acm sigcomm

SIGCOMM FY’20 Annual Report July 2019 - June 2020
 
Submitted by: R. Guerin, Chair
 
SIGCOMM is ACM's professional forum for the discussion of topics in the field of communications and computer networks, including technical design and engineering, regulation and operations, and the social implications of computer networking. SIG members are particularly interested in the systems engineering and architectural questions of communications.
 
SIGCOMM continues to be a thriving organization serving a broad community of researchers from both academia and industry interested in all aspects of computer networking. We sponsor several successful, single-track, high-impact conferences, several of them in cooperation with other SIGs. There are a number of highlights to report from the past year.

Education Initiatives
With the COVID-19 pandemic having massive effects on students across the globe, our educational efforts became more important than ever. The SIG launched an aggressive effort to construct online platforms, virtual collaboration engines, and venues to support students and learning activities. In August, the SIG created a new workshop entitled "Teaching and Learning Computer Networking During the Pandemic, and Beyond". The workshop, organized as an interactive discussion, brought together teachers and faculty across the world to discuss experiences, lessons learned, community resources, pedagogy, and other topics with the goal of improving and supporting on-line networking education. The workshop received widespread and diverse participation, bringing together over 200 participants from over 35 countries, across a variety of institutions (R1/R2, teaching universities, etc.) and with instructors who taught a variety of networking topics and classes. The workshop was rated as either "very good" or "good" by every single participant who took the survey at the end of the workshop, with most participants also indicating the event substantially improved their teaching, helped them learn to teach online, and helped them learn about platforms to support their teaching.
 
With students at home and separated physically from their home institutions there is danger of them becoming isolated from both educational and support structures critical to their learning. To address this The SIG has also launched multiple virtual environments to support students during the pandemic. For example, we have launched an ACM SIGCOMM Slack workspace. Slack is a collaborative platform which includes chat functions as well as the ability to share and interact on files and activities. The workspace has been a rousing success, growing to over 1,400 members, and maintaining regular and ongoing discussions on a variety of networking and network-education related topics. The platform also contains a channel run by a licensed social worker from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Counseling Center to provide emotional and wellness support to students during these challenging times. 
 
A third challenge encountered in the era of COVID-19 is supporting virtual conferences. One thing that is becoming clear is students are becoming more isolated at these events. The ability to run into each other in lunch lines, catch the authors after events, the happenstance meetings in hallways, seem like small things but are so crucial to the creation of new ideas and strengthening the social and intellectual bonds that make up our community. Students and new faculty are especially prone to this given the early stage of their careers. To address this, the SIG was heavily involved in supporting interactions at ACM SIGCOMM 2020. The SIGCOMM conference has long held a social event of some sort to encourage meetups, and since doing this in person was not possible, the SIG created a virtual tour of New York City (the former location of the conference before COVID19 hit), where students and faculty can mingle along with a tour guide showing them sights. The SIG also created a Networking Pictionary event where students and professionals draw and try to guess networking words, like "ECN" or "router". The SIG also created a "speed networking" event to pair up students and new faculty with more senior faculty and industry professionals for one-on-one meetings on zoom. The SIG also created "electronic hallways" using the Mozilla Hubs platform, and an “electronic flyer” to advertise students attending the conference. These platforms were well received and led to increased interactions at the conference.
 
In addition to these efforts, the SIG has done a few other things as well. First, the SIG has worked with the ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communications Review (CCR) to create a new track on education. Several education papers have been submitted and accepted for publication. The CCR website which publishes the papers tracks views each paper gets, and we found that the education papers received the highest number of views of all papers in the issue, for every issue since the education track was created (two issues so far). Second, the SIG leveraged community input to develop list of the most important papers in the field of networking, and placed the list for public use on Wikipedia. Third, the SIG has started an interview series with "Great Educators" in the field of networking - one interview has taken place so far, and we expect to conduct interviews at a slow rate over the next year for periodic release in CCR.

Conferences and associated support
The SIG sponsors an eponymous flagship conference and is the sole sponsor of the following conferences: CoNEXT, Information-Centric Networking (ICN), and the HotNets Workshop. The SIG also co-sponsors the following conferences: Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), SenSys, ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems (ANCS), Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR), and ANRW, the joint ACM, ISOC, IRTF Applied Networking Research Workshop.
 
