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From Health of Conferences Committee
ACM/IEEE Health of Conferences Committee
MARK D. HILL (Chair), University of Wisconsin, ACM/SIGARCH & IEEE
JEAN-LUC GAUDIOT, UC Irvine, IEEE
MARY HALL, USC/ISI, ACM/SIGPLAN
JOE MARKS, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, ACM/SIGGRAPH
PAOLO PRINETTO, Politecnico di Torino, IEEE
DONNA BAGLIO, ACM Headquarters
Filed: //wiki.acm.org/healthcc
Release 1.0 on 31 May 2006
Charge from ACM President David Patterson
The idea is to collect the best practices onto a web page so that conference organizers can see innovative ways to cope with the demands of paper submissions, refereeing, and presentations, as the number of papers increase. The hope is that organizers will either try good new ideas or at least avoid the mistakes of others.
Process
The committee--with the members listed above--was formed in December 2005. It "met" for several conference calls to create this Wiki, the initial version of which was released in May 2006. Key steps were formulating questions to ask ACM SIG chairs and IEEE TCs, mailing out the questionnaires, and compiling a short list of ideas to be recommended or avoided.
The goals are to unearth actionable ideas and reveal failed ideas. It is NOT our goal to produce summary statistics because we expect our audience is more interested in groups in situations similar to their own than in some average.
The next two sections present (a) selected ideas that the committee decided to highlight and (b) the complete survey results. Large conferences have more than one-thousand attendees, small conferences have less than 100, while medium conferences are in the middle.
==Let's Talk About Selected Ideas==
This section lists several ideas that the committee decided to highlight. Please click on topic of interest (e.g., Talk: Tracking Reviews, but NOT the edit button the right) to see:
- Comments from survey or the committee
- Comments by others
- Add a comment yourself!
Talk: Tracking Reviews
Talk: Two-phase Reviewing
Talk: Author Responses (Rebuttals)
Talk: Double-Blind Submissions
Talk: Accepting More Papers
Talk: Hierarchical Program Committees
Talk: Visionary Venues
Talk: Co-Located Workshops
Talk: Competitions
Talk: Catch All
Complete Survey Results
This section after this one presents the raw data so you can mine it yourself.
- Large conferences: >1000 attendees
- Medium conferences: 100-1000 attendees
- Small conferences: <100 attendees
Question 1: REVIEWER LOAD
Has your community recently adopted new practices to deal with growing reviewer load, such as:
- tracking reviews of rejected papers from conference to conference as is done in journal reviewing
- increasing program committee size
- charging a review fee
- others?
For each practice you are using, what is your view of how well it is working within your community? Please comment on the merit of the other strategies as applies to your community.
Question 2: NON-INCREMENTAL
Has your community recently adopted new practices to promote non-incremental new ideas?
- big ideas sessions
- more papers
- shorter papers
- deemphasizing detailed evaluation
- others?
For each practice you are using, what is your view of how well it is working within your community? Please comment on the merit of the other strategies as applies to your community.
Question 3: PROGRAM COMMITTEES
Does your community practice:
- double blind submissions
- program committee submission restrictions
- rebuttals (author responses)
- large program committees
- program subcommittees
- others?
Do these practices seem to help or hurt promoting your field?
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?
Question 5: CATCH-ALL
Are there other approaches your community has tried or abandoned that the rest of us can learn from?
Acknowledgments
The committee acknowledges the constructive advice of David A. Patterson.
The committee acknowledges the excellent support work of Mike Marty and Caitlin Scopel.
References
Mark D. Hill, Some Advice for Program Committee Chairs Based on my ISCA 2005 Experience, April 2005, http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill/pcadvice2005.html.
Mark D. Hill, Interim Talk to the ACM Special Interest Group Governing Board, February 24, 2006, http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill/acm_ieee_heath_conf_2006_02.ppt.
Kathyryn D. McKinley, Notes of Chairing Program Committees, May 2005, http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mckinley/notes/PC.html.
David A. Patterson, President's Letter: The Health of Research Conferences and the Dearth of Big Idea Papers, Communications of the ACM, December 2004, pp. 23-24.
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