Changes in SIGART Organization
In addition to the SIGART elected officers, which include Yolanda Gil as Chair, Qiang Yang as Vice-Chair, and Gautam Biswas as Treasurer, SIGART now has an organization that includes a distinguished Advisory Board, whose members are Tom Dietterich, Jim Hendler, Haym Hirsh, Eric Horvitz, Craig Knoblock, and David Waltz. Maria Gini continues to be involved in SIGART as past Chair. Mehran Sahami and Peter Norvig were appointed SIGART officers for Education Activities. Weike Pan was appointed SIGART Information Officer.
Educational Actvities
SIGART is participating in the CS2013 Curriculum Initiative, a joint effort to develop an updated curriculum for computer science education that ACM and IEEE initiate every ten years or so. Mehran Sahami and Peter Norvig are the appointed SIGART officers that are representing our SIG in this initiative. They have been directly engaged in this activity. Mehran run a panel together with Zachary Dodds at the Second Symposium on Educational Advances in AI (EAAI) conference that was held with AAAI (http://eaai.stanford.edu/). This presentation is posted in the SIGART web site. That meeting was very useful to collect input from the AI community. We would love to have feedback from SIGART members, particularly those of you that do not traditionally attend AAAI and are in institutions where CS curriculum decisions affect you directly.
SIGART continues to award a number of scholarships to students to attend the conferences co-sponsored by SIGART. The amounts of scholarships varied from $1,000 to $10,000 per conference, depending on the conference size. Funding students is a good way to ensure long term growth and vitality in the AI community and a good investment for the future.
SIGART co-sponsored with AAAI the annual SIGART/AAAI Doctoral Consortium. The Doctoral Consortium provides an opportunity for Ph.D. students to discuss in depth their research interests and career objectives with the other participants and a group of established AI researchers that act as individual mentors. Presentations and discussions take place over two days of intense meetings prior to the AAAI conference.
Conference Support
In addition to the K-CAP conference, SIGART sponsors the annual conferences on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), and Automated Software Engineering (ASE). For these conferences, SIGART provides financial sponsorship and makes the proceedings available in the ACM Digital Library, which disseminates them to over a million subscribers. A CD of the proceedings of these conferences is mailed to all SIGART members.
SIGART granted in-cooperation status to dozens of international conferences, likely many in your areas of interest. We feel it is important to support the community, particularly in developing countries where the endorsement from our organization helps organizers to attract good submissions and attendees to the conferences.
Awards
SIGART has also been working with the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS) to continue a special cooperation status regarding the AAMAS conference and the ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award. The ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award is an annual award for excellence in research in the area of autonomous agents, which is awarded by SIGART.
SIGART also nominates candidates for a number of ACM awards. We always welcome nominations from SIGART members. You can submit nominations yourself for a number of awards, details are at http://awards.acm.org/html/award_nominations.cfm.
ACM members are potential candidates for other awards, such as ACM Distinguished Member. Please check the SIGART web site for details.
Publications
SIGART endorses two important new journals of the ACM family. The ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (ACM TIST) publishes the highest quality papers on multi-disciplinary research on intelligent systems (http://tist.acm.org/). The ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (ACM TiiS) focuses on AI research on the design, realization, or evaluation of interactive systems (http://tiis.acm.org/).
Outreach
In 2010, SIGART launched a new web site, with up-to-date information about the SIG and its activities. Weike Pan is the SIGART Information Officer and developed and maintains the site. Check it out at http://www.sigart.org/.