In addition to conferences we sponsor or co-sponsor, we are in-cooperation with a number of events, including the International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM), the International Teletraffic Congress (ITC), the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), the ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), the ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys), the Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis (TMA) conference, the International Conference on Future Internet Technologies (CFI), besides the COMSNETS, AINTEC, and APNET conferences.
 
Continuing our policy of rotation among regions on a 3-year cycle, our flagship conference was held in August in Beijing, China.  Thanks to the population size of China, attendance was one of the highest ever with close to 1200, largely driven by strong local participation. This relative success notwithstanding (increasing involvement from Chinese colleagues was a major motivation behind the selection of Beijing), the organization of the conference has been a constant challenge.  Some of it is attributable to communication difficulties and cultural differences, but there have also been unanticipated problems caused by local rules and regulations and lack of experience in dealing with them, both at the level of the SIG and that of ACM.  Although a number of lessons were learned by going through the process of having SIGCOMM 2019 in Beijing, the experience made us more acutely aware of the many challenges involved in organizing a large conference in China. If we are to hold another of our sponsored conferences in China, it will be important to draw on this experience to try to avoid some of the mistakes made this time around, and make sure that organizers step into it with open eyes.
 
While at the time of this writing, SIGCOMM 2020 has not happened yet, this edition was due to take place in New-York, USA, but will take place virtually instead. Given the limited costs of holding a virtual conference, we do not expect any financial issues. Further, given that the number of accepted papers has increased by about 65% this year, we expect a generous attendance, though unlikely at the level of the 2019 edition, but more in line with previous years. Due to the COVID-19 situation, and issues with the organising committee, the organisation this year was challenging, as it was last year, but for different reasons, mostly related to poor commitment and internal coordination of the organizing committee. We learned some lessons regarding the deadlines that need to be enforced on the organisers to ensure that irrespective of how the conference is taking place (physically or virtually), the paperwork, budget, and contracts are in place early enough. The new conference coordinator has already taken steps to improve this part of the process, and increase the accountability of the conference organisers towards the SIGCOMM executive committee.
 
On the financial front, the 2019 edition of the SIGCOMM closed with a small deficit of ~$17k, which given the conference surge in size and the challenges of a first time organization in China is not unexpected.  This year, most other SIG (co-)sponsored conferences registered surpluses, so that the SIG’s finances continue to be strong.  This has allowed us to continue to offer and even expand a strong travel grant program with a special focus on increasing diversity.  In particular, as discussed in the “Diversity and Outreach” section, the SIG has expanded its support for N2Women and entered in an agreement with them to, in addition to the dinner held each year at the SIGCOMM conference, now also have one N2Women workshop to be held at one of the SIG’s sponsored or co-sponsored conferences.  In addition, after ending our support for the LANC conference, we rebooted our efforts to seek greater participation from South America by launching the LANCOMM student workshop that was held last year with the SBRC conference in Brazil.
 
More generally, we continue to foster the success of our sponsored conferences through generous general student travel support (totaling close to $100k per annum) as well as invited speaker travel funds and special diversity grants to facilitate participation in PC meetings by members from under-represented areas.
 
In addition, the SIG continues to financially support, i.e., through a range of (travel) grants aimed at students and/or junior faculty, several regional conferences in computer networking. The current set of regional conferences we support financially includes COMSNETS, a major networking conference in India, the Asian Internet Engineering Conference (AINTEC), and a new conference focused on the Asia-Pacific region, APNET, whose first edition was held in Fall 2017. COMSNETS has been quite successful and has become a strong regional event in its own right, while AINTEC has not fully realized its original goals of broadening participation in the Asia-Pacific region, in part because the conference has remained anchored at the same location in Thailand.  We had previously given feedback to the organizers recommending that they explore alternative locations, but although they plan to hold next year’s conference outside of Thailand, they were not able to do so this year.  As a result, the SIG shifted its support to that we afford to local conferences and asked that the support be in the form of student travel grants.  Last but not least, the SIG continued its support for the development of a research community in Latin America, through LANCOMM, a student workshop. The SIG would have provided support for both student travel grants as well as invited keynote speakers for LANCOMM'20, but unfortunately the workshop could not be held due to the COVID-19 situation in Brazil.
 
