BUSINESS MEETING REPORTACM SIGIR Annual Business Meeting 2011: Secretary’s Notes
Andrew Trotman
Department of Computer Science
University of Otago
Dunedin, New Zealandandrew@cs.otago.ac.nz

1Opening Matters

The 2011 ACM SIGIR Annual Business Meeting took place on Thursday 27th July 2011, at theSIGIR 2011 conference in Beijing, China. The meeting opened at 12:05pm and was lead by JamesAllan. The meeting started with a tribute to the late Efthi Efthimiadis who passed away on the 7th ofApril 2011. Efthi was a long time contributor to, and well know by, the IR community.
The Executive Committee was introduced as: James Allan (Chair), Ian Ruthven (Vice-Chair),Andrew Trotman (Secretary), Ian Soboroff (Treasurer), Elizabeth Liddy (Past-Chair). Thanks werethen given to the many volunteers including: Djoerd Hiemstra (Information Director), Raman
Chandrasekar & Diane Kelly (SIGIR Forum editors), and Mark Smucker (IRList editor). A call was
made for nominations for the position of Awards Chair.
The role of the Executive Committee was outlined as were the member services including: SIGIR
Forum, reduced conference registration fees for sponsored and in-cooperation conferences, access tothe ACM Digital Library, and the SIGIR-IRList electronic newsletter. Non-members who attend theannual SIGIR conference become members at registration.
Finally special thanks were given to the conference supports including: Microsoft, Baidu, EMC2,Google, SOSO, Yahoo!, eBay, HP Labs, IBM Research, Yandex, Université de Montréal. And
student travel supporters: Google, Donald B. Crouch Grants, HP Labs, ACM-W, and SIGIR.

2Treasurer’s Report

Ian Soboroff began by stating that the SIG is in a very strong financial position. Conferences continueto run at a profit and ACM Digital Library downloads have increased. The largest expense is student
travel grants (in 2011 more than US$115,000). SIG reserves are sufficient by ACM regulations.
Finances were then reviewed starting with a graph showing 1997-2011. The annual net profit hascontinued to rise since 2009 leading to an increasing balance of (about) US$1.2 Million. A graphshowing the breakdown of income and expenditure showed the digital library continuing to be a
substantial portion of the SIG income. In 2011 the conference income is projected to be unusuallylarge.
A graph showing SIGIR membership numbers (2005-2011) showed a general downwards trend in all
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membership types. Although not a financial concern, this is a SIG concern.
SIGIR continues to sponsor several conferences including: SIGIR (100%), CIKM (50%), WSDM(25%), and JCDL (25%). This involves underwriting the event, but also a profit share.

3SIGIR Survey

James Allan presented preliminary results of the SIGIR Survey. The online survey ran from 21st July
2011 to 5th August 2011 and had been running for just 6 of those days (with 218 responses) when thepreliminary results were given. The Secretary only presents imprecise highlights in an effort to avoid
later incorrect reporting on preliminary results.
Participant demographics were shown first, then conference attendance patterns. More respondents
believed that the SIGIR conference was too expensive than those who believed it was good value:
about US$600 ± US$100 was considered appropriate. Opinion was evenly split on the student fee,
US$300 ± US$100 was considered appropriate. With respect to the reducing the SIGIR conference
fee, votes were strong for maintaining coffee breaks and wireless Internet – but not the boxedbusiness meeting lunch. More believed that the banquet should be optional than believed it should beoptional for students. Most believed that the paper proceedings should be dropped. Most voted toincrease the number of SIGIR conference awards. Few opposed regional SIGIR conferences.
Responses to questions on how to spend the SIG surplus suggested travel grants are at about the rightlevels. There was generally little support for new initiatives requiring financial support. With respect
to the ACM Turing celebrations, the majority believed that US$10,000 was appropriate sponsorship.
Although the community was split on how to address the increasing problem of papers reporting nonreproducible results on propriety and non-publically released data sets, there was general support foraddressing the problem with less than a third of respondents believing that nothing should be done.

3.1 Discussion
James Allan chaired a discussion on the survey. In an effort to make this section more readable theSecretary summarizes the comments without attributing them to their original source.
More information was requested on the ACM Turing celebrations. It is a celebration of the 100thbirthday of Alan Turing. It will be held in San Francisco. Previous ACM Turing Award winners will
be invited to give talks. Little more is known.
As a cost saving move the banquet might be replaced by a second poster session. This suggestion wasalso made at the 2010 business meeting. The possibility of a best oral presentation award was raised.
There were several comments on the issue of publicly available test collections. One participant
asked what should be done if no publicly available data were available. Another asked what should
be done if the experimental results are not reproducible on the publicly available test collections. Yetanother pointed out that the survey design might affect the results to this question. James Allan
responded by saying that the survey was measuring community opinion and not proposing a solution
and agreed that the issue appears to warrant careful consideration.

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4Conferences

The meeting continued with presentations on ACM sponsored and in-cooperation events including
SIGIR, CIKM, JCDL, and WSDM.

