Re: [Tccc] summary of current conference concerns

I'll only note that we seem to have four complaints that seem to point to an inherent conflict of goals:

- "There are too many conferences/workshops."

- Large conferences with lots of papers (Globecom, ICC, even Infocom) are perceived as not very productive for attendees.

- The review process is arbitrary (it's very hard to make highly selective review processes work well, at least at scale, given the inherent difficulty of comparing papers across areas and the various novelty vs. depth vs. interest trade-offs). My rough experience is that it's easy to eliminate the bottom 50% of the papers, and usually most reviewers agree on those, so adding reviewers to a paper doesn't help much. Also, the top 10% of the papers seem to stand out. The middle 40% is where the problem lies. Most of those papers aren't blatantly wrong or lack all novelty.

- We have a large number of researchers, including from new geographic areas.

I'm not picking on you, but we can't solve the problem without acknowledging that something has to give, namely we can either have:
- fewer papers accepted/submitted OR
- more conferences OR
- larger conferences.

But there's no magic that can produce
- more papers accepted AND
- fewer conferences AND/OR
- smaller conferences.

As I noted, we may need to think of a different model that relies less heavily on conferences.

Henning

On Dec 10, 2009, at 7:23 PM, Manoj B. S. wrote:

>
> 1. Large volume of submissions: This issue is beyond anyone's control.
> Internet has grown, so are the number of people doing research on
> networking. Naturally, the number of submissions will be huge. Many of
> the traditionally non-research universities around the world are now
> doing wonderful research in this area. That is not under IEEE's
> control. Actually IEEE encourages and works hard for that! In fact, in
> 2007 discussions, Nitin used the term "Democratization of Research" to
> describe this effect. Since we cannot control that, we have to learn
> to live with it. We could, however, try to scale up IEEE or ComSoc to
> handle such huge growth. IEEE conferences and strategies need radical
> solutions to take the fast growing opportunities. Any potential
> solutions are welcome on this topic. Point (3) down this email will
> discuss about scaling ComSoc towards this.

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