The SIG also supports a handful of summer schools with grants. This year, we provided grad cohorts 18K, the APnet conference with 10K, and the ANWR’20 workshop co-located with RIPE with 3K. 
 
In addition, the SIG offers support for special initiatives upon request.  One such example is travel grants in support of a “Shadow PC” for the 2019 IMC conference.
 
Miscellaneous.  We are continuing the practice of waiving the SIGCOMM contingency share for our fully sponsored conferences to give the organizers more flexibility and allow them to keep registration fees as low as possible.   This may, however, change in 2020-2021 for conferences that will target an in-person component because of the greater uncertainty caused by COVID-19.
 
On the logistics front, the SIG switched from using MeetGreen to AMS to provide administrative support to our volunteers, and we are currently reviewing the range of services we offer to our volunteers through AMS.  We contemplated migrating our website from ACM to a site professionally supported by AMS.  This would have been at an added cost, but was motivated by a recurring set of problems in the area of security and reliability with the service currently offered by ACM.  It was, however, decided to put this on hold, both because the added cost ended-up being higher than anticipated and the COVID-19 introduced a new level of financial uncertainty that deterred us from adding a new recurring expense to the SIG’s budget  

Newsletter
The SIG’s newsletter, Computer Communications Review (CCR), continues to publish four issues per year. Since 2016, CCR has been published entirely on both the ACM Digital Library and at https://ccronline.sigcomm.org. We publish two types of articles: technical papers and editorial contributions. The editorial contributions range from meeting reports to reflections on the evolution of the field. Technical papers are peer-reviewed by members of the editorial board and external reviewers. This year, we also created a new track for educational papers, handled by the SIGCOMM education director, who is the CCR area chair in charge of these papers. All submissions for the educational track are reviewed by the area editor in charge of the track, as well as by the editor of CCR.
 
The highlight of this year’s CCR was the publication of the 50th anniversary of SIGCOMM. SIGCOMM’s 50th birthday was celebrated at the SIGCOMM conference in Beijing in August 2019 with a special panel. This fiftieth birthday was a good opportunity to look back at the evolution of both the networking field and the SIGCOMM community over half a century. Earlier this year, after a very interesting teleconference with Vint Cerf, the editor contacted all the former SIGCOMM chairs and CCR editors to share their reflections on the evolution of our community. Many of them wrote an invited editorial. As our community is driven by scientific innovations, former recipients of lifetime SIGCOMM awards, test-of-time awards and best paper awards, were encouraged to also share their vision with an invited editorial. Thirty-three papers published in this special issue (October 2019) addressed a wide range of topics.
 
The editor in charge of CCR changed this year, with Olivier Bonaventure stepping down, and Steve Uhlig taking over since April. Some changes have been made to the editorial board. The reviewing process is also evolving, to improve review transparency through more open communication between authors and reviewers, and to make the newsletter more open to various types of contributions that add value to the community. These changes have been published in an editorial note co-authored by the whole editorial board, in the July 2020 issue. In summary, these changes are the following: (1) reviewers and authors can clarify questions before decision, (2) open review is encouraged, (3) area editors may fast-track decisions, and (4) a new criterion in paper evaluation “value to the research community” has been introduced.

Awards
 
SIGCOMM Lifetime Achievement Award:  This year, SIGCOMM recognized two Internet pioneers with the lifetime award. Dr. Amin Vahdat from Google, and Prof. Lixia Zhang from UCLA. The award recognizes Dr. Vahdat for groundbreaking contributions to data center and wide area networks, and Prof. Zhang for pioneering work in Internet protocol development. Both awards will be presented during the annual SIGCOMM conference.”
 
The award committee consisted of Bruce Davie (VMWare), Craig Partridge (Colorado State University, chair), and Karen Sollins (MIT).
 
SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis in Computer Networking and Data Communication: The award for the best doctoral dissertation submitted in 2019 went to two recipients as well, Dr. Deepak Vasisht for his thesis titled “Towards Realizing the Internet-of-Things Vision: In-body, Homes, and Farms”, and Dr. Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo for her thesis titled “Stateful Programming of High-Speed Network Hardware”. Dr. Vasisht is recognized for visionary research on internet-of-things services with concrete impact solving human-critical problems in different application areas including in-body, homes, and agriculture. Dr. Tahmashi Arashloo is recognized for pioneering the idea of raising the level of programming abstraction, and for proposing a new architecture for programming network transport protocols in FPGAs and a new language and compiler system for developing stateful applications for software-defined networks.
 
The committee consisted of Christophe Diot (Google, chair), Jim Kurose (UMass Amherst), Lili Qiu (University of Texas at Austin), Catherine Rosenberg (University of Waterloo), and Geoff Voelker (UC San Diego).
 
SIGCOMM Rising Star Award: The recipient of the 2019 SIGCOMM Rising Star Award was Ethan Katz-Bassett from ColumbiaUniversity.   The award was in recognition of outstanding research contributions, early in his career, in improving the reliability and performance of Internet services. His practical and principled measurement-driven approach has led to innovative high-impact contributions across academia and industry. 
 
The rising star award committee consisted of Lixin Gao (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Thomas Karagiannis (MSR Cambridge, chair), Craig Partridge (Colorado State University), Lili Qiu (University of Texas at Austin).
 
SIGCOMM Test of Time Paper Award:  One paper was selected for the 2019 award by a committee composed of Paul Barford (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Hamed Haddadi (Imperial College London, chair), Thomas Karagiannis (Microsoft Research Cambridge), Sue Moon (KAIST), Walter Willinger (NIKSUN).  The paper is: “A network in a laptop: rapid prototyping for software-defined networks" by Bob Lantz, Brandon Heller, and Nick McKeown, in ACM HotNets 2010.
 
Using illustrative cases studies, the paper demonstrates how a Mininet-based design can be wrapped in a VM to create a “network appliance” that can be distributed over the Internet so that anyone with a laptop can download and run a ``living, breathing” example of a new networked system. The paper has had a profound impact on catalyzing collaborative network research by setting new standards for reproducible networking research in the form of “runnable papers.” 
 
SIGCOMM Networking Systems Award:  This award was awarded for the third time in 2020 by a committee comprised of: Anja Feldmann (Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik), Srinivasan Keshav (University of Cambridge, chair), and Nick McKeown (Stanford University).
 
“The ns family of network simulators (ns-1, ns-2, and ns-3)”
“ns” is a well-known acronym in networking research, referring to a series of network simulators (ns-1, ns-2, and ns-3) developed over the past twenty five years. ns-1 was developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) between 1995-97 based on an earlier simulator (REAL, written by S. Keshav). ns-2 was an early open source project, developed in the 1997-2004 timeframe and led by collaborators from USC Information Sciences Institute, LBNL, UC Berkeley, and Xerox PARC. A companion network animator (nam) was also developed during this time [Est00]. Between 2005-08, collaborators from the University of Washington, Inria Sophia Antipolis, Georgia Tech, and INESC TEC significantly rewrote the simulator to create ns-3, which continues today as an active open source project.
 
All of the ns simulators can be characterized as packet-level, discrete-event network simulators, with which users can build models of computer networks with varying levels of fidelity, in order to conduct performance evaluation studies. The core of all three versions is written in C++, and simulation scripts are written directly in a native programming language: for ns-1, in the Tool Command Language (Tcl), for ns-2, in object-oriented Tcl (OTcl), and for ns-3, in either C++ or Python. ns is a full-stack simulator, with a high degree of abstraction at the physical and application layers, and varying levels of modeling detail between the MAC and transport layers. ns-1 was released with a BSD software license, ns-2 with a collection of licenses later consolidated into a GNU GPLv2-compatible framework, and ns-3 with the GNU GPLv2 license. ns-3 [Hen08, Ril10] can be viewed as a synthesis of three predecessor tools: yans [Lac06], GTNetS [Ril03], and ns-2 [Bre00]. ns-3 contains extensions to allow distributed execution on parallel processors, real-time scheduling with emulation capabilities for packet exchange with real systems, and a framework to allow C and C++ implementation (application and kernel) code to be compiled for reuse within ns-3 [Taz13]. Although ns-3 can be used as a general-purpose discrete-event simulator, and as a simulator for non-Internet-based networks, by far the most active use centers around Internet-based simulation studies, particularly those using its detailed models of 4G LTE (led by CTTC) and Wi-Fi systems. The project is now focused on developing models to allow ns-3 to support research and standardization activities involving several aspects of 5G NR, next-generation Wi-Fi, and the IETF Transport Area.
 
