Sigaccess fy’18 Annual Report

SIGCOMM FY’18 Annual Report
July 2017 ― June 2018
Submitted by: Roch Guerin, SIGCOMM Chair

SIGCOMM is ACM's professional forum for the discussion of topics in the field of communications and computer networks, including technical design and engineering, regulation and operations, and the social implications of computer networking. SIG members are particularly interested in the systems engineering and architectural questions of communications.

SIGCOMM continues to be a vibrant organization serving a broad community of researchers from both academia and industry interested in all aspects of computer networking. We sponsor several successful, single-track, high-impact conferences, several of them in cooperation with other SIGs. There are a number of highlights to report from the past year.

Conferences

The SIG sponsors an eponymous flagship conference and is the sole sponsor of the following conferences: CoNEXT, eEnergy, Information-Centric Networking (ICN), and the HotNets Workshop. The eEnergy conference will, however, migrate to the recently formed Energy EIG in 2019. The SIG also jointly sponsors the following conferences: Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), SenSys, ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems (ANCS), Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR), and ANRW, the joint ACM, ISOC, IRTF Applied Networking Research Workshop.

Our flagship conference, continuing our policy of rotation among regions on a 3-year cycle, was held in Los Angeles, CA, in August 2017. The conference had an attendance of 785, which, after the lower attendance of 2016 held in Brazil where the Zika scare had affected attendance, was back in keeping with participation levels of previous years. This fact, together with strong support from industry sponsors produced a healthy surplus for the conference while allowing us to at the same time award over $60k in travel grants to attend the conference.
This relatively large surplus together with more modest surpluses from other conferences we sponsor meant that even if the SIG continues to seek to down-spend its large financial reserve, it continues to remain financially extremely strong. This strength will allow the SIG considerable freedom in continuing to expand its support for the community.
In particular, one of the SIG’s main focus area is on outreach and diversity, with a new Director of Diversity and Outreach, Marinho Barcellos, having been added to the EC. In addition to Marinho’s responsibilities on exploring new initiatives to foster greater diversity in the SIG and its conferences, the SIG has also been expanding its support of several activities aimed at increasing diversity. They are further detailed in the section titled “Support for the community and new projects” below. The 2017 SIGCOMM conference also provided the opportunity to recognize a long-time SIG volunteer who recently passed away, Chris Edmondson-Yurkanan. A travel grant named in Chris’ honor was introduced and will be awarded each year to a young woman, preferably but not necessarily a student, who has demonstrated the kind of enthusiasm and eagerness to become involved in the SIG and its activities that was Chris' trademark. The travel grant will be awarded by the SIG’s liaisons to the N2Women organization.
As in previous years, the SIG continued to financially support several regional conferences in computer networking. The current set of regional conferences we support financially includes COMSNETS, a major networking conference in India, and the Asian Internet Engineering Conference (AINTEC). COMSNETS has been quite successful and become a strong regional event in its own right, while AINTEC has remained somewhat confined in realizing its original goals of broadening participation in the Asia-Pacific region. This may have been in part because the conference has remained anchored at the same location. As part of the feedback given to the organizers, the SIG recommended exploring alternative locations in the future. Subsequent support from the SIG may, therefore, hinge on whether or not this advice is followed. The SIG had previously been supporting the Latin American Networking Conference (LANC), but decided to withhold its support this year, as feedback from our community indicated that the conference had drifted away from its original goals and was not viewed as particularly relevant anymore. We are in the process of exploring starting an new event in Latin America that will better fulfill our goal of better serving and growing our community in that region.
We also continued to support a new conference focussed in Asia-Pacific, APNET, whose first edition was held in Fall 2017. We continue to foster the success of these conferences by means such as invited speaker travel funds and student travel grants. In addition to supporting regional conferences, the SIG provides generous general student travel support to all of its sponsored conferences.
We are in-cooperation with a number of events, including the International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM), the International Teletraffic Congress (ITC), Multimedia Systems (MMSys), the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), the Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames), the International conference on Networked Systems (NetSys) besides the aforementioned COMSNETS, AINTEC, and APNET.
The SIG also supports a handful of summer schools with grants of up to $25k, including the PhD School on Traffic Monitoring and Analysis (TMA) that was held in Vienna in June 2018, and the ...MeetGreen has continued to provide administrative support to our volunteers, but we are exploring possible alternatives that may allow us to offer additional services to our volunteers, including a menu of options that conference organizers could chose from.
SIGCOMM Survey and Its Summary

Towards better understanding a number of questions that had been raised regarding exploring possible changes to the SIGCOMM conference process, we conducted a survey shortly after the 2017 edition of the conference.

