Submitted by: Ephraim P. Glinert, SIGCAPH Chair
The past year was a relatively quiet one for our SIG. Our membership figures appear to have remained relatively stable. Our newsletter, under the expert and energetic stewardship of Art Karshmer, appears on a regular basis (three times a year). Art tells me that he now has a backlog of material awaiting publication and he expects this situation to continue unless we can find a way to increase our page-count allotment; this is an action item for the coming year.
After ASSETS'96, the 2nd International ACM/SIGCAPH Conference on Assistive Technologies which was held April 11-12, 1996 at the Waterfront Centre Hotel in Vancouver, BC, we had tentatively planned to hold ASSETS'97 this fall in order to maintain the 18-month interval previously established between each pair of conferences in this series. However, we were advised to reconsider by several former attendees, who cited an unexpectedly large number of competing events in the field this year. So the 3rd conference in the series has been postponed to the spring of 1998 immediately preceding CHI'98 in Los Angeles. The General Chair of ASSETS'98 will be our own Art Karshmer, and the Program Chair will be Meera Blattner of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and the University of California at Davis. Meera is no stranger to conference organization, having served for example as General Co-Chair of ACM MULTIMEDIA'93 in San Francisco. Art and Meera have been looking into suitable hotels in the LA area; the "short form" should be submitted soon and the CFP issued.
A very positive development for our SIG is that Bowden Wise, a graduate student in Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has agreed to serve as our webmaster. Bowden had previously established and maintained at RPI the web site for the ASSETS conferences (this material has now been moved to the ACM server, where it more properly belongs). I am confident that he will be able to provide our SIG with an outstanding presence on the World Wide Web.
Finally, I are pleased to report the results of the SIG elections held this past spring for two-year terms beginning July 1. The candidates for the various offices and the number of votes received by each were as follows:
Accordingly, the new officers for the 1997-99 term are: