2017Q3 Reports: SIGBioMed

Membership is mostly stable at around 103 (changing daily), up from 84 five years ago.

ORGANIZATION

Kevin Cohen and Dina Demner-Fushman were re-elected as chair and secretary in 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 2016 workshop was the eight BioNLP workshop under the auspices of SIGBIOMED and the fifteenth BioNLP workshop held in conjunction with ACL or NAACL. There were about 80 participants.

This year's workshop will be held in conjunction with ACL in Vancouver and will be one day long.

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

The Google group mailing list that was put together last year has been an efficient method for communicate between members. It was used for elections and SIG announcements.