BUSINESS MEETING REPORTACM SIGIR Annual Business Meeting 2018:
Secretary’s Notes
Emine Yilmaz
University College London
Email: emine.yilmaz@ucl.ac.uk

1Opening Matters

The 2018 ACM SIGIR Annual Business Meeting took place on Wednesday July 11, 2018, at the
SIGIR’18 Conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. The meeting was held between 13:00-14:30
and was led by the chair of SIGIR Executive Committee, Diane Kelly.
The meeting started with an introduction to the executive committee, which involves Diane
Kelly (University of Tennessee) as the chair, Jaap Kamps (University of Amsterdam) as the vicechair, Emine Yilmaz (University College London) as the secretary, Ben Carterette (University ofDelaware) as the treasurer and Charles Clarke (University of Waterloo) as the past chair.
Apart from the executive committee, volunteers play an important role in running SIGIR.
Diane introduced and thanked the volunteers for 2017-2018. The volunteers for this period were
Nattiya Kanhabua & Guido Zuccon (Information Directors), Jaime Arguello (Student TravelAwards Chair), Craig Macdonald (June Forum Editor), Claudia Hauff (December Forum editor),
Falk Scholer (Awards Chair), Laura Dietz (Student Affairs Chair), Yoelle Maarek (Industy Liaison), Jimmy Lin (CIKM Conference Liaison), Sue Dumais (WSDM Conference Liaison) and Edie
Rasmussen (JCDL Conference Liaison).
The upcoming year is an election year for the SIGIR Executive Committee. As part of this,new elections will be done for the chair, vice chair, secretary and treasurer positions. This year
the committee also introduces a new volunteer position, the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Chair
whose role will be to increase diversity and inclusion at SIGIR. This position will also be filled forthe upcoming year. Alistair Moffat will be leading the election process as the Election Official.

2Initiatives and Accomplishments

The meeting continued with a summary of initiatives and accomplishments that were made during
the last year.

2.1

Friends of SIGIR

Through the Friends of SIGIR Program, SIGIR provides up to US$5,000 to support student
travel and keynote speaker(s) for conferences considered as “friends” of SIGIR. Applications for
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this program are managed by the SIGIR Treasurer and are accepted four times per year. Current
friends include ADCS, AIRS, CLEF, FIRE, IR Autumn School and MediaEval. Approximately
US$42,000 was awarded as part of the Friends of SIGIR programme during the last year.

2.2

Student Support

This year SIGIR supported students in several ways, which includes an award of approximately
US$218K in student travel scholarships and organizing the SIGIR Student Lunch and Party.
SIGIR also sponsored the CRA-W event this year again.
The meeting continued with a talk by Laura Dietz (Student Affairs Chair), who summarized
the activities performed during the last year. Laura started with an overview of the mission of theStudent Affairs Chair, whose goal is to make sure that every student attendee is improving her or
his network and to ensure ideal conditions for IR students to thrive. To achieve these, SIGIR has
been organizing the Student’s Get Together event since 2015. Last year SIGIR introduced two
new initiatives, the Student Liaisons and the PhD Buddy Program:
SIGIR Student Liaisons are responsible for staying in touch with students, to listen to students
concerns, and to work on improvements. Student liaisons also run the PhD Buddy Program.
SIGIR liaisons for this year were Hamed Zamani, Maram Hasanain, Jiaxin Mao, Mohammad
Aliannejadi, Jaspreet Singh and Johanne Trippas. New liaisons will be selected for next year andall student members of the SIGIR community can apply to serve as a student liaison.
The goal of the PhD Buddy Program is to connect students with other students to share
their experiences. There is an informal introduction service, to which the students can sign up at
https://goo.gl/CAeXro.

2.3

ACM Artifact Badging

Badging system was developed by ACM as a way to recognize aspects of reproducibility in research
publications. One of the major goals of implementing ACM badges is to recognize efforts thatmake research more repeatable, replicable and reproducible.
ACM asks SIGs to develop their own review procedures for assigning badges. Based on the community survey results, the SIGIR community seemed to be interested in this. Hence, a taskforce
was formed to investigate and develop procedures for SIGIR. Members of the SIGIR Taskforce
are Nicola Ferro, Diane Kelly, Maarten de Rijke, Leif Azzopardi, Peter Bailey, Hannah Bast, RobCapra, Norbert Fuhr, Yiqun Liu, Martin Potthast, Filip Radlinski, Tetsuya Sakai, Ian Soboroffand Arjen de Vries. The first meeting of the SIGIR Taskforce was held during the same day of
the SIGIR business meeting.

