SIGCAPH Annual Report
August 1994
Submitted by: Ephraim P. Glinert
I am pleased to report, for the third year running, that SIGCAPH continues to make progress on the road to viability. Our Newsletter has again appeared more or less on schedule as a quarterly publication, although I will admit that on occasion it has been thinner than I would like. We've also agreed to be "in cooperation" with a couple of international conferences. But by far the major event for SIGCAPH during the past year has been, that the plans we began to make two years ago to hold an annual series of conferences relating to computer-based assistive technology are finally bearing fruit! ASSETS '94, the First Annual ACM/SIGCAPH Conference on Assistive Technologies, will take place October 31-November 1 at the Doubletree Hotel in Marina del Rey (Los Angeles), California. We have an approved TMRF, a signed contract with the hotel, and reduced-airfare agreements with several major airlines. SIGGRAPH has agreed to be "in cooperation" with ASSETS '94, and SIGBIO and SIGLINK have both recently expressed interest in a similar arrangement. Our Program Committee of close to two dozen volunteers rigorously reviewed all of the papers that were submitted, and 22 of them were accepted for presentation. There will also be keynote speakers and a panel. We aren't rich enough to do lots of mailings for the conference, but we are aggressively advertising its existence via e-mail and the internet, as well as in CACM and IEEE Computer. We have generated a great deal of interest, and I am confident that we will attract a sufficiently large number of attendees to break even or return a profit to SIGCAPH after all expenses are paid. We expect many new members to join our SIG (and ACM) during the conference, which should help us immensely in the future. We will also take advantage of ASSETS '94 to get organized for ASSETS '95, and to put together SIGCAPH's slate of candidates for the elections that are scheduled for Spring of 1995.
