Q2: Large Conferences

From Health of Conferences Committee

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.

OOPSLA

If I understand it correctly, then the answer is yes. OOPSLA has been very active in introducing new venues for a long time (Educators Symposium, Doctoral Symposium, Practitioners Reports, Demos, of course in additon to the traditional other venues such as workshops, and tutorials. I apologize if I didn't understand what is meant by non-incremental.

big ideas sessions

Yes, it has been a tradition for OOPSLA to host specific tracks devoted to specific issue with related tutorials, workshops and panels, and some times with its own invited speaker (e.g., THe OnWard! track)

more papers

Introduced recently different categories to the papers track (e.g., Essays, selected papers from the OnWard! track that pass the same technical papers review criteria)

shorter papers

Yes, we introduced Practioner Reports which doesn't have the same acceptance criteria as the technical papers but they are not citable either. They server the practioners community rather than academia though we see more and more interst from Academia in what the practioners are doing.

deemphasizing detailed evaluation

Only for non technical papers

others?

For OOPSLA Practitioner Reports and Onward! proved very valuable to our community.

SIGGRAPH

SIGGRAPH already has a special sessions program where broader ideas/interest areas are presented each year. It is a very successful program that draws anywhere from several hundred to a couple of thousand attendees. There is also the Sketches program that may not focus on "big ideas" but on new and innovative ideas that are on the horizon of interest amongst attendees.

more papers

While SIGGRAPH is concerned about the growing number of submissions, there is also concern for bringing in appropriate content with the changes in research areas. There is increasing pursuit of these new and less represented areas so that the scope of content provided at the conference is comprehensive.

shorter papers

I am unclear about the papers committee's concern about papers length. However, the Sketches program seems to be filling a need for shorter papers presentation.

deemphasizing detailed evaluation

Again, I think that this depends on the program chair and the committee process and it changes from year to year.

SIGCSE

others

I believe that we always have looked for a balance of papers on a variety of subjects.

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.

This is not done formally, although each committee looks for balance and interesting new thoughts. Also, we have added several keynotes to our conferences to solicit new or different perspectives.

DAC

We do have short papers, and we do try to keep the submission rate above 20%. However, we still require rigorous review of all papers.

Do these practices seem to help or hurt promoting your field?

We practice all of the above, and feel that they are all necessary. They seem to help.

Super Computing

In addition to technical papers, the conference include about 40-50 tutorials, 4 invited speakers for Plenary sessions, one Keynote, and 12 invited “Masterworks” presentations. The masterworks sessions and invited speakers are intended to provided targeted “big issues” and also bring to the conference highly regarded people who are leaders of the different communities. This works very well.

more papers

In SC 05 we went to 5 parallel tracks for the technical papers. This was done not to increase the technical papers but to expand other aspects of the conference, including an additional award sessions, special sessions associated with the themes of the conference, etc. The chart shows that actually the number of technical papers declined slightly and then stayed about the same.

shorter papers

No – the papers are all 30 minutes.

deemphasizing detailed evaluation

Several years ago, we tried the concept of “extended abstracts” for selection and the having the full papers done for only the accepted papers. This was done mostly to help authors – but it was found that it causes several problems. First, there was not enough detail to fully evaluate some papers. Second, we felt getting the final papers in on time is more challenging. In SC05 we had full papers submitted and it seemed to work well. This appears to work well.

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.