2.4

Policy Against Harassment at ACM Activities

Next, Diane gave an update on policy against harassment at ACM activities. The policy regarding
this is available at the ACM Web site, which can be reached at http://sigir.org/conferences/conference-code-of-conduct/. Diane described what is the expected behavior from the participants of ACM activities and what is considered as unacceptable behavior according to ACM.

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Finally Diane gave information about how to report unacceptable behavior and how to addressgrievances.

2.5Communications

All conference proceedings have now become open access. The possibility of getting rid of theprint version of the SIGIR forum and switching to a completely digital version was supported bymost attendees. One suggestion made by Doug Oard was to possibly use the money saved fromswitching to digital version from a paper version for supporting more students to attend SIGIR,
which also got strong support.

2.6

SIGIR Website and Documentation

The executive committee is planning to fix the web site to make sure everything related to SIGIR
is easily accessible from a single site.
The committee is also taking a new initiative about documentation: We do not have most of
the details about the positions, how the their tasks, etc. properly documented and the as part ofthe initiative for building a new website, detailed documentation will also be created.

2.7

Membership

Next Diane presented some statistics about SIGIR membership. According to the statistics, themedian number of female members of SIGIR across many years is 75, compared to 418 median
total number of members. Diane showed a plot that compares these statistics with other SIGs.
The percentage of ACM SIG female members is 10% across all the SIGs, compared to 13% forSIGIR.
Maristella Agosti raised a concern about the participation of women, which seems to be declining and mentioned that we have to understand why this is happening and to do something
about this. Laura Dietz raised the issue of the few number of students from the IR field in theCRA-W event, as compared to female students from some other communities. Doug mentionedthat SIGIR membership numbers may not fully reflect the demographics of people who actuallyattend the conference and mentioned that it would be better to consider actual conference participation instead. Finally, Vanessa Murdock emphasized that women who do participate at SIGIR
are made visible either as session chairs or in senior positions; which is something we have toappreciate and make sure that this continues.

2.8

New Chapters

This year two new SIGIR Chapters have been introduced: The SIGIR Tokyo Chapter will bechaired by Hideo Joho, with Tetsuya Sakai as the vice-chair and Masaharu Yoshioka as the treasurer. The second new SIGIR chapter, the SIGIR Beijing Chapter will be chaired by Yiqun Liu,and Jiafeng Guo and Zhicheng Dou will be the vice chair and the treasurer, respectively.
Diane then gave information about the procedure for proposing a new chapter for SIGIR, forwhich detailed information can be found at https://www.acm.org/chapters/chapter-in-a-box.

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3Treasurer’s Report

SIGIR treasurer Ben Carterette took over and showed a graph reporting the overall expenses.
Overall finances (the amount of savings) of SIGIR has been going up until 2018, with savings
slowly increasing. During the year of 2018 required expenses have gone up, resulting in a decreasein savings. These were partially caused by the increase in operating expenses for SIGIR and SIGIR
sponsored conferences (SIGIR operating expenses for Tokyo in 2018 was almost three times higher
than that of Pisa in 2017, CIKM operating expenses for Singapore in 2018 was more than twiceas high as that of Indianapolis and WSDM operating expenses for Marine del Rey in 2018 wasalmost ten times as high as Cambridge!). Overall, even though the savings have slightly decreased
in 2018, the finances of the SIG is still quite healthy.
Ben then showed the organizational expenses for SIGIR across many years. The main thingthat seems to be increasing in 2018 compared to previous years seems to be allocations (which areconference expenses), whereas most other expenses seems similar to the previous years.
Next, Ben talked about the expenses made for the special programs in 2018. US$42,000 has
been spent on the Friends of SIGIR program, which includes sponsorships for workshops, events,
summer schools, meetings as well as the CRA-W Grad Cohort Workshop sponsorship at the Silverlevel. SIGIR also sponsored the Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion Event and the Student Lunchand Party at SIGIR 2018 Conference. As part of the SIGIR Student Travel Grant Program,
US$218,000 was spent for awards across six conferences for FY 2017 and the projection for 2018
was US$270,000.
Ben also showed a plot describing the conference income for SIGIR and SIGIR sponsoredconferences for the past 10 years. Conference income has been increasing for almost all SIGIRand SIGIR sponsored conferences and conferences seem to be profitable for almost all the years.
When all income sources are considered, conference income seem to be particularly high in thelast years and the income from the Digital Library also seems to be increasing. Income frommemberships seem to be mostly stable during the last few years.
Finally, Ben talked about SIGIR joining with SIGKDD to organize an African Summer Schoolon Machine Learning for Data Mining and Search. The idea for organizing such a workshop wasraised by Doug Oard to during the SIGIR 2017 Diversity and Inclusion Lunch and the executive
committee took the initiative to organize such an event in order to reach more students/researchers
from Africa. The first one will take place in Cape town in January. See http://www.sigir.org/
afirm2019 for more information.

