2012Q1 Reports: Office - Priscilla Rasmussen
Priscilla Rasmussen, 16 January 2012
ACL Business Office Report
First, many thanks to all of you for my 3-year contract renewal and raise! It is such a pleasure to work with people who are so dedicated to the health and well-being of ACL. I learn and grow by working with each of you.
I have hired Pat Kirby, on a project-by-project basis, for now. She has been helping me on election issues related to membership status and updating records, cleaning up and updating membership records as the election postcards were returned as undeliverable, readying the office for the new year, and so on. My plan, unless/until she might find more permanent work, is to call her in on an as-needed basis throughout the year and to have her work primarily at conference times almost full-time when she would be needed most. When (or if) our current arrangement is no longer working, I will search for a more permanent arrangement with someone else but, with the ebb and flow of office work requiring more than one person, finding someone who is flexible is difficult.
Publications and Royalties: With our ongoing arrangement of Curran Associates now handling print-on-demand of our publications, I receive few requests for publications in the office. In all of 2011, there were only 10 orders that I filled (two from our membership and eight from outside vendors).
We have received royalties from Curran Associates this year in the amount of $1,311.00. Copyright Clearance Center also sent a check for $1,122.24 for the period ending December 31, 2011. And, MIT Press Journals’ royalty year ends March 31, 2012 so we have not received a statement from them. However, if we earn less than $50, this smaller amount will be credited to our account for next year.
Membership: Having surpassed 2100 members each of the past few years and ending 2011 with 2028 total members, we seem to be staying on course with something over 2000 members each year. Of course, with 2012 having conferences in all three of our world regions, I expect our membership may well surpass the 2200 mark. And, the Chinese students seem to be renewing in small spurts of individual renewals but, again, certain professors or researchers are contacting me with “bulk membership renewals” of their students and these renewals, in particular, come very late in the calendar year. Please see Membership spreadsheets for final 2011 details on countries represented and statistics.
As of today, the total membership for 2012 from online Portal renewals and multi-year members is 432. I expect most 2012 memberships will come with conference registrations.
The new Membership Portal is now working well. In gathering statistics for this report and other reports requested by various Boards’ members, I have found some difficulties in pulling out necessary information without having to go through my own multi-step piecing together of bits of information from differing locations. Also, the searching mechanism is less than ideal. However, Joshua Herring, our new portal webmaster, is doing wonderful things to help fix those issues of concern to me. He is highly responsive and, for just recently stepping into his role, I believe he is quite effective. I need to continue to say that there are quite a lot of conscientious long-term members (and others, I would guess) who are not updating and correcting their information in the Portal. When pulling out statistics for this report, a good number of people seem not to have changed the default of “undergraduate student” to what their actual position is, do not update their physical mailing address (over 200 election postcards were returned, most as undeliverable), and many seem to have never visited their record at all. This leaves me to do my best to determine student versus non-student for reporting, update addresses as best I can (at least the country which is needed for my report), etc.. Each is a small issue but, taken together, leads me to continue to worry that some membership records are not being properly updated by the members as was originally envisioned.
Elections: The elections ran fairly smoothly, I think. When Drago was ready to assign PIN numbers, I was able to download and send to him the up-to-date list of members. He later returned the file with the PINs assigned and I mailed out the postcards to everyone. Simultaneously, he emailed to everyone the same information as on the postcards. We were delayed a little bit so we could include the SIGDAT elections along with the ACL elections but I think it was well worth the extra days waited so we could make the SIGDAT transition as painless as possible for them.
My one recommendation is that we really do need to set a membership cut-off date for those who will be eligible to vote. When we know approximately when the elections will begin (say October 1st), we ought to send emails to recently lapsed members telling them they have until September 30th to renew their membership if they want to participate in the ACL elections. I recommend this because there were well over 100+ membership renewals that arrived after voting had begun and a good many of these were the “bulk membership renewals” of Chinese students.
