Monday, July 23, 2012

CCC12- post 4 of 4- Misc Info.

CCC 12 post 4 of 4.
The business meeting and other observations.

  1. Programming committee info:
    1. There were 119 submissions of which 18 were junk (more on that later). This is pretty large- Paris 2009 had 113 submissions. The junk papers were not so much papers that claim they proved P=NP or P\ne NP; they were papers where it is hard to know what they are claiming. (Hmmm- there are valid papers that, after you go through all the definitions, its not clear what they are claiming.)
    2. 34 papers accepted. Second highest to Paris having 37. (In both Paris and this year there was no Rump Session- that could be why, no time for one.)
    3. Andrew Drucker won Best Student Paper award for Limitations of Lower-Bound Methods for the
      wire complexity of Boolean Operators
      .
    4. See Prog Comm Chair Slides for more information.
  2. There were roughly 60 people at the conference. Here is a list of all attendance figures up through 2008 (if you know of the attendance in the later years let me know and I will add them).
  3. Steering committee:
    1. Johan Hastad and Manindra Agrawal have been on the committee but their term has expired so they are now off of it.
    2. The steering committee put Madhu Sudan on.
    3. An election by people at the meeting put Venkat Guruswami on.
    4. Peter Bro Miltersen is stepping down as chair (his term expired) and Dieter is the new chair. Peter will stay on one more year (I think).
  4. Future Conferences:
    1. 2013: the conference will be in Palo alto, ca, co-located with STOC June 1-4 STOC, June 4-7 CCC. I WILL BE THERE!
    2. 2014: the conference will be in Vancouver. Local arrangements chair Valentine Kabanets. There were no competing bids (are there ever?) I WILL BE THERE!
    3. 2015: Depends on if there is an FCRC and if we join it. In any case I WILL BE THERE! The Steering committee will decide these things later.
  5. This year there were electronic proceedings (I think for the second time.) That's good, and I'm glad we don't have paper, but I would prefer if the proceedings were available on a public website before the conference (SODA has done that) or at least after (if it IS available and I missed that- leave an intelligent comment about it). On the other hand this might not matter much since most of the papers are available on line anyway.
  6. My posts on the content of the conference didn't get many comments, nor did I think they would. I hope they were useful to you. Forcing myself to do it was very useful to me, and for that I thank you, the readers. (For abstracts of ALL of the papers without my opinions, see here and press on abstracts (not on the left column).
  7. On my Honeymoon in 1991 I went on a cruise and we were cut off from ALL news. When we got back the first thing I heard was The crisis is over, the tanks are leaving Moscow. This was somewhat alarming. They were referring to the 1991 Soviet Coup d'etat attempt. By contrast, in 2012 in Portugal, I heard about the Supreme Court Decision on Health Care within an hour of when it happened. I missed the earlier incorrect accounts. Is it a good or bad that its harder to get away from news coverage? Lance posted on a related topic a while back
  8. I was gone for a total of 20 days and did not check email once. (i had a vacation problem on.) I came home to 474 emails of which 20 needed to be responded to. None of them were crucial.

5 comments:

  1. Thank you Bill for those 4 posts. At least I read all of them, with quite an interest and you provided some food for thought.

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  2. The summaries are great. I find them very useful. Thanks for posting it!

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  3. Could more papers have been accepted based on quality if there weren't a sense of a need to reject many papers?

    Were the "junk" papers just poorly written? Did the authors get good feedback?

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  4. Harry and Anon 3:21- Thanks!

    Any 4:54- You would have to ask Venkat, but here are my IMPRESSIONS from what he said (always dangerous but what-the-heck)

    a) I suspect that the (say) 5 papers just below the cutoff were pretty good
    and the cutoff can be somewhat arbitrary. I wouldn't quite say there is a need to reject, just a need to have only X papers to fit into the timeslot.

    b) The junk papers were REALLY junk. I don't know if they got good feedback
    but its hard to give feedback beyond `I do not know what you are claiming you proved' to some junk papers.

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  5. Toni Pitassi emailed me her slides so I posted them on
    the Day 2 of n post (where I discussed her talk).

    ReplyDelete