4.1 SIGIR 2010
James Allan presented the final report for SIGIR 2010 on behalf of Fabio Crestani & Stephane
Marchand-Maillet.
The total number of registrants was 553. 280 participated in the tutorials and 241 in workshops. 35%
were ACM members, 32% were not, 23% were students, 4% were sponsors, 6% were staff andvolunteers. Registrants came from 45 countries, 41% coming from Europe, 31% coming from North
America, 22% from Asia Pacific, 3% from Africa, 2% from the Middle East, and 1% from SouthAmerica. New Zealand was represented, but not well.
The paper acceptance rate was 16.7%, posters was 30.7%, demos was 50%, Tutorials was 52.4% andWorkshops was 50%.
Registration fees did not increase from the 2009 price yet the conference returned an about
US$100,000 profit (c.f. US$23,000 in 2009)

4.2 SIGIR 2011 Preliminary Report
Jian-Yun Nie outlined the logistics of the conference (location, etc.) and thanked Racemind andMicrosoft Research Asia for their help with the conference management.
There were 543 papers submitted of which 108 were accepted (19.9%). 89 of 274 short papers wereaccepted (32.5%). 8 workshops, 15 demonstrations, and 11 tutorials were accepted (but only 8 ran).
There were about 800 participants, of which 52% were from Asia-Australia, 31% from NorthAmerica, 14% from Europe. Attendance from New Zealand appeared to have doubled since 2010!
Tutorials were attended by 236 participants and 200 attended workshops. 358 attended the Microsoft
Research Asia reception and 228 attended the industry tour. The secretary notes that 800 participants
is a substantial increase in attendees from the 553 seen in 2010.
Beijing costs are high, but nonetheless it remained within budget and is expected to will return asmall surplus. Sponsorship was strong due to the efforts of Jimmy Huang who was personallythanked.
The organizing committee was again thanked was were the sponsors: Microsoft, Baidu, EMC2,Google, Soso, Yahoo!, ebay Research Labs, HP Labs, IBM Research, and Yandex, CPIS, Universitéde Montréal. And the exhibitors: Morgan and Claypool Publishers, Springers, and Now.
SIGIR 2011 saw changes to previous conferences. A double meta-reviewer system was introduced as
was the ability for the reviewers to ask questions of the authors. The papers were extended to 10pages because the paper proceedings became optional. Industry visits were introduced. Honorablemention was added to the awards.

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4.3 SIGIR 2012
Bill Hersh outlined the location of the conference, Portland Marriott Downtown Waterfront (Portland,Oregon, USA). Statistics on the climate were given along with suggestions for recreational activities.
The conference will take place 22nd – 26th July 2012. Paper abstracts are due 16th January 2012.
Further dates were presented, they are available on the SIGIR 2012 web site(http://www.sigir.org/sigir2012/).
[Secretary/Editor’s Correction: Following SIGIR 2011, it was determined that the conference dates
would shift based on hotel availability. SIGIR 2012 will take place on 12th-16th August 2012. Thelocation is the same, Portland Marriott Downtown Waterfront (Portland, Oregon, USA). Paper
abstracts are now due 06th February 2012. Full papers are due on 13th February 2012.]
The conference will be chaired by Bill Hersh, the PC chairs will be: Jamie Callan, Yoelle Maarek, &Mark Sanderson. Poster and Demo Chairs will be: Falk Scholer, Mark Smucker, & Andrew Turpin.
The tutorial chair will be Henning Muller. Workshops Chair will be: Eugene Agichtein & Vanessa
Murdock. Other members of the organizing committee include: Udo Kruschwitz & Su-Lin Wu(Industry Track Chairs), Marteen de Rijke & Mounia Lalmas (Doctoral Consortium Chairs). The
Secretary notes that the Doctoral Consortium Chairs are likely to change as it is convention toinclude a graduate of the Doctoral Consortium as a co-chair. Doug Oard (Mentoring Chair),ChengXiang Zhai (Best Papers Chair), Javed Mostafa (Treasurer), Elmer Bernstam (PublicationsChair), Justin Fletcher (Local Arrangements Chair), Jayashree Kalpathy-Cramer (Publicity Chair),Aaron Cohen (Sponsorships Chair), Chris Weldon (Webmaster).

4.4 SIGIR 2013
Páraic Sheridan presented SIGIR 2013 to be held at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland with Plenary
Sessions at The Mansion House, the welcome reception at the Guinness Brewery and the banquet atCroke Park Stadium. Secretaries note: general chairs are: Páraic Sheridan, & Gareth Jones.

4.5 SIGIR 2014

The 37th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference will be held at Australia’s Gold Coast and co-chaired byShlomo Geva & Andrew Trotman. Shlomo Geva presented details on the location including climate,environs, and accommodation. Andrew Trotman presented details on access including flight times
from most of the previous 7 SIGIR conferences. It was noted that Google Maps suggests the travel
time from Amherst (Massachusetts, USA) to Gold Coast (Australia) is 56 days and 5 hours due to arequirement to Kayak across the Pacific – this is likely only to affect Bruce Croft.
Others organizers were presented as: Alistair Moffat (Treasurer), Laurianne Sitbon (LocalArrangements Chair), and Peter Bruza as one of the Program Committee Chairs.

