SIGAda being a good citizen within ACM and helping Ada too!

I had the honor and pleasure in March of attending my first ACM Computing Week officially representing SIGAda as Chair. Held in Phoenix this year, ACM Computing Week combines what is now ACM' s flagship conference, the Computer Science Conference (CSC) with SIGCSE's (Computer Science Education) annual symposium and workshops, the new ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) , SIG Chairs and SIG Board meetings (usually pretty dull happenings), the ACM Local Activities Board' s "Big Event" for Local Chapters principals, and inauguration of ACM's first class (133) of "AC M Fellows," their new, most distinguished class of membership (mostly previous winners of major AC M awards). As an aside, the CSC includes the Turing Award presentation and lecture, won this year by Juris Hartmanis (Cornell) and Richard Stearns (SUNY Albany) in recognition of their seminal paper whic h established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory. (Boy was I surprised to learn that Richard Stearns graduated from the same small liberal arts college I did, Carleton .) Other than SIGCSE with its own event, SIGAda was the most visible SIG there — we had a booth on the exhibit floor (which was 80% book publishers). Previous SIGAda Education Committe e Chair Rich Pattis and present Education Working Group Chair Mike Feldman have organized and staffed a SIGAda booth there since 1991, and this year we grew on the favorable exposure this booth alway s creates for Ada. In addition to updates of many Ada resources and vendor literature available for perusal or taking in our booth, our booth had two impactful innovations this year : (1) sale of Walnut Creek's Ada CD-ROM as a promotion for Ada (at a deeply discounted $10 price made possible by Walnut Creek' s generosity to help us attract new users to Ada), and (2) a starter set of 9 professionally produced "Ada success stories" spanning a variety of non-DoD domains. I observed that ours was among the mos t popular booths on the floor. Furthermore the uniformly friendly, interested reception by the many boot h visitors was rewarding. Additional Ada presence during the week was provided by the Ada 9X tutorial b y Dave Cook and Eugene Bingue; an "Ada in CSI " session chaired a "Ready-for-Prime-Time Ada" birds-of-feather session Mike, Don Reifer, and I organized for SIGCSE ; Verdix/Meridian and AdaI C booths on the exhibit floor ; and an …