Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Committees and conferences...

FOCS 2009 PC size: 20
SODA 2009 PC size: 27
ICDE 2010 PC size: 230
IJCAI 2009 PC size: 600

SoCG 2008 attendance: ~150
SODA 2008 attendance: ~300



  1. Just to get some feeling... is there any statistics about the number of papers submitted/accepted to each of these conferences and the workload on each PC?
    -- Iftah

  2. For a large conference such as SODA which does not have a physical PC meeting, there is no convincing reason not to have a PC >= 50 people.

  3. I've started adding the line "(submission forbidden)" after each of the theory PC memberships in my CV.

    I may also start adding "(No one has served on this committee more than three times. EVER.)"

  4. jeffe: which conference is that ?

    iftah: generally, theory is anomalously high in terms of workload. for other conferences that I've been on PCs for, the average load is 10/12 papers per person.

    I should point out that the numbers are slightly deceiving. SODA has a 27 member PC, but a very large outside reviewing community. These other conferences have almost no external reviewing, so they essentially swallow up the external reviewers into the PC. Each "senior PC member" is probably more comparable to a PC member at a theory conference although there are some key differences.

    Most importantly (well from a tenure perspective) you can't list 'external reviewer for X' as a bullet point, but you can of course list "PC member for X".

  5. There are workshops where PC size > attendance > number of accepted papers.

  6. The disappearance of external reviewing is exactly what I expected. One follow-up question, taking your ~10 papers workload per PC and multiplying it by 200+ PCs gives more submitted papers than the overall submissions to the 5 "most loaded" theory conferences. Is it really the case?
    -- Iftah


    More importantly, what these conferences do, is give credit to the external reviewers. As a result, IMHO, reviewers are motivated to do a better job, than if they were merely reviewers.


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