SIGSOFT has had another strong year, and we are well-positioned to hand off the leadership to our newly elected slate of officers.
On the awards front, we continued to make our annual service and research awards. This year's ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award was presented to Kouichi Kishida, who has served the software engineering community in many ways (including opening up many of the relationships between Japan and the remainder of the software engineering community). This year we awarded the Outstanding Research Awards to Michael Jackson. The awards were announced at ICSE 2001 in Toronto, with the presentation to Mr. Kishida taking place; Mr. Jackson will receive his award at ESEC/FSE in September 2001 as part of his keynote address. We also continued to award the Most Influential Paper from ICSE N-10, which this year went to the ICSE-11 paper "Tolerating Inconsistency", authored by Bob Balzer. We made a number of awards to students for travel support to SIGSOFT-sponsored conferences, under our CAPS program; indeed, for ICSE 2001 in Toronto we increased our awards to handle much more of the demand. As is common, several of the new ACM Fellows are members of SIGSOFT.
We have one specific issue with respect to awards that needs to be handled. Several years ago the SIGSOFT Executive Committee agreed to have Program Committees name up to 10% of the papers from conferences as Distinguished Papers; we have, however, never put this decision into action. We plan to do so this year, also understanding that we need to clear this through the ACM awards committee. We have made significant progress on making the award nomination process more visible and active: indeed, the research award was awarded in part due to a well-prepared and effective nomination that was received.
We have been involved this year in a number of significant and innovative programs.
One major goal in the next year is to simultaneously increase interactions with other SIGs while also trying to regularize our conferences and conference schedule. Another major goal, which we share with other SIGs and the ACM overall, is to continue to try to understand what value we should provide to our members to ensure that SIGSOFT is an organization that people want to be members of.