[compgeom-announce] Minutes of the SoCG 2007 Business Meeting

[Günter Rote <rote@inf.fu-berlin.de>]

Minutes of the Business Meeting SoCG 2007, June 6.
(as recorded by Mark de Berg)

1.SoCG 2007

Otfried Cheong, chair of the Organizing Committee, reported on various organizational
issues regarding SoCG 2007.
Despite the fairly low registration fee — made possible by financial contributions from
two sponsors, KAIST and BK21 — there were only 111 registered participants: 35 from Korea,
10 from Japan/Hongkong, 36 from Europe (incl. Israel), and 30 from US/Canada. attendance
was the lowest ever for SoCG. The previous negative “record” was when the conference was
in Hongkong (2000).
This year SoCG was organized “in cooperation with” ACM, rather than
“sponsored by ACM”. The main reason was that the ACM procedure required for
“sponsored” conferences (in particular with regard to setting up bank accounts)
is impossible to follow in Korea.

Jeff Erickson, PC chair, reported that there were 139 submissions this year. This is
similar to previous years (2006: 142, 2005: 140). From these submissions 45 were
accepted, making the acceptance ratio 32%.
Monique Teillaud, chair of the Video Committee, reported that 7 videos were submitted.
All videos were accepted, in one case under the conditions that certain changes would
be made (which the authors did).

2. SoCG 2008

Dave Mount, chair of the Organizing Committee for next year’s SoCG, reported that the
conference will be held on the campus of the University of Maryland (College Park).
This is different from the original plan, which was to have the conference in
Old Town Alexandria. The hotel that was supposed to host the conference
changed owners, and as a result prices increased significantly. Hence Dave decided,
in consultation with the steering committee, to move the conference to the campus of
the University of Maryland. The dates will either be June 8—10 or June 9—11.
Monique Teillaud, who will be PC chair next year, introduced the members of the
program committee (17 in total):

# Franz Aurenhammer (Technische Universität Graz)
# Siu-Wing Cheng (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
# Sariel Har-Peled (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign)
# Martin Held (Universität Salzburg)
# Michael Joswig (Technische Universität Darmstadt)
# David Kirkpatrick (University of British Columbia)
# Christian Knauer (Freie Universität Berlin)
# Patrice Koehl (University of California, Davis)
# Marc van Kreveld (Utrecht University)
# Stefan Langerman (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
# André Lieutier (Dassault Systèmes and LMC/IMAG)
# Sylvain Petitjean (LORIA, Nancy)
# Alla Sheffer (University of British Columbia)
# Shakhar Smorodinsky (Ben-Gurion University)
# Diane Souvaine (Tufts University)
# Monique Teillaud (chair; INRIA Sophia Antipolis)
# Emo Welzl (ETH Zürich)

3. SoCG 2009

There were two bids to host SoCG 2009: Lars Arge proposed to have the conference in
Aarhus (Denmark) and John Hershberger to have it in Portland (USA).
Beer played a prominent role in both presentations, but apparently the community
prefers Danish over American beer, because Aarhus won the bid by a wide margin.

4. Discussion

Following up on the fact that this year SoCG was organized “in cooperation with ACM”,
there was a discussion whether this should perhaps always be the case. Advantages are
that this would make it easier for organizers outside the US. In addition, it would
probably be cheaper, because ACM takes a certain percentage of the income of
sponsored-by conferences (which is more than the reduction in printing costs).
A disadvantage would be that ACM no longer guarantees to cover any deficits
(but SoCG never had a deficit), to provide financial backing (advance payments
for hotels) or legal advice. After some discussions it was decided to leave this
for the Steering Committee to explore.

There was also discussion about the reviewing process for SoCG.  Some people felt
the process could be improved, for example by having a rebuttal phase and/or
double-blind reviewing (as is done e.g. in some of the graphics conferences).
Others thought the rebuttal phase would mainly mean more work (for both authors
and PC members), that it would make authors happier with the decisions
without increasing the quality of the decisions. A disadvantage of double-blind
reviewing would be that, if done seriously, submission of SoCG papers to e.g. EWCG
or CCCG would no longer be possible. No consensus was reached on the topic, and
the discussion will probably be continued on various blogs as well as in the
Steering Committee. Ileana Streinu volunteered to set up a blog and a discussion
forum.

Monique Teillaud promised she would do her best to make sure the PC would give good
and relevant feedback to the authors next year.
--
Günter Rote

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