Report of the SIGMAN Meeting held at IJCAI in Montreal - 1995

• WWW site - Maria has created a sigman web page - it is accessible from aaai's home page: http//www.aaai.org/ . Maria is also making the newsletter accessible through this web site, which should cut down on the production lead time that aaai always requires.
• Lack of Elections this year - It was decided that we could still hold 1995 elections by the end of the year, and that it would be a good idea to do so. This means that we need to identify candidates quickly, so that elections can be advertised in the upcoming (Sept newsletter). The following positions are slated to be up for re-election this year:
  • Industrial Co-Chair: Mark Boddy has indicated that he is interested in running again. We need one other candidate.
  • Distribution & Field Service: Anil Rewari has stepped down; position currently vacant. We need two candidates here.
  • Organization & Management: Currently held by David Goldstein. David is interested in running again. We need one other candidate.
  Again, we need recommendations very soon so that we can decide on a slate. I propose that recommendations be sent to Maria.
• Workshop - time was spent discussing the possibility of holding a workshop apart from AAAI/IJCAI - an idea that has been kicked around several times in the past but has never happened. One proposal was to co-locate with this coming year's NSF DDM Conference to be held at Sandia (a gathering of NSF sponsored manufacturing related research). The nice aspect of doing this would be cross-fertilization with this crowd. The potential downside is that it will happen early in January, which gives very little lead time. Leslie Interrante agreed to explore this possibility (and the possibility of NSF support). Bill Regli offered to explore possible interest by NIST in supporting a Sigman workshop. Decisions on this will be made as soon as possible.