Monday, January 07, 2013

SODA 2013 4/n: Business

If you haven't been following my live-tweets at the SODA business meeting, here's a summary of the unusually quiet meeting:
  • Attendance at the conference was 311, which is quite low, but is a local high for New Orleans (third time in the last 10 years). 
  • 135 papers were accepted out of a net 459 submissions. This is an acceptance rate of nearly 30%, which should strike fear into the hearts of tenure-track assistant professors everywhere. 
  • PC members had to review "only" 42 papers each. Yes, I know this is insane. And no, we're not going to do anything about it. 
  • Shiri Chechik received one of two best student papers for her paper "New Additive Spanners". Bernhard Haeupler received the other for "Simple, fast and deterministic gossip and rumor spreading".
  • I've already mentioned the two best papers, on graph minors and dynamic connectivity
  • SODA 2014 is in Portland, land of beer, books and birds. Chandra Chekuri is chair. 
  • After Salt Lake City observers had to withdraw because of serious voting irregularities, the trumped up unfair winner of the SODA 2015 sweepstakes was San Diego. But since we never go with our first choice location (Honolulu, anyone?), San Francisco was listed as a second choice, with DC as a third choice. 
  • David Johnson is handing the baton over to Cliff Stein, after running SODA since before I knew it wasn't a fizzy drink. 

4 comments:

  1. "the unusually quiet meeting" -- Perhaps everyone is full of lots of rich NO food.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It was before dinner :). No mostly it was the lack of an actual agenda for discussion.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "(...) which should strike fear into the hearts of tenure-track assistant professors everywhere." Why is that?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Faculty often assume that acceptance rates are inversely correlated with quality. Theory conferences tend to have higher acceptance rates than other comparable venues (self-selection, community size, and so on)

    ReplyDelete

Disqus for The Geomblog