2016Q3 Reports: SIGBioMed

Membership is mostly stable at around 110 (changing daily), up from 84 four years ago.

ORGANIZATION

Kevin Cohen and Dina Demner-Fushman continued as chair and secretary. We are currently in the process of holding the triennial election of officers that is specified by the SIG constitution.

WORKSHOP

The SIG's major activity has been the organization of the annual workshop. The 2015 workshop was the seventh BioNLP workshop under the auspices of SIGBIOMED and the fourteenth BioNLP workshop held in conjunction with ACL or NAACL. There were about 70 participants.

This year's workshop will be held in conjunction with ACL in Berlin and will be one day long. An additional day focussed on shared tasks will be held at another venue at no cost to ACL, but with the registration fees going to ACL, and the proceedings being published by ACL.

FINANCES

In addition to organizing the workshop, our other main activity has been in fundraising. We haven’t brought in any funds this year (unlike many recent years).

WEBSITE AND MAILING LIST

We have a working website ([1]|here) that lists upcoming events of interest to our members and links to BioNLP proceedings. We use the BioNLP and AMIA nlp-sig mailing lists for announcements and discussions.

ISSUES OF NOTICE

We migrated from our old mailing list to a Google Group. At the time of the migration, we sent out notification emails for anyone new who would like to join the group. We also did this in conjunction with the election.