2024Q3 Reports: SIGFSM

Summary

SIGFSM traditionally meets at its main conference FSMNLP, which is held biennally (last in 2019 in Dresden, Germany; next one was scheduled 2021 and 2023 in Stellenbosch, South Africa, but was cancelled both times due to Covid and low participation). Our meetings typically attract 40-50 participants and are organized as satellite workshops of major meetings or stand-alone conferences. The premier conference FSMNLP is usually stand-alone and held at locations where the local research community is involved in developing or using finite-state techniques. Unfortunately, FSMNLP 2021, which was scheduled for late 2021 in Stellenbosch, South Africa under the auspices of Bruce Watson, had to be cancelled due to the uncertainties related to Covid lockdowns. In 2023 another attempt to hold FSMNLP in Stellenbosch co-located with IJCAI was started, but IJCAI moved to Macau on short notice and the response to the nevertheless issued call-for-papers was minimal. In the interest of all parties FSMNLP 2023 was also canceled.

SIGFSM has suffered major setbacks due to Covid and activities have significantly slowed. We intend to improve community activities. All recent event proceedings have been published in the ACL Anthology. We also support the import of older proceedings, but we solely depend on the program committee chairs of those former conferences to supply the required information. We joined efforts with the TAG+ community to collocate our premier meetings and to foster more communication and collaboration between the two communities. Despite the current stand-alone nature of FSMNLP, we might consider running it as an ACL satellite event to make it more visible, to make it widely accessible at a lower cost, and to reduce the overhead work in organization.

Membership

In 2024, the membership count of SIGFSM remains stable at 131. The last recruit drive at FSMNLP 2019 was successful, but we had no events in 2020-2024. We use our meetings to actively recruit new members and hope to attract new members at the next FSMNLP.

Officers

The currently elected officers started their 3-year term on August 1, 2020 and their regular term ended on July 30, 2023. Since no elections took place in 2023, all officers still serve in their respective capacities. It is still planned to discuss the removal of the position of Treasurer at the next FSMNLP in 2025. Electronic elections will be held in 2024 to compensate for the elections that were planned at FSMNLP 2023.

• Andreas Maletti (President)
• Anssi Yli-Jyrä (Treasurer)
• Bruce W. Watson (Secretary)

Other Positions:

• Liaison Representative at ACL 2024: none
• Email List Resource Manager: Anssi Yli-Jyrä
• Web Site Resource Manager: Anssi Yli-Jyrä
• Web Content Resource Manager: Anssi Yli-Jyrä

International Advisory Committee

The members of the International Advisory Committee (IAC) are nominated by the president and they continue to serve in this position until further notice.

• Matthieu Constant (Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, France) — since 2010
• Frank Drewes (Umeå University, Sweden) — since 2017
• Tim Fernando (Computer Science Department, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland) — since 2012
• Colin de la Higuera (Nantes University, France) — since 2010
• Laura Kallmeyer (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany) — since 2015
• Lauri Karttunen (Stanford University, USA) — since 2010
• Kevin Knight (USC/Information Sciences Institute, USA) — since 2010
• András Kornai (Harvard University, USA & Budapest Institute of Technology, Hungary) — since 2010
• Mark-Jan Nederhof (University of St Andrews, UK) — since 2015
• Jakub Piskorski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw) — since 2010
• Laurette Pretorius (University of South Africa, South Africa) — since 2010
• Heiko Vogler (Technische Universität Dresden, Germany) — since 2015
• Bruce W. Watson (University of Pretoria, SA & Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands) — since 2010
• Anssi Yli-Jyrä (University of Helsinki, Finland) — since 2010
• Menno van Zaanen (Tilburg University, The Netherlands) — since 2010
• Lynette van Zijl (Stellenbosch University, SA) — since 2010
• the elected officers

SIGFSM Business Meetings

• The last FSMNLP/SIGFSM business meeting was held on September 24, 2019 at FSMNLP in Dresden, Germany.
• The next business meeting will be held at the next FSMNLP in 2025.

Elections

• The fourth SIGFSM elections were held in 2020 and the next elections will be held electronically in 2024.

Financial Report

SIGFSM has no savings worth mentioning. All meetings are organized with local funds or funds collected during registration. Indeed it is planned to discuss the further need for a SIGFSM treasurer with the membership at the next business meeting.

Previous Reports

[1] 2009 [2] 2010 [3] 2011 [4] 2012 [5] 2013 [6] 2014 [7] 2015 [8] 2016 [9] 2017 [10] 2018 [11] 2019 [12] 2020 [13] 2021 [14] 2022 [15] 2023