The ns-3-users Google Groups forum has over 9000 members (with several hundred monthly posts), and the developer mailing list contains over 1500 subscribers. Publication counts (as counted annually) in the ACM and IEEE digital libraries, as well as search results in Google Scholar, describing research work using or extending ns-2 and ns-3, continue to increase each year, and usage also appears to be growing within the networking industry and government laboratories. The project’s home page is at https://www.nsnam.org, and software development discussion is conducted on the ns-developers@isi.edu mailing list.
The main authors of ns-1 were (in alphabetical order): Kevin Fall, Sally Floyd, Steve McCanne, and Kannan Varadhan. ns-2 had a larger number of contributors. Space precludes listing all authors, but the following people were leading source code committers to ns-2 (in alphabetical order): Xuan Chen, Kevin Fall, Sally Floyd, Padma Haldar, John Heidemann, Tom Henderson, Polly Huang, K.C. Lan, Steve McCanne, Giao Nguyen, Venkat Padmanabhan, Yuri Pryadkin, Kannan Varadhan, Ya Xu, and Haobo Yu. A more complete list of ns-2 contributors can be found at: https://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/CHANGES.html.
 
The ns-3 simulator has been developed by over 250 contributors over the past fifteen years. The original main development team consisted of (in alphabetical order): Raj Bhattacharjea, Gustavo Carneiro, Craig Dowell, Tom Henderson, Mathieu Lacage, and George Riley.
 
Recognition is also due to the long list of ns-3 software maintainers, many of whom made significant contributions to ns-3, including (in alphabetical order): John Abraham, Zoraze Ali, Kirill Andreev, Abhijith Anilkumar, Stefano Avallone, Ghada Badawy, Nicola Baldo, Peter D. Barnes, Jr., Biljana Bojovic, Pavel Boyko, Junling Bu, Elena Buchatskaya, Daniel Camara, Matthieu Coudron, Yufei Cheng, Ankit Deepak, Sebastien Deronne, Tom Goff, Federico Guerra, Budiarto Herman, Mohamed Amine Ismail, Sam Jansen, Konstantinos Katsaros, Joe Kopena, Alexander Krotov, Flavio Kubota, Daniel Lertpratchya, Faker Moatamri, Vedran Miletic, Marco Miozzo, Hemanth Narra, Natale Patriciello, Tommaso Pecorella, Josh Pelkey, Alina Quereilhac, Getachew Redieteab, Manuel Requena, Matias Richart, Lalith Suresh, Brian Swenson,  Mohit Tahiliani, Cristiano Tapparello, Adrian S.W. Tam, Hajime Tazaki, Frederic Urbani, Mitch Watrous, Florian Westphal, and Dizhi Zhou. The full list of ns-3 authors is maintained in the AUTHORS file in the top-level source code directory, and full commit attributions can be found in the git commit logs.
 
References
[Bre00] Lee Breslau et al., Advances in network simulation, IEEE Computer, vol. 33, no. 5, pp. 59-67, May 2000.
[Est00] Deborah Estrin et al., Network Visualization with Nam, the VINT Network Animator, IEEE Computer, vol. 33, no.11, pp. 63-68, November 2000.
[Hen08] Thomas R. Henderson, Mathieu Lacage, and George F. Riley, Network simulations with the ns-3 simulator, In Proceedings of ACM Sigcomm Conference (demo), 2008.
[Lac06] Mathieu Lacage and Thomas R. Henderson. 2006. Yet another network simulator. In Proceeding from the 2006 workshop on ns-2: the IP network simulator (WNS2 ’06). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 12–es.
[Ril03] George F. Riley, The Georgia Tech Network Simulator, In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Models, Methods and Tools for Reproducible Network Research (MoMeTools) , Aug. 2003.
[Ril10] George F. Riley and Thomas Henderson, The ns-3 Network Simulator. In Modeling and Tools for Network Simulation, SpringerLink, 2010.
[Taz13] Hajime Tazaki et al. Direct code execution: revisiting library OS architecture for reproducible network experiments. In Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies (CoNEXT ’13). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 217–228.

