Proceedings of the 2002 ACM symposium on Applied computing
Venue: Symposium on Applied Computing (2002)

Welcome to the 17th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC'2002) as hosted by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in Leganes, Spain, which is strategically located South of Madrid! Thanks for attending this international forum for computer scientists, engineers and practitioners that includes many innovative computational ideas and a wide spectrum of applications.SAC is a conference devoted to the study of real-world problem applications using many varieties of computation algorithms. As such, it provides an avenue for discussion and exchange of new ideas, associated computation algorithms, and interesting complex applications. The Symposium is rightly sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Applications (SIGAPP) whose mission is to further the interests of the computing professional engaged in the development of new computing applications, interdisciplinary applications areas, and applied research. Thus, the spectrum of applications and tutorials covers databases and computational finance to evolutionary algorithms, software engineering, and parallel and distributed computing plus others designed to provide a wide range of topics as reflected in the SAC'2002 program. Note that Biomedical Computing is also a special element of the Symposium with an innovative bioinformatics track and associated tutorial and plenary session as directed by Warren Jones.Welcome to the 17th Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2002). During the past 16 years, the Symposium provided an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to present their findings and research results in the areas of computer applications and technology. This year, the 3-day technical program offers a wide range of tracks covering major areas of computer applications. Highly qualified referees with strong expertise and special interest in their respective research areas carefully reviewed submitted papers. In addition, the technical program includes a tutorial program offering 3 full-day and 4 half-day and tutorials. The tutorials are described later in this program and are posted on SAC 2002 Website (http ://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2002/TutorialCall.htm).This year, SAC embarked on a radical modification of its established procedure for compiling the list of tracks to which authors would subsequently submit their papers. More to the point, an open call for track proposals was introduced, inviting all parties interested in holding a track to respond to this call by submitting to the Program Chairs a short description of the proposed track, along with a preliminary dissemination plan of the proposed track's call for papers and a short CV of the potential track chairs. In response to this call, 34 track proposals were submitted which were evaluated thoroughly by SAC 2002's Organizing Committee. Some proposals were rejected on thegrounds of either not being appropriate for the areas that SAC covers traditionally or being of rather narrow and specialized nature. Some others were merged to form a single track, on the grounds of having substantial overlap with each other. Eventually, 21 tracks were established, which then went on to produce their own call for papers. In response to these calls, 457 papers were submitted, from which 194 papers were strongly recommended by the referrers for acceptance and inclusion in the Conference Proceedings. This gives SAC 2002 an acceptance rate of 42% across all submissions and an average acceptance rate of 40% over all tracks. It also makes SAC 2002 the most successful conference in the history of SAC so far, but also one of the most popular and competitive conferences in the international field of applied computing.