[compgeom-announce] Business meeting at SoCG 2009 (minutes); new steering committee

[Marc van Kreveld <marc@cs.uu.nl>]

Dear computational geometers,

This message contains the minutes of the business meeting that was held
in Aarhus, during SoCG 2009. These minutes will be stored permanently
(like the minutes of business meetings of previous years) on

http://www.computational-geometry.org/

This address also contains the slides of those who presented something
during the business meeting (conferences chairs, PC chairs, ...), as 
well as the
video/multimedia submissions (acceptances) of SoCG2009 and previous years.

I would also like to announce that the new steering committee has taken
over from the old one, and will serve until the summer of 2012. Please
see the minutes below.

Best regards,
Marc van Kreveld

Secretary of the (previous) steering committee

------------------------------------------------------------------------

SoCG 2009 Business meeting, Aarhus, June 8

Chaired by Guenter Rote, chair of the steering committee

1. Lars Arge, conference chair

Lars presented the attendence numbers (135), budget breakdown (good
balance), and mentioned the fact that the conference was held in
cooperation with the ACM, like usual when it is held outside the US.
He also thanked his fellow organisers for their part in the organisation.

2. John Hershberger, PC chair

John presented the whole process by which the submissions were reviewed,
including the dates, the use of EasyChair, and some statistics. There
were 195 abstracts submitted, which led to 170 paper submissions (second
highest ever). Of these, 44 were accepted (26%, which is the lowest ever).
As last year, John made sure that the reviews were edited to avoid 
unfortunate
formulations, and to add possible useful text from the on-line discussion.
Furthermore, John thanked the submitters of papers, the reviewers, and his
PC.  He chose to accept only as many papers as fit into a single
track conference, and remarked that several more good papers could have
been accepted (had there been space in the program).

Then John raised some points that led to discussions. One of these was
the paper length. Although submitters followed the instructions mostly,
appendices sometimes lead to many page submissions. There is no unified
way in which PC members or reviewers deal with the appendices. The lively
discussion did not have a clear outcome.

Another discussion issue that John raised was that of double-blind
reviewing (where only the PC chair knows the author names), or the milder
form of anonymous submissions (where additional reviewers do not know
the author names, but the PC does). Some claimed that it would make the
reviewing process more fair, while others believed that it would not make
much of a difference (also because many people hear of relevant results 
early
anyway).

3. Guenter Rote, steering committee chair

Announcement of the new steering committee for the period 2009-2012
(summer to summer). The elections held this spring led to the following
new steering committee:

Jack Snoeyink (chair)
Mark de Berg (secretary)
Joe Mitchell
Guenter Rote
Monique Teillaud

4. Suresh Venkatasubramanian, conference chair of SoCG 2010

Suresh announced the dates and other details for SoCG 2010 at Snowbird,
near Salt Lake City. It will be held June 13-16, and the registration
fee was announced to be around 275 US dollar. The center allows parallel
sessions, but for cost reasons it is best to concentrate this to one
(or two) days, and not spread it over three days. Suresh also suggested
that one (part of an) afternoon could be used for a hike, which would
be the social program. One inconvenience of the conference site is the
lack of transportation from Snowbird to downtown Salt Lake City and
back (e.g., for dinner, or if you have a hotel downtown instead of in
Snowbird).

5. Guenter Rote

Announcement of the PC chair and PC for SoCG 2010: David Kirkpatrick
will be the PC chair for SoCG 2010. The names of the PC members were also
revealed:

Hee-Kap AHN
Nina AMENTA
Tetsuo ASANO
Sergey BEREG
Therese BIEDL
Erin CHAMBERS
Hazel EVERETT
Sandor FEKETE
Efi FOGEL
David KIRKPATRICK, Chair
Valentin POLISHCHUK
Raimund SEIDEL
Bettina SPECKMANN
Csaba TOTH
Chee YAP

6. Bids for SoCG 2011

Steve Oudot and Frederic Chazal made a bid to host SoCG 2011 in Paris
(the one in France). They showed the planned location (a theater downtown
near the Quartier Latin) and the probable costs for participants.

Since there was no other bid, the community did not have to vote,
and Paris was gladly accepted as the place to be (in June 2011, if you are
a computational geometer).

7. Discussion topics

As the beer and sausages were waiting outside the hall where the business
meeting was held, discussion was kept to a minimum....

8. Announcement of JoCG, Jeff Erickson

Jeff announced the start of a new journal by the community, for the
community, the Journal of Computational Geometry. It will be free and
on-line, and therefore fast. The editors-in-chief and managing editors
were made known, and also the editorial board. The idea is to rotate more
quickly (four years) than other journals. JoCG will be high
quality, peer-reviewed, and indexed and counted at all the right places.

End of business meeting

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