Wednesday, September 06, 2006

SODA results trickling in...

The full list should be available soon. Unusually, no information about accepts/submits was provided in the author notification.

Here's our (accepted) paper.

Update: 135 papers accepted, with some caveats. There were 4 merges, and with two papers, I believe that there will be two separate papers in the (already extra-large) proceedings, but only one talk. The rationale for this escapes me. Effectively there will be 137 papers in the proceedings though. This translates to a 36% acceptance rate.

Update II: The list of accepted papers is here.

Categories:

18 comments:

  1. Do the results normally come on the same day for all, or do they take 2-3 days to announce all the results ? 

    Posted by Anonymous

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  2. Every committee does it slightly differently: it partly depends on the hacking skills of the PC chair :) 

    Posted by Suresh

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  3. It seems that only accepted authors were notifed by now 

    Posted by Anonymous

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  4. Are you sure that all accepted papers have been announced now? 

    Posted by Anonymous

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  5. Yes,
    http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/alist.txt 

    Posted by Anonymous

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  6. I believe that there will be two separate papers in the (already extra-large) proceedings, but only one talk. The rationale for this escapes me.

    This is a so-called "weak merge". Its goal is to reduce the usage of talk slots, which (unlike the number of pages in the proceedings) is the critical conference resource. At the same time the authors are saved from a (sometimes heavy handed) paper merge process.

    Cheers,


    Posted by Piotr

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  7. Yes, I am in fact very much in favor of leaving
    a merger decision to the authors. The PC can
    stipulate that only one talk be given on related
    papers.

     

    Posted by Chandra

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  8. Piotr,
    if we believe that conference slots are an expensive resource, and it's easier to accept papers, then accepting (only) 135 papers, a number driven entirely by the number of talk slots, doesn't make that much sense.

     

    Posted by Suresh

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  9. The reason why conference slots are an "expensive resource" is precisely because their number is limited, and in case of SODA this is a hard limit. There is no hard limit on the number of pages in proceedings, although presumably at some point enough is enough,

    So, if two accepted papers are quite related, it makes sense to give them one talk slot but 20 pages of proceedings. The audience is spared from seeing similar talk twice, the authors are spared from fitting 20 pages into 10 with a machete, and one talk slot is recycled.

    Now, does it make sense that the number of talk slots determines the number of accepted papers ? This is a good question, which is however hard to address within the conference system that is dominant in CS.

    Piotr 

    Posted by Piotr

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  10. Exactly. and that's the bigger pity, that this discussion can't be had within the current format. I guess though that with submission rates temporarily in decline, any discussions of the scalability of the conference format will be shelved.  

    Posted by Suresh

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  11. Rejects are out now as well -- as I just experienced. Unfortunately we got a reject without any (!) comment to the authors. I am not sure, but shouldn't there be some rule which forces the referees/PC members to write at least one, two sentences explaining their decision.
    Getting a mute reject is extremely frustrating :-(

    Posted by Stefan

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  12. Not that it's any consolation, but I got a review for an accepted paper that didn't even make sense (!). SODA is not great at generating reviews for authors of papers. I think the volume of submissions has something to do with this.  

    Posted by Suresh

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  13. Agree! Really frustrated on blank review comments. It could mean nothing or exponential meanings. 

    Posted by Anonymous

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  14. Try ESA if you want comments. Once I submitted the same paper to a journal and ESA at roughly the same time. (I was informed later that I could run into copyright issues for this stunt, so I don't recommend that practice.) However, I received better comments from the ESA committee, which rejected my paper, than the comments from the journal, which accepted it. 

    Posted by Anonymous

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  15. "Unfortunately we got a reject without any (!) comment to the authors.  "

    Stefan,

    Comments were to follow later, as I'm sure you have already noticed.
     

    Posted by Anonymous

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  16. Comments were to follow later, as I'm sure you have already noticed.

    Yep, we got a second EMail supposedly with comments. But this said that there were no comments :-(

    What I don't understand is that the referees had to write something about the paper anyway (unless their referee report consisted of a scalar value only).
    Most of these comments meant for the PC would be very useful for the authors as well, I can hardly think of comments that should not be made available to the authors (unless they contain direct comparisons with other submitted papers).

    For our accepted paper we got very useful comments, but I'd rather have them for the rejected one ...


    Posted by Stefan

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  17. "What I don't understand is that the referees had to write something about the paper anyway (unless their referee report consisted of a scalar value only). "

    This year I made a point of writing all of my comments in a single block, then cut-and-paste the confidential parts in the PC section only, while leaving the rest in the "comments to the author" section. The increase in workload was negligible but the end result was over a page of comments to the author.  

    Posted by Anonymous

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  18. People with suggestions for the review process in particular and conferences in general are encouraged to post at the ACM conference improvement wiki.  

    Posted by Anonymous

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