SIAG/CSE Business Meeting, March 5, 2009

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[edit] Meeting

CSE SIAG Business Meeting 2009

Meeting called to order 6:48pm, 3/5/09 by Tammy Kolda

Thank you's went out to the outgoing officer, John Bell. Welcome was given to new officer, Uli Rude. Current officers are:

• Chair: Tammy Kolda
• Vice Chair: Kirk Jordan
• Program Chair: Uli Rude
• Secretary: Carol Woodward

[edit] Announcements

There are over 750 attendees at this meeting, making it the largest SIAM CSE meeting yet. This is the largest SIAM SIAG with over 1700 members.

We are the only one with a majority of members as students (53%) indicating a young and growing field.

We will have officer elections in a year, so please send in your nominations (self included).

We will have a track of mini-symposia at ICIAM 2011 (Vancouver, Canada) and SIAM Annual 2010. Please send any suggestions for topics or organizers.

The email list will be more moderated than in the past.

We have a new Wiki for the SIAG. Check it out at: http://wiki.siam.org/siag-cse/ We are looking for volunteers to help with the wiki, so please consider helping out with this.

Carol Woodward will ask invited speakers to provide the slides of their plenary talks for posting on the new SIAG/CSE wiki.

SIAM News will be doing an issue on CSE and is looking for story ideas. If you have one, please contact Gail Corbett (corbett@siam.org).

Kolda said that since the CSE conference is growing larger, SIAM will be planning the location of conferences farther in advance. We are looking for suggestions for the next CSE meeting locations. Ideas discussed include: Phoenix, Austin, San Francisco, Miami, Monterrey, and Germany. For CSE13, Europe was suggested as were Albuquerque and New Orleans. Ruede asked for people to send other suggestions to him.

For the next CSE meeting location: a suggestion from the audience is that the conference hotel be accessible to local attractions and restaurants.

We are also looking for suggestions for themes for the CSE11 meeting. Please send ideas to Uli Rude or Padma Raghaven, our meeting co-chairs.

[edit] Discussion Items

1. Are publication needs of the CSE community being served by SIAM? Uli Rude discussed that SISC will have a special issue on CS&E. It will be published in November and will have 26 articles from 90 submissions. This special edition was an experiment to see what could be done for the CS&E community in SISC. The project showed both the strengths and the difficulties of the idea. One problem was that half of the papers submitted were turned down because they did not meet SIAM’s definition of CS&E. The focus is on methodologies, not the domain sciences. The editors of SISC will clarify the editorial policy to make this clear. He plans (with approval by SIAM) to continue CSE within SISC through a section of each issue in the future. As a result of the success of this special edition, in the future SISC will have a section on CS&E. Specifically, SISC will have 3 sections in the future, each with its own editor: 1. Algorithms – prototype articles currently appearing in SISC 2. CS&E – applications-oriented 3. HP and software

The education panel mentioned a request for textbooks on CSE with examples and exercises. Lori Diachin mentioned that the CSE book series has some prospects for this. The CS&E editorial board for books is asking members to suggest types of books that the series needs to publish, including ideas for textbooks.

It was stated that it would be good to engage the European community more in CSE conferences. Jim Crowley stated that there are three ways to do this: lend our name to a meeting (the SIAM CSE SIAG helped to sponsor this meeting) without money; become a joint sponsor; or move our meeting out of the US periodically. Attendees were asked to submit the names of any groups in Europe currently sponsoring CS&E conferences.

One suggestion to increase SIAM’s presence in Europe is to hold the SIAM CSE conference on an annual basis, alternating locations between North America and Europe. It was pointed out that this would conflict with the SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing which is currently held alternately with the CS&E conference. Membership Manager Susan Whitehouse was asked to provide figures on the number of SIAG/CSE members in Europe as well as the number of CSE09 attendees from Europe.

The suggestion to have the conference in Germany was discussed. Ulrich Ruede, CSE11 program chair, said that he did not think a conference of the size of CSE09 would be suitable for Europe as a large percentage of the CSE attendees are from government labs and would not be able to attend.

2. What role should the CSE SIAG play in government policy, education, and career guidance? One suggestion was to have a student representative on the board. Juan Mesa, a member of the SIAM policy committee, stated that it would be great to have a set of accomplishments to present in Washington, DC. Pictures would be especially useful. It was suggested that the activity group encourage members to share success stories and get people talking to one another. Success stories could be provided to funding agencies to help them build their cases. It was discussed that a CSE prize for junior faculty would be useful as a way to help promote the field (and tenure of its practitioners).

The SIAM Science Policy Committee meets with congressional staff on the hill. The SIAG could determine what type of information it could provide to the committee to assist them in their efforts on the hill. One suggestion was for the SIAG to put together a set of accomplishments made by the CS&E community. To do this, the SIAG could send an email to SIAG/CSE members or ask authors of the special editor of SISC to put other a one-page description of their accomplishments.

It was also suggested that the SIAG could define the CS&E intellectual philosophy, as well as define what constitutes an education in CS&E.

3. Should we update the “Petzold Report” on CSE? Generally people thought we should update the report. Kirk Jordan volunteered to coordinate the look at this. The purpose of the report is to help define CSE as a discipline and help departments who are interested in setting up a program. Uli Rude stated that we have not defined what an education program in CSE should be. It was suggested that an update of the report focus on education, both graduate and undergraduate.

Scribes: Carol Woodward, Susan Whitehouse