4.6 SIGIR 2015

James Allan called for bids for SIGIR 2015 (to be located in the Americas); formal bids are due 15th
September 2011. Ian Soboroff somewhat humorously suggested Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA.
Ricardo Baeza-Yates asked for a general show of hands for a Chile for which there was a positive
response (the Secretary notes that Chile claims 1,250,000 square kilometers of Antarctica and that
SIGIR has never been run anywhere on that continent (and for him it is close to home)).
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Charlie Clarke presented Vancouver (Canada) which received a positive show of hands. Somewhere“mid-west”, perhaps near Chicago was also suggested by another. During discussion Nick Belkinsuggested that the Executive Committee make the details of bid chairs and bid locations available forexpressions (or votes) by the SIGIR community.

4.7 Sponsored and In-Cooperation Conferences
James Allan presented details on the SIGIR sponsored and in-cooperation conferences
JCDL 2011 was held at the University of Ottawa and chaired by Glen Newton. Attendance was up
from 220 in 2010 to 260 in 2011. A small surplus is anticipated (of which SIGIR will receive 34%).
JCDL 2012 will be held at the George Washington University in Washington DC, with Barrie
Howard & Karim Boughida co-chairing. In 2013 the conference will in Indianapolis.
CIKM 2010 was held at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel, Toronto (Canada) and had about 600
attendees. The acceptance rate for full papers was 13.3% and for short papers it was 17.5%. Finances
are not complete but the conference is expected to return a large surplus. CIKM 2011 will be held in
Glasgow (Scotland) an chaired by Iadh Ounis & Ian Ruthven (who presented the event). CIKM 2012
will be held in Maui (Hawaii, USA) and chaired by Xue-Wen Chen (however the location waspresented by James Allan).
WSDM conferences were presented by Ricardo Baeza-Yates. WSDM 2011 was chaired by Irwing
King, held in Hong Kong, and attended by 238 split 120 academic and 118 industry. A breakdown of
the budget was given: income US$140,000, expenditure: US$130,000, surplus: US$10,000. WSDM
2012 will be held in Seattle (Washington, USA) between the 8th and 12th of February. The generalchairs will be Eytan Adar & Jaime Teevan. WSDM 2013 will be in Rome, Italy.
Recent in-cooperation events included: NLPIR-SS 2011 (Beijing), IRFC 2011 (Vienna, Austria),ECIR 2011 (Dublin, Ireland) and CVIR 2010 (Xi’an, China). Upcoming events include RecSys 2011
(Chicago in October), AIRS 2011 (Dubai, UAE in December), ECIR 2012 (Barcelona, Spain, inApril).
Attention was also drawn to the Australasian Document Computing Symposium (ADCS) which iscurrently working through the in-cooperation process and is likely to be such an even in 2012 when itwill (in all likelihood) be held in Dunedin, New Zealand.

5Broad Issues

James Allan chaired a discussion (from the floor) on broad issues. He started by discussing issues
from the survey including reducing the CIKM conference fee and maintaining the current SIGIRconference fee (perhaps through changes to the banquet). More SIGIR conference awards are likely,
and some funds will be contributed to the ACM Turing Celebration.
Discussion from the floor is summarized below. In an effort to make this section more readable theSecretary summarizes the comments without attributing the comments to their source.

5.1 SIGIR Conference Issues
Questions about the organization of the conference included a suggestion that the talks be recorded
and put online for download. There was criticism that attendees did not know the printed proceedings
was an optional add-on, James Allan responded by noting that it was listed as such on the conference
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registration form. The change from 8 to 10 full conference papers was raised – there is no generalpolicy on this and for 2012 the decision is to be made by the Program Chairs (who are considering
returning to 8 pages). It was suggested that 8 pages plus one for references might be better. A show ofhands suggested that attendees prefer 8 pages. Although full papers as posters was proposed for
SIGIR 2011 it did not happen.
A request was made for more information on parameter settings in conference papers. The asker
pointed out that experiments are not reproducible without this information.

5.2 Other Issues
It was suggested that SIGIR provide seed funding for a data repository (or an algorithm checker) sothat all publicly available data could be found in one place and ongoing.
The status of the SIGIR Literature Repository was questioned – James Allan responded by sayingthat Donna Harman continues to work on the project, has many of the historical document digitized,
and is currently considering what to do about software.
Questions finished with a member of the Executive Committee noting that the only reason ADCS
was not an in-cooperation event in 2011 was that the ACM required the organizers to legally be a notfor-profit organization, ADCS is currently organized by an ad hoc committee with no legal status.
The process of legally becoming a not for profit organization is complex and time consuming. This
complication should be considered by all conferences trying to achieve in-cooperation status.

6Conclusion

James Allan concluded the meeting with thanks at 1:52pm.

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