Monday, November 10, 2008

STOC deadline, reminder again

Remind your friends (and, if you're feeling generous, your enemies) that indeed the short abstract for your future STOC submission is due today (full conference submission deadline - Nov 17). Thanks to Shai Halevi's help, the server is even synched with the deadlines on the conference Web page.

I've seen over 150 submissions so far, and it's not even close to midnight...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

How many total submissions did you get?

Anonymous said...

This is a comment about conference proceedings which I feel is relevant to this upcoming STOC (though this message is probably coming much too early). Reviews in TCS conferences are allegedly blind, but often times by the knowledge of a research area made evident in a review you can often narrow the reviewer's identity down to a handful of people, and if you combine this with the list of thanked reviewers in the first few pages of the printed proceedings, you can often figure out exactly who the reviewer was. I would like to propose abolishing the page thanking subreviewers for the upcoming STOC proceedings (and all future conference proceedings in TCS), since doing so I believe undermines reviewer anonymity. I would like to know your thoughts on this proposition.

Michael Mitzenmacher said...

anonymous--

My default would be to give credit as a group to the reviewers, as is done. They deserve the credit, and there should be a strong reason to remove them. As far as I know, reviewers can always opt out and ask not to be listed!

While you have a point, I think you might exaggerate the ability to pick out an exact person who is the reviewer. My experience suggest that while you can get it some of the time, you're giving yourself too much credit if you think you can get it all or even most of the time. Given that you can guess who's likely to read your paper without a list of reviewers, I'm not sure there's much benefit to this proposal.

It's certainly arguable, though.