Specifically, the submission deadline for SIGCOMM papers is currently near the end of January. Reviewing starts soon after, and takes place in multiple rounds. Papers that have positive reviews at the end of the first round are promoted to round 2; others are rejected. Papers in round 2 get additional reviews. There may optionally be a third round. Finally, papers with sufficient support at the end of the final round are discussed in a 1.5-day long in-person PC meeting, where the final program is determined. Notifications of acceptance are sent around the end of April. The program typically has roughly 40 papers presented in a single track fashion. The conference takes place in August. The survey focused in part on understanding better what aspects of this process work for both authors and reviewers, and what aspects, if any, don't. The broad goal was to continue to improve the conference and the review process.

The survey was released in October 2017, and stayed open for two weeks. Roughly 170 responses were received. To put this in context, this is about 10% of the overall SIG membership.

The results from the survey are publicly available at http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~akella/sigcommsurvey/, and have been shared broadly both within the SIGCOMM and elsewhere (e.g., the NSDI community). The SIGCOMM Technical Steering Committee and 2018 PC chairs were also provided access to the survey results.

Key conclusions from the survey are:

• 
  60% of the respondents were supportive of SIGCOMM adopting a revision process.
  
• 
  64% of the respondents were supportive of SIGCOMM employing multiple rolling deadlines as opposed to a single annual one.
  
• 
  54% of the respondents were supportive of SIGCOMM adopting a journal model similar to PACM.
  

We also received several detailed comments from respondents about what aspects of the current process they like or dislike the most. Many respondents like the fact that SIGCOMM reviews are detailed, and that SIGCOMM program committee meetings provide a high-bandwidth avenue to ironing out major differences of opinion among reviewers. On the flip side, the fact that rejection means waiting a whole year before resubmission was brought up as a major source of concern with the current process, especially for young/untenured researchers in the community.

Newsletter

The SIG’s newsletter, Computer Communications Review (CCR), continues to publish four issues per year. Since 2016, CCR is published entirely on both the ACM Digital Library and at https://ccronline.sigcomm.org. We publish two types of articles: technical papers and editorial contributions. The editorial contributions range from meeting reports to reflections on the evolution of the field. Technical papers are peer-reviewed by members of the editorial board and external reviews. In order to encourage the authors to release their artifacts (software, datasets, measurements, ...) the papers that release their artifacts can be longer than the regular six-pages limit for technical papers. We observe that a growing fraction of the accepted technical papers provide artifacts that enable readers to extend and reproduce the results describe in the paper. Every year, the CCR editorial board selects the two best papers for oral presentation during the SIGCOMM conference. This year, the two best papers have released their artifacts.

A recent survey conducted among the authors of the accepted papers at SIGCOMM’17, CoNext’17, IMC’17, and ICN’17 revealed that one third of the accepted papers contained artifacts. Despite ACM's reproducibility initiate, these artifacts have not been reviewed. SIGCOMM has launched an artifact evaluation committee that will evaluate artifacts of accepted papers and assign the ACM reproducibility badges. A first evaluation of SIGCOMM paper artifacts will be organised this fall.

Awards

SIGCOMM Lifetime Achievement Award:
This year, SIGCOMM recognized Prof. Jennifer Rexford from Princeton University with the SIGCOMM Award for Lifetime Achievement; She will receive the award and present a keynote talk at the annual SIGCOMM conference in August 2018 in Budapest, Hungary. She was recognized "For her fundamental and practical contributions to making the Internet more reliable and predictable, and for her outstanding mentoring and community service.”
The award committee consisted of Bruce Davie (VMware), Albert Greenberg (Microsoft), Nick McKeown (Stanford University, chair), Nina Taft (Google), Don Towsley (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis in Computer Networking and Data Communication:

The award for the best doctoral dissertation submitted in 2017 went to Anirudh Sivaraman Kaushalram for his thesis titled “Designing Fast and Programmable Routers.” His thesis was cited as follows: “Sivaraman's dissertation makes pioneering and impactful contributions to the design and implementation of programmable routers that run at hardware line rates.”

The committee consisted of Marco Mellia, T.S. Eugene Ng (chair), Xiaowei Yang, and Haifeng Yu