BUSINESS MEETING REPORTACM SIGIR Annual Business Meeting 2019:
Secretary’s Notes
Claudia Hauff
Delft University of Technology
Email: c.hauff@tudelft.nl

1Opening Matters

The 2019 ACM SIGIR Annual Business Meeting took place on July 24, 2019, at the SIGIR ’19
Conference in Paris, France. The meeting was held between 12:50-14:20 and was led by the chairof the SIGIR Executive Committee, Ben Carterette.
The meeting started with an introduction of the new executive committee (whose term runs
from July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2022): Ben Carterette (chair), Tetsuya Sakai (vice-chair), Claudia
Hauff (secretary), Min Zhang (treasurer) and Diane Kelly (past chair). Ben thanked the outgoing
executive committee—Diane Kelly (chair), Jaap Kamps (vice-chair), Emine Yilmaz (secretary),
Ben Carterette (treasurer) and Charles Clarke (past chair)—for their work in the past three years.
SIGIR would not function without volunteers. The volunteers in the past year were Nattiya
Kanhabua & Guido Zuccon (Information Co-Directors), Yubin Kim & Damiano Spina & Jaime
Arguello (Student Travel Awards Chairs), Craig Macdonald & Claudia Hauff (SIGIR Forum Editors), Falk Scholer (Awards Chair—who worked hard to get the SIGIR Best Short Paper Award
recognized as an official ACM award!), Laura Dietz & Jiaxin Mao (Student Affairs Chair), YoelleMaarek (Industry Liaison), Jimmy Lin & Jaap Kamps (CIKM Liaisons), Sue Dumais (WSDMLiaison) and Edie Rasmussen (JCDL Liaison).
A new SIGIR volunteer position has been created too; that of the SIGIR historian, a role thatis filled by Donna Harman. Old SIGIR materials will be scanned and send to ACM to be archived
at the Charles Baggage Institute.

2Official Recognition for SIGIR Members

ACM’s most prestigious member grade (ACM Fellow ) recognizes the top 1% of ACM members fortheir outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding
service to ACM and the larger computing community. In 2018, Ellen Voorhees became an ACMFellow.
In 2018, Tetsuya Sakai and Jaime Teevan became ACM Distinguished Members. This members’
grade recognizes those ACM members with at least 15 years of professional experience and 5 yearsof continuous Professional Membership who have achieved significant accomplishments or havemade a significant impact on the computing field.
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3Initiatives

3.1

Student Affairs

The mission of the SIGIR Student Liaisons is to connect students within the IR community andto bring student events to conferences besides SIGIR.
Over the past year, two new SIGIR Student Liaisons have been recruited: Souvick Ghoshfrom America and Xiaohui Xie from Asia. Student events were organized at CHIIR 2019 (thanksto Johanne Trippas and Leif Azzopardi) and SIGIR 2019 (thanks to Laura Dietz, Benjamin
Piwowarski and Brigitte Grau). A separate SIGIR student liaison budget was set up to support
the student events and provide travel support for the organizers of those events.
With five current student liaisons graduating soon, additional volunteers are needed to fill
the role. One important idea for the near future is the student paper reviewing program: newreviewers need to be mentored and more opportunities for student reviewers need to be created.
A special thanks went to Laura Dietz who started the SIGIR Student Liaison program.

3.2

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiative is being co-chaired by Barbara Poblete, Suzan
Verberne and Hussein Suleman.
A DEI lunch was organized at SIGIR 2019 with a thought-provoking talk by Jennifer Rodeabout how to make conferences accessible.
The Diversity Scholars program (which sponsors people from areas that typically do not attendSIGIR) provided four scholars with the opportunity to attend SIGIR 2019. All four had also
attended AFIRM, the first ACM SIGIR/SIGKDD Africa Summer School on Machine Learning
for Data Mining and Search. AFIRM took place in Cape Town (South Africa) in January 2019.
AFIRM’s five-day program was attended by 35 students from all over Africa.

