Q4: Large 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?

OOPSLA

workshop co-located at conferences

Workshops have been always an impportant part of OOPSLA. For the last 4 years OOPSLA has been co-located with other conferences.

stand-alone workshops

We didn't call them Workshops but we have tracks such as the Educators' and Doctoral Symposia that are stand alone. For few years OOPSLA sponsored mid-year series of Workshop as a separate meetings from OOPSLA but achieved moderate success and the idea died when its champion stepped down.

panels

Always as part of the core OOPSLA conference

crazy idea sessions

Last year we introduced the Lightning Talks (strictly 5 minutes talks for any idea an author would like to share with the audience). It is too early to assess its success, but the concept was borrowed from other conferences where such talks were a great success.

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?

I believe OOPSLA was instrumental in introducing many of such venues that other conference adopted and such venues proved very valuable for the community. OOPSLA publishes a companion to the proceedings which includes the workshops conclusion, panels, etc. Also, Onward! presentations have been published in separate publications.

SIGGRAPH

crazy idea sessions

SIGGRAPH does all of these things annually as well as implement new programs (panels is a permanent program). For example, Web Graphics was funded for a three-year period to assess the need for permanent implementation as a separate program or blending this content into other existing programs. Other experimental programs have included SIGGRAPH TV, Online Services, Community Outreach, SIGKids, to name few.

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?

Most of SIGGRAPH's experimental programs have been successful and have been necessary in promoting the different areas of visual fields and education. The technology and content of some of these programs live on in the more established programs after the end of the experimental runs.

SIGSCE

stand-alone workshops

in computer science education, CCSC and other groups sponsor quite a number of regional conferences. SIGCSE is in cooperation with these. Since these have a strong following, SIGCSE has not seen any reason to try to duplicate them.

panels

each conference has a range of panels on new or emerging ideas.

crazy idea sessions

The SIGCSE Symposium provides an opportunity for "Special Sessions" and Birds-of-a-Feather than can promote a range of "crazy" ideas.

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?

The SIGCSE Bulletin and conferences are the primary mechanisms for communication within the computer science education community, especially at the college level. We have tried to expand this to other levels (with special emphasis on two-year colleges and high schools), within our resources. For example, we have had special conference rates for high school teachers.

DAC

crazy idea sessions

We have all of the above except crazy idea sessions. They all work well.

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?

We also have a student design contest, and some of the top ones get in our technical program. This gives them a wider dissemination.

ICSE

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?

Crazy ideas sessions were discussed above under NON-INCREMENTAL. There are numerous co-located and stand-alone workshops in software engineering. Regrettably many of these are becoming more like conferences, with solicitation and publication of conference-length papers, and serial presentation of conference-length talks. Thus it is difficult for papers from these workshops to receive any wider dissemination than they receive as papers in the workshop proceedings, since any attempt to submit similar ideas and text to a conference would be viewed as a re-submission of published work.

Super Computing

We have 8-10 workshops associated with the conference. One has grown quite large (the Grid Workshop) and we are “graduating” it over the next few years. Not all of these are immature work. Indeed the Grid Workshop has an acceptance below the conference.

stand-alone workshops

We have about 2-4 standalone workshops – some with separate registration.

panels

Yes we use panels and they are sometimes our more popular sessions. Typically we have about 6 sessions.

crazy idea sessions

We tried two “gather and scatter” sessions this year – which were a success. These sessions allow people to sign up on site for 15 mini-sessions to discuss late breaking/evolving work.

We do other things. We have poster sessions. A small number of rejected papers are referred to the poser sessions, but the general rule is the posters are separate submissions.

We have an Exhibitor Forum – where vendors can come and talk about the technical aspects of their products. They are supposed to be non-marketing and are reviewed before selection.

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?

At SC|05, in conjunction with the ACM, we recorded all sessions for later availability on the web.