New SIGCOMM members as ACM Fellows and ACM Distinguished Members
 
At the ACM level, three SIGCOMM members have been selected as ACM Fellows this year: Xiangyang Li, Prashant J. Shenoy, and Ramesh Kumar Sitaraman.  Other members of the community recognized as ACM Distinguished Members included Mark Berman, Konstantinos Psounis, Joerg Widmer, and Haitao Zheng.

Industry Liaison Board
 
The SIG’s industrial liaison board (ILB) was established four years ago with the goal of coming up with ideas and suggestions to increase industry participation at SIG-sponsored conferences. The ILB is currently chaired by Venkat Padmanabhan from Microsoft.  The ILB has been much less active in the reporting period than in the past, but a summary of its recent activities follows:

• Student dinner.  The ILB collated and passed on to the 2019 chairs the “best practices” from recent SIGCOMM conferences on the organization of the student dinner, with a view to maximizing the opportunity for students to interact with industry attendees. Due to many 2020 events being virtual, it still remains unclear if this activity will lead to benefits for the student attendees and industry supporters.
• Industry Day.  Given the lukewarm response to the Industry Day events in the past for various reasons, this initiative remains on hold. The Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW) collocated with IETF meetings has established itself as a successful venue for exchanges between part of the SIGCOMM community and the IETF community, which covers a significant part of the industry. 
• ILB structure.  The structure of the ILB has been formalized, with a size of 6 members, each serving a 3-year term. So 2 new members would join and 2 rotate out each year. 

Diversity and Outreach
 
N2Women partnership.  Following the partnership with N2Women, a workshop promoting diversity was organized alongside SenSys'19 in NY with support from SIGCOM and SIGMOBILE. In addition, we are also supporting N2Women awards aimed at each year honoring two members of the community who have made significant contributions to leadership and mentoring of junior researchers from underrepresented communities. The second edition of the workshop will be a one-day virtually held event together with our main conference, SIGCOMM'20, in NY, August 2020. The workshop will include talks and posters, of which the best ones will be recognized with an award. We are supporting the workshop by providing free registration to the workshop and the main conference as well as prizes to best poster awards (free registration to SIGCOMM'21).
 
CRA-WP support. The CRA-WP Grad Cohort Workshop was originally designed for female graduate students in computing fields, but has been recently changed to "Widen Participation (WP)" and split into two workshops, called CRA-WP Grad Cohort for Women, and CRA-WP Graduate Cohort for Under-Represented Minorities and Persons with Disabilities (URMD). We continue to provide $15k in yearly support for both CRA-WP workshops, which is used to allow minority students to attend these events. We also support attendance of the workshops by a couple of senior SIG members to represent the SIG. The workshops include a mix of formal presentations, informal discussions and social events. Participants can build mentoring relationships and develop peer networks that are intended to form the basis for ongoing activities during their graduate career and beyond. This year, the CRA-URMD and CRA-W workshops were scheduled for March and April, respectively, but were unfortunately disrupted by the pandemics. CRA-URMD happened nonetheless in the first week of March, in Texas. We supported the attendance of one senior member of our community, who happens to be a member of one of the minority groups represented in the workshop. CRA-WP for Women was not feasible.
 
LANCOMM 2020. The first edition of LANCOMM was very successful. The second one would take place, as in the previous year, along with the Brazilian Symposium on Computer Networks (SBRC), to leverage both the infrastructure and attendance of that event. LANCOMM was originally scheduled for May 2020, in Rio de Janeiro city. However, the pandemics led to SBRC organizers to postpone the event to December 2020, in hopes of having a normal, physical event or at least a hybrid one with support for virtual participation. However, the pandemics situation did not improve globally, and particularly worsened in Brazil, and at this point SBRC is likely to be held virtually anyway. One of the key objectives of LANCOMM is to promote networking, which requires in-person contact. In this context, the workshop organizers decided to cancel LANCOMM 2020 as they would be unable to attract a physical presence of students or senior keynote speakers.  
 
