independent starting in 2007.

Had elections in 2007, with a new person joining the board.

Started a wiki page on the SIGART web to connect and engage the members. Good response to requests for help.

SIGART Conferences

Healthy conferences with stable size, strong program committees, many volunteers, and high-quality papers.

Multiple best paper awards given yearly at conferences.

Autonomous Agents Research Award given yearly since 2001. The most recent recipients are Milind Tambe, Michael Wooldrige, Sarit Kraus, and Yohav Shoham.

SIGART Publications Efforts to expand contents in DL, by

adding, when possible, conferences in cooperation and new content (e.g., we started recording the AA award talks).

Conference Proceedings from AAMAS, K-CAP, IUI, and HRI are sent to members.

Trying to broaden the portfolio by adding new in-cooperation conferences.

SIGART Other Issues Increased cooperation with AAAI:

Plans are currently being finalized with AAAI to start a CACM Research Highlight Nominator Committee. This will help unify the AI community and increase SIGART visibility.

Sponsoring annual AAAI/SIGART Doctoral Consortium at AAAI.

Study of effectiveness of doctoral consortium will be done this coming year.

SIGART Other issues Communities are forming within the broad

SIGART community (e.g. autonomous agents) and keeping them within SIGART is difficult.

We are looking for opportunities to start new conferences or co-sponsor existing ones.

Effort to broaden SIGART to reach out to new communities (e.g. human-robot interactions) will be continued and strenghtened.

Potential to increase cooperation with related SIGs (for instance SIGCSE on AI in education) will be explored.