[Tccc] ComSoc technical cosponsorship - r...
Lachlan Andrew
lachlan.andrewatgmail.com
Sat Jun 1 04:15:59 EDT 2013
Greetings Joe,
Thanks for designing this questionnaire. It looks useful.
On 1 June 2013 04:10, Joe Touch <to... at isi.edu> wrote:
> TPC meetings in person are much more effective in discussing papers than
> any alternative, for the same reasons as in-person conferences.
In-person conferences are useful because they promote fruitful
unplanned conversations that can generate new ideas and they build
relationships. TPC meetings are about having a conversation on a
particular topic, which may involve careful re-reading and/or
verifying facts. The latter is much more suited to a multi-day
on-line discussion than the former is.
Another difference is that discussions at in-person conferences are
between experts in the area. If all TPC members have read the paper,
then I agree that an in-person discussion is the most effective
option. However in cases like INFOCOM where the TPC meeting
discussions deliberate only involve people who were *not* reviewers
(in order to "review the reviews"), I think that the in-person meeting
is less useful than a thorough on-line discussion between the
reviewers.
A third difference is that most conference last more than 10 hours,
and so the travel cost is amortized over a much more substantial
event. Coming from Australia, that travel cost is typically ~50 hours
round trip (more than the hours nominally worked in a week), and
equivalent to driving an SUV ~100km each day for an entire year. If
that isn't daunting, I'll book you to give us a seminar sometime :)
I would strongly recommend that the criterion become
"Of the three media (a) long/active on-line discussion phase (b)
in-person TPC meeting (c) remote-access TPC meeting, the conference:
E Employs all three
A Employs two out of three
D Employs 0 or 1 of the three"
On 31 May 2013 06:16, Joe Touch <to... at isi.edu> wrote:
> On 5/30/2013 12:47 AM, Martin Gilje Jaatun wrote:
> >
>> The problem with acceptance rates is that they are so easy to game - and
>> according to this, a conference that receives 100 great papers and
>> accepts 60 of them is worse than a conference that gets 1000 junk
>> submissions and accepts 400 of them...
>
> I don't agree that this can be 'gamed' on a persistent basis.
> Conferences that get 100 great papers will later get 1000. It's
> impossible to target a voluntary audience so directly that this happens
> without correction over several events.
That is true for conferences with a broad scope such as the flagship
conferences, but not true of more specialized conferences, however
high the quality. Conversely, a poor conference may continue to
attract 1000 submissions because it is known to be easy to get into.
I agree that acceptance rate is a useful metric, provided it isn't
given undue weight. For conferences that have existed a few years, a
more useful metric would be the average citations per paper over some
time interval. If the IEEE could provide a script to scrape that from
Google Scholar, that would be a great separate contribution. I'd love
to be able to distinguish between the many conferences on a new topic
(IoT, smart-grid, cloud, ...) without waiting for reputation to spread
by word-of-mouth.
$0.02,
Lachlan
--
Lachlan Andrew Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures (CAIA)
Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia
<http://caia.swin.edu.au/cv/landrew>
Ph +61 3 9214 4837
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