Geo-diversity Travel Grants.   Historically, SIG sponsored conferences have not received many requests for travel grants under the geo-diversity category. We have been actively publicizing our conferences to under-represented groups, with an initial focus on Latin America, highlighting the availability of travel grants and related initiatives supported by the SIG, e.g., grants to allow young faculty to travel to Program Committee meetings. The situation is gradually improving, which was observed throughout 2019, but the first semester of 2020 is abnormal because of virtual conferences, when no traveling is possible. 
 
Consistent Policies for SIG events.  Towards ensuring that all SIG events comply with properly displaying the ACM and SIG policies that attendees need to be made aware of, especially when it comes to issues related to discrimination, harassment, and privacy; something that was unevenly done before, the SIG employs a document that summarizes those requirements and that is to be used by all SIG events.
 
CARES Committee (Committee to Aid REporting on discrimination and haraSsment policy violations). The SIGCOMM CARES committee was formally introduced in 2019.  It is intended to help prevent and address any form of unacceptable behavior at events associated with the SIG. Its creation was in part in recognition of the fact that reporting discrimination and harassment to a person of authority, e.g., conference chairs, SIG officers, or ACM staff, can be intimidating, especially in the face of an already traumatic experience.  CARES committee members can serve as an alternative and are also intended as a source of advice on how to approach such a situation and ensure it is investigated by ACM. Committee members are available to listen and help anyone who has either experienced or witnessed discrimination and harassment at any event promoted by the SIG, or needs counseling on how to handle it. Committee members were present in four of the most important SIG events: SIGCOMM, CoNEXT, IMC, and HotNets. CARES members can also be contacted online to facilitate and schedule initial discussions. The role of the committee has been recently expanded to cover any harassment-related issues in the community, not limited to during conferences. The present committee members are Sujata Banerjee - VMware, Marinho Barcellos (co-chair) - University of Waikato, NZ, Craig Partridge - Colorado State University, Jennifer Rexford - Princeton University, Justine Sherry - Carnegie Mellon University, and Ellen Zegura (co-chair) - Georgia Tech.

Issues facing the SIG
 
Last year’s report identified discrimination and harassment as an important issue that the SIG needs to tackle seriously.  Towards addressing it, we introduced at the 2018 SIGCOMM conference in Bucharest a pilot CARES committee (Committee to Aid REporting on discrimination and haraSsment policy violations) modeled after the committee of the same name introduced by SIGARCH.  The CARES committee was then formally introduced in 2019 and its role was recently expanded to also include instances of harassment and/or coercion related to publications.  There are six CARES committee members that rotate in being present across our conferences, with all members accessible on an ongoing basis to members of the SIGCOMM community either by email or other form of virtual contact.  The hope is that the existence of this committee will increase awareness about discrimination and harassment of any kind, and consequently reduce the number of suc occurrences while at the same time offering easier access to resources and advice when they do occur.
 
Although membership decrease seems to have stabilized, or membership level remains at an all-time low, which is worrisome.  This is not (yet) affecting the financial stability of the SIG as our conferences continue to generate a healthy surplus and may be a sign of the waning interest in data communications when compared to “hot areas” such as “AI & ML”, the professional data communication community remains healthy and even to some extent growing. This seems to indicate that we may not be offering a strong enough value proposition to this segment of our community.  We have attempted to address this through our Industry Liaison Board, but as mentioned earlier, it is itself facing its own challenges; maybe in part because of difficulties in identifying relevant intersections between the traditional research focus of the SIG and the more applied interests of the current bulk of our community.    
 
Our attempts to broaden the SIG’s diversity may succeed in providing a temporary reprieve to our membership decline (by tapping into new “markets”), but if we are truly not delivering meaningful value to members, that reprieve is likely to be short-lived.  The outreach activities initiated by the education chair this year are another step in the right direction. However, understanding how we can initiate other activities that will help us turn this around and bridge the gap that seems to exist between many of our current activities and where the interests of the bulk of our community lie is one of the main challenges the SIG is facing going forward.