Conferences: ACL-HLT 2011, in Portland, Oregon was be our largest meeting ever held, with a total of 1101 attendees at part or all of the meeting. Of these, a record-breaking 898 were paying main conference attendees. Another 72 were volunteers, SRW students, sponsors, exhibitors, and guests/organizers. There were also 118 people only attending tutorials or workshops. This does not include the 77 people registered separately for SIGdial. And, with poster session having over 120 posters (including the SRW posters), it was especially challenging to accommodate all session events but it seems everyone enjoyed the conference quite a lot.
The Office provided advice and an advance to the EMNLP 2011 organizers in Edinburgh but otherwise, EMNLP was managed solely within Scotland. From what I understand, EMNLP 2011 was a great success, ending with a surplus of a little more than $14,000.
While EACL 2012 is being managed by those in Europe (as is always the case), I have been working with Walter Daelemans and others, mostly in an advisory capacity. It seems they have things well under control and Avignon should be a wonderful conference.
NAACL HLT 2012 will be held in Montreal, June 3-8, 2012 at the Le Centre Sheraton. Our planning is moving forward nicely and, so far, I see no problems at all. I expect to make a second site visit to Montreal around the end of February to pin down the exact rooms we will need and release the others being held as well as meet with the staff and go over the entire physical layout and other planning. This should be a great conference in a great city!
The planning for ACL 2012, to be held at Jeju, South Korea, July 8-13, 2012 is moving along well and much of our energies are now being devoted to the planning and fine-tuning of our 50th anniversary event. Having made the site visit to Jeju, I can promise a great experience to all attendees.
ACL 2013 will be in Sofia, Bulgaria. The venue is quite large and will comfortably hold all our events. Graeme has signed the contract with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), where our Local Arrangements Chair, Svetla Koeva, was just elected to a 4-year term as Director. BAS will receive advances from ACL and act as our “agent” in Bulgaria to enter into contracts on our behalf (with our prior approval) and make intermediate payments as required. BAS has already signed the contract with the National Palace of Congress (NPC, the conference venue) after Graeme and I made adjustments and approved of it. I plan to work very closely with Svetla and am sure this will be an interesting and exciting conference.
NAACL HLT 2013 was recently decided to be held in Atlanta, GA, at the Westin Peachtree, June 9-14. Having completed the site visit, I can say that, while the Westin is in the downtown commercial area, there are wonderful restaurants and clubs within a few blocks walk and the MARTA line is less than half a block away. Within 2-4 stops on the MARTA, the super upscale restaurants and nightlife of Buckhead is easily reached. Atlanta should be a lovely venue for our meeting. And, the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is definitely going to be in Atlanta in 2013. Their typical conference time is the end of June or early July but I have been talking to them and we agree there could be significant overlap of participants interested in attending both NAACL and ICML. The President of ICML has recommended to their 2013 organizers that they look strongly at the week immediately following NAACL to hold their meeting and I am working with them on making that happen.
Conference Sponsorship: ACL 2012 currently has sponsorships totaling $15,177.41; EACL 2012 currently has sponsorships totaling €2,663.20; and, NAACL 2012 currently has sponsorships totaling $14,733.87. To date, Google has committed to being a Platinum Level sponsor if certain concessions can be worked out; Baidu, IBM and Microsoft are deciding what levels/types of sponsorships they wish to make. These are not included in the totals since details are not finalized yet. The area Sponsorship Chairs are working diligently to help make our conferences successful and it is a pleasure working with them.
The new plan of appointing a Sponsorship Committee with two representatives from each regional world area (Asia, North/South America and Europe/Africa) and having an overall Chair (currently Haifeng Wang) is working very well. While it is usually quite difficult to get sponsorships from world areas not hosting the conference, this year, we seem to be more successful in getting offers of 3-pack sponsorships whereby a company sponsors all three conferences at a somewhat reduced rate than supporting each conference individually.
Many thanks to all sponsors who help to make our conferences and workshops successful!