4Conferences

Diane continued with discussions on SIGIR sponsored and co-sponsored conferences.

4.1

SIGIR Co-Sponsored Conferences

The SIGIR co-sponsored conferences include Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) and Web Search and Data Mining(WSDM).

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JCDL 2019 will take place in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. The CIKM
2018 Conference will be held Turin, Italy and WSDM 2019 will take place in Melbourne, Australia.

4.2

SIGIR Sponsored Conferences

Conferences that are fully sponsored by SIGIR include ICTIR and CHIIR.
ICTIR 2018 will take place Tianjin, China and ICTIR 2019 will be held in Santa Clara, USA.
CHIIR 2019 and 2020 will be held in Glasgow, Scotland and Vancouver, Canada, respectively.

4.3

Recent and Upcoming SIGIR Conferences

The discussion continued with a summary of the finances for the recent SIGIR Conferences, aswell as a discussion on the future SIGIR Conferences.
First, Noriko Kando, who chaired the SIGIR 2017 Conference together with Tetsuya Sakai
and Hideo Joho took over to give a report of SIGIR 2017. SIGIR 2016 had 911 registrants, arecord number compared to previous years. Noriko also gave a summary of registrants, feedback
from participants and finances. Total revenue of the conference was US$957,419.15. When theexpenses of US$754,312.22 were excluded together with the ACM quota (allocation for ACM) ofUS$120,689.96, the conference was left with a surplus of US$82,416.97.
Next, Kevyn Collins-Thompson (co-chair of SIGIR 2018 together with Qiaozhu Mei) took overto give an overview of SIGIR 2018, which was held at the University of Michigan. Most of thenumbers for SIGIR 2018 had not been finalized during the time of the business meeting. Theconference is estimated to have 750 registrants (for which the actual number could be in the rangeof 720-740 after processing cancellations due to visa issues). This is the second largest number ofregistrations across all SIGIR conferences in Americas region. Estimated revenue (income) of theSIGIR 2018 Conference is US$82,929 during the time of the meeting.
An overview of SIGIR 2019 was presented by Benjamin Piwowarski, who will be co-chairing
the conference together with Max Chevalier and Eric Gaussier. The conference will be held at Cit
des Sciences in Paris, at a venue that is very close to the University Pierre and Marie Curie.
The business meeting continued with a presentation by Yi Chang, who will be chairing SIGIR
2020 together with Jimmy Huang and Xueqi Cheng in Xi’an, China.
Diane took the stage and officially announced the location of SIGIR 2021, which will be chaired
by Fernando Diaz, Chirag Shah and Torsten Suel. While SIGIR 2021 was originally planned tobe in New York, there was a proposal to change the conference to Montreal, Canada. People’sopinions about the two possible locations were asked and most people seem to prefer Montreal
over New York 1 .
Diane continued with the announcement that the SIGIR is asking for bids for SIGIR 2022 tobe held in Europe. She asked for formal bids to be submitted on September 15, as stipulated on
http://sigir.org/bid.html.
1The conference location was finally changed to Montreal after consideration by the Executive Committee

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5Conclusions

As sessions were about to start again, and Diane Kelly concluded the business meeting with thanks
to all attendees.

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