3.3

ACM Artifact Badging

At SIGIR 2018, the SIGIR artifact badging task force (tasked with the development of review
procedures to assign ACM badges) met for the first time. The badge system was introduced by
ACM to recognize efforts of reproducibility in research publications. Every SIG was asked todevelop their own badging procedures. The SIGIR artifact badging task force has the following
members: Nicola Ferro (chair), Diane Kelly, Maarten de Rijke, Leif Azzopardi, Peter Bailey,Hannah Bast, Rob Capra, Norbert Fuhr, Yiqun Liu, Martin Potthast, Filip Radlinski, Tetsuya
Sakai, Ian Soboroff, and Arjen de Vries.
Research publication authors may ask for a badge upon acceptance of their paper. Simple
badges (e.g., Artifact available) will be processed by a standing committee. Demanding badges(e.g., Results reproduced ) will be queued in a requests queue and reviewed by volunteers. In orderto encourage reviewers to participate in this time-consuming process a number of reviewer rewards
are envisioned:• The artifact stamp in the ACM Digital Library will link to OpenReview for artifacts.
• For simple badges, once per year a SIGIR Forum report will list all badge reviewers.
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Vol. 53 No. 2 December 2019• For replicability badges, an overview paper will be co-authored by all reviewers consisting oftext from OpenReview. An alternative option is a dedicated SIGIR Forum report to which
each reviewer contributes a short abstract.
• For reproducibility badges, a TOIS Resources and Reproducibility paper will be co-authoredby all reviewers.

3.4

Local ChaptersThe SIGIR Tokyo and the SIGIR Beijing Chapters have been established.
The SIGIR Tokyo Chapter is chaired by Hideo Joho; Tetsuya Sakai acts as vice-chair andMasaharu Yoshioka as treasurer.
The SIGIR Beijing Chapter is chaired by Yiqun Liu; Jiafeng Guo is vice-chair and Zhicheng
Dou is treasurer.
Information on how to organize and maintain an ACM chapter can be found at https://www.
acm.org/chapters/chapter-in-a-box.

4

Treasurer’s report

SIGIR treasurer Min Zhang presented SIGIR’s finances. A large part of the expenses are accounted
for by student travel grants: $230K were awarded across six conferences in FY2018, a similar
amount is expected to be spend in 2019. Other expenses are higher than usual due to the alreadymentioned AFIRM and DEI commitments. Overall, $32.5K were spent on the Friends of SIGIR
program. In terms of conference incomes, SIGIR has by far the largest surplus of all (co-)sponsoredconferences; the biggest income for SIGIR comes from the digital library. Overall, Min concluded
that we are in a healthy state and can provide generous financial support to special events andour students.

5Conferences

Ben continued with the discussion of SIGIR (co-)sponsored conferences, in particular CIKM andICTIR. CIKM 2019 had a record 1,031 paper submissions. The discussion of what ICTIR is about(currently: generalizable insights, theory does not just mean math) may be resolved through acommunity survey.

6BrandingIn April 2019 a workshop took place in Cologne to discuss the SIGIR brand—its vision & mission
as well as its visual identity. The result of this workshop and the subsequent work that took place
was presented by Ben in a short branding presentation.
The goal of the branding is to refresh the look and feel of the SIGIR brand; to create a bigger
differentiation between SIG and IR; to improve the “stickiness” and engagement of the brand;
and to be more inclusive and attract a more diverse group of people to SIGIR events.

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Ben walked the audience through the design decisions (made with longevity and people insteadof technology in mind). Esther Smith is leading the branding and is creating not just the designfor the SIGIR website but also templates and assets for conference organisers, both online andoffline.
In the best case, the completion of the brand identity, website and conference assets will takeanother six months.

7Audience Comments and Questions

During the last part of the business meeting the floor was opened to the audience. Among
those attendees that spoke up, the organization of the SIGIR conference led to most comments/suggestions:• The current presentation format at SIGIR (long talks) does not leave a lot of time forengaging in a Q&A. We should either shorten the talks or take inspiration from machinelearning conferences that have few oral presentations and many poster sessions.
• We should move to a format of unlimited number of references (similar to ACL).
• The current 10-page page limit encourages poor reviewing quality. Ben Carterette takes
an informal poll: most of the audience prefers 8-pages over 10-pages.
• Due to the conference surplus we can give one author of each paper a free conference
registration. The conference surplus of SIGIR should be the starting budget of next year’sSIGIR.
• Short papers are reviewed as critically as long papers. Reviewers generally want to findfaults in papers instead of starting out positively. Senior reviewers appear to not always
read their assigned papers. Senior reviewers struggle with non-responsive reviewers during
the discussion phase. We should keep track of well/poorly performing reviewers acrossconferences and years. We need additional incentives for reviewers to review well.
• We should increase acceptance rates for SIGIR to increase inclusivity.
The following questions were raised:• Can we reduce the registration fee for SIGIR? Why are participants not given refunds
when the surplus becomes known?
• What is stopping people from attending SIGIR?
• Should we try the OpenReview model?

8Conclusions

As sessions were about to start again, Ben Carterette concluded the business meeting with a thankyou to all attendees.
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