SIGIR NEWSACM SIGIR Annual Business Meeting 2020:
Secretary’s Notes
Claudia Hauff
Delft University of Technologyc.hauff@tudelft.nl

1Opening Matters

The 2020 ACM SIGIR Annual Business Meeting took place virtually on July 29, 2020 and July30, 2020 to accommodate participants from different time zones. It was led by the chair of theSIGIR Executive Committee (EC), Ben Carterette.
The EC aims for increased transparency: the meeting agenda and minutes of each quarterly
meeting are posted online. Regularly, an online form is distributed to the community to elicit
questions/comments for the EC. This opportunity is not yet taken up a lot by the community.
The form can be found online.1

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SIGIR Volunteers

SIGIR would not function without its volunteers. The volunteers are Nattiya Kanhabua &Guido Zuccon & Chirag Shah (Information Co-Directors), Jaime Arguello (Student Travel AwardsChair), Josiane Mothe & Tirthankar Ghosal & Julián Urbano (SIGIR Forum Editors), Hannah
Bast & Gianluca Demartini & Ryenn White (SIG Awards Chairs), Andew Yates & Jiaxin Mao(Student Affairs Chairs), Donna Harman (SIGIR Historian), Barbara Poblete & Hussein Suleman& Suzan Verberne (SIGIR Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Chairs), Jaap Kamps (Conferences Chair),Nicola Ferro & Johanne Trippas (Artifact Review Committee Chairs), Nazli Goharian & Xin Ma& Suzan Verberne (Women in IR).
Note that two of the above chairs are newly created: the Conferences Chair and Artifact
Review Committee Chairs.
We thank the outgoing volunteers Craig Macdonald & Claudia Hauff (outgoing SIGIR ForumEditors), Falk Scholer (outgoing Awards Chair), Laura Dietz and Johanne Trippas (outgoingStudent Affairs Chairs).
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http://bit.ly/SIGIR-EC-form

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3Impact of COVID-19

AFIRM 2021 is likely to be canceled; AFIRM 2020 occurred as anticipated on site. WSDM 2020
was held on site but participants from China were not able to attend. CHIIR 2020 was initiallycanceled and later run as virtual event. JCDL 2020 was initially postponed and later run asvirtual event. The 2020 editions of SIGIR, ICTIR and CIKM were run as virtual events.

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ACM SIGIR Academy

The newly created ACM SIGIR Academy honors and recognizes individuals who have made significant, cumulative contributions to the development of our field. It is led by Ryen White. Eachyear, a small cohort (3-5 new members) will be elected to the SIGIR Academy. This selection
is an official ACM award. Inductees will be celebrated at the SIGIR conference in their year ofinduction.
To start off the academy, leading researchers in IR have been auto-inducted as the class of2021. The next deadline for nomination is December 31, 2020. A diverse selection committee will
pick the inductees. More details on how to nominate someone can be found online.25Official Recognition for SIGIR Members

Irwin King from the Chinese University of Hong Kong has become an ACM Distinguished Member.
Google’s Marc Najork has become an ACM Fellow.

6DEI Checklist

The DEI chairs have created a DEI checklist for conference organizers to ensure a diverse, equitable
and inclusive event. This checklist will become part of the SIGIR handbook and distributed tothe SIGIR associated steering committees. The June 2020 version of the checklist can be foundonline.3

7Future of ICTIRThe ICTIR steering committee has been rebooted. We thank Leif Azzopardi for his work asformer steering committee chair. The tentative plan is to run ICTIR 2021 as a mini-conferenceco-located with SIGIR 2021, with a timeline similar to SIGIR 2021 workshops.
The new ICTIR steering committee is chaired by Tetsuya Sakai and includes the following
members: Krisztian Balog, Frank Hopfgartner, Vanessa Murdock, Bruce Croft, Yi Fang, Evangelos
Kanoulas, Fiana Raiber, Dawei Song and Keith van Rijsbergen.
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http://sigir.org/awards/sigir-academy/
https://bit.ly/dei-checklist

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8SIGIR 2023

At the business meeting the location of SIGIR 2023 was announced. Among the four strong bids,Taipei, Taiwan July 23 - 27, 2023 was selected.
Bids to host SIGIR 2024 (to be set in the Americas) are now being accepted.

9Treasurer’s Report

SIGIR treasurer Min Zhang presented SIGIR’s finances. SIGIR maintains its healthy financialstate. Most of its income is generated by conferences and ACM’s digital library. In the fiscal
year 2019, $287K were spent on student travel grant awards. SIGIR 2020 was supported with 158
student grants and 50 non-student grants. A total of $34K were spent on the Friends of SIGIR
program.

10Audience Discussion Points

During the last part of the business meeting the floor was opened to the audience. The following list
provides a summary of the discussion points that were raised by the audience. Where appropriate,
the response of the SIGIR executive committee is included.
• SIGIR’s best paper award process can be improved by being more consistent and transparent in nature in terms of candidate selection (ensuring that reviewer scores are not theultimate arbiter), award committee selection and award criteria.
• Events sponsored by our SIG should be required to adopt diversity best practices. BenCarterette: ‘requiring’ is a strong word; everyone is a volunteer; we do our best to encourage
the adoption of best practices; the conference leader workshop organizers are aware of theimportance of this issue.
• Going forward, SIGIR paper should have limitations and ethical considerations sections toforce authors to think more deeply about their contributions and the consequences of theirwork.
• Do we have insights into the economical consequences of open access? Ben: not yet,but we will investigate this.
• We should move towards an unlimited number of reference pages at our conferences.
• We should think about updating our review process to encourage more high-quality reviews. Are there things we can learn from the NLP community and how they are runningtheir review process?
• The SIGIR paper deadline at the end of January inconveniences a lot of authors. Can it
be moved? Ben: this issue is regularly being discussed at the EC level but we are restricted
by VISA process times (once conferences move to being onsite again). There is no deadlinethat will work well for everyone.
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• It should be clarified better to reviewers what is (not) in scope of SIGIR. Reviewers are notconsistent, which leads to bad experiences for authors. Vanessa Murdock (program co-chairof SIGIR 2020): this concern was addressed by a higher acceptance rate (27%) and by thePC chairs pushing back against out of scope reviews; PC chairs are aware of the problem.
• The NLP community has strong incentives for dataset and resource papers and as aresult lots of dataset papers are published. This is not the case for SIGIR. How can weencourage a similar trend at SIGIR?

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