Q4: Medium Conferences

From Health of Conferences Committee

Question 4: WORKSHOPS, ETC.

Does your community provide venue for work not mature enough for your major conferences, such as:

• workshop co-located at conferences
• stand-alone workshops
• panels
• crazy idea sessions

On balance, are these other venues effect for advancing your field? What mechanisms, if any, do you use allow good papers from these venues to later achieve wider dissemination?

SIGART

Yes, for the large conferences we have workshops co-located with the conference.

SIGARCH

workshop co-located at conferences

Yes

stand-alone workshops

No

panels

Often (But just one per conference.)

crazy idea sessions

Not at ISCA.

SIGCHI

YES, MANY OF THEM, AT CONFERENCES OF ALL SIZES. THESE ARE A GREAT BENEFIT TO BOTH THE COMMUNITY AND THE CONFERENCE. WE BOTH HAVE "MAJOR" ONES THAT ARE SEPARATELY ORGANIZED EVENTS AND MINOR ONES THAT ARE PART OF THE CONFERENCE PROGRAM (BUT WITH SEPARATE SUBMISSIONS/REVIEW).

stand-alone workshops

YES, WE HAVE MANY OF THESE, THOUGH MANY OF THEM ARE NOT ACM-SPONSORED BECAUSE OF THE COSTS INVOLVED. IN SOME CASES WE SPONSOR OR CO-SPONSOR THEM, IN OTHER CASES THEY ARE HOSTED BY UNIVERSITIES OR CORPORATE LABS.

panels

SOMETIMES. SOME CONFERENCE HAVE A TRADITION OF PANELS. OTHERS HAVE ELIMINATED THEM.

crazy idea sessions

On balance, are these other venues effective for advancing your field?

SIGART

Workshops help broadening the community while keeping a low acceptance rate for the conference.

SIGARCH

Yes, the workshops (and tutorials) are a great way to broaden the active participation in the conference.

SIGIR

We have about 10 workshops per year co-located with the conference (on the "workshop day", the day after the main conference ends). Turnout is very good, at all levels of the community (junior to senior).

The IR community has a few standalone workshops each year, but not many. Occasionally, e.g., every 3-4 years, there might be an invitational workshop that allows the senior members of the community to meet to discuss the direction of the field.

We used to do panels, but not in recent years. Many felt that they were not helpful - just an opportunity to pontificate without any real debate emerging.

SIGIR has a 2-hour Business Meeting at each conference. This is an opportunity for the Executive Committee to report to the community about what it's doing, to solicit opinions on major changes to the conference (e.g., to do away with paper proceedings, or to make major changes in reviewing structure), and for the community to sound off about what it feels is important. Attendance is usually very good.

SIGACT

Some of our conference do have workshops and tutorials colocated. There are few stand-alone workshops. Some conferences have panels but only at the business meeting.

SIGPLAN

SIGPLAN conferences tend to have many workshops co-located with conferences, often as many as six or seven.

We tend not to have panels or crazy idea sessions.

There are some number of stand alone workshops, but not so many.

SIGMOD

Yes, to all of the above. And I think they are effective.

SIGCOMM

Starting with SIGCOMM'03, the SIGCOMM conference has been a five-day event, with three-days of conference (T-W-Th) and two days of tutorials and workshops (M and F). The workshops vary from year to year and are chosen by review of proposals. We also sponsor a number of stand-alone worksohps, including HotNets and the SIGCOMM Asia Workshop, and conferences (IMC, ANCS, etc.). SIGCOMM sometimes has a work-in-progress session, and also has a poster session. We also have an outrageous opinion session.

The workshops -- both stand-alone and co-located -- are effective. I have mixed feelings about panels and work-in-progress talks, as sometimes they can be rather useless but, just every so often, they are really good. The outrageous opinion session often degenerates into stand-up comedy but it is loads of fun and really lightens the mood and brings the every-larger community closer together. What mechanisms, if any, do you use to allow good papers from these venues to later achieve wider dissemination?

SIGART

Nothing specific, it is up to the workshop organizers.

SIGARCH

Some workshops have their papers published as special issues in SIGARCH Computer Architecture News or other venues. But this is based more on the energy of the workshop organizers than the quality of the workshop.

SIGCHI

DEPENDS ON THE VENUE. PANELS MAY BE WRITTEN UP AS MAGAZINE ARTICLES (FOR INTERACTIONS MAGAZINE) IF WARRANTED. SMALL WORKSHOP PAPERS OFTEN ARE REVISED AND EXTENDED INTO CONFERENCE PAPERS. OUR "MAJOR" WORKSHOPS OFTEN PUBLISH THEIR PROCEEDINGS IN THE ACM DL.

SIGIR

Extended / revised versions of workshop papers may be submitted to an IR conference or journal.

SIGACT

Authors of conference papers are expected to submit full papers to journals. Most do just that because the conference paper has severe page limits. There are quite a few very strong theory journals. Most conferences have a best papers solicitation for special issues of journals. When a new result comes out there is often a lot of buzz on blogs and around the community. Very often preprints of these hot results circulate before the conference.

SIGPLAN

Good papers from such workshops are often later published in conferences. Occasionally there are special issues of journals devoted to them. We often publish the abstracts of such workshops in SIGPLAN Notices.

SIGMOD

None, really, that I'm aware of.

SIGCOMM

The top few papers from SIGCOMM (and from IMC) get forwarded to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking for fast-track consideration.

Several of the conferences (including the main SIGCOMM conference) give a best student paper award. We are in the process of instituting the SIGCOMM Test of Time award to recognize an influential paper published 10-12 years ago in a SIGCOMM-sponsored venue. We also give a SIGCOMM Award for lifetime achievement each year, and are active in nominating networking researchers for ACM Fellow and other ACM awards.

SIGKDD

workshop co-located at conferences

YES

stand-alone workshops

panels

YES

crazy idea sessions

we try to encourage novel ideas

These approaches are effective.

Regarding publication, frequently they have follow on special issue of journals or books.

SIGOS

HotOS is very popular and well-followed. The tension in this conference is: should it be for big and wild ideas or papers that in a year will be submitted to SOSP? Different years cone down on different sides of this question. We're seeing this idea appear in other areas, eg HotDep (hot topics in dependable systems; a success) and HotP2P (not as successful).

SIGMOBILE

As I mentioned, we have a large number of workshops at our four conferences. Generally, the day after the conference has a number of parallel concurrent one-day workshops. Most workshops do well, both technically and financially, and some do very well. Our MobiHoc conference started as one of these worksohps, and is now a large 3-day conference. MSWiM and WoWMoM also started as these workshops, are are now each 3-day IEEE conferences (SIGMOBILE did not want to continue to sponsor them at this level). We publish full proceedings for all our workshops, and they of course appear in the ACM DL.

We often have one or more panels at our conferences. Some of these have been great, and some have been terrible. That seems to be the way of panels. The danger is that they turn into a mini set of unrefereed talks, where the panel speakers only talk about their own work. A much better panel happens when the speakers go beyond their own work, and when there is something controversial in the topic, for the panel members and audience to "debate".