Australian rankings of theory conferences

CORE is an association of university computer science departments from Australia and New Zealand. Lately CORE and therefore Australian and NZ CS academics, have been busy preparing rankings for conferences and journals.

It is not clear (to me and most people I know) what the purpose of those rankings will be exactly, but most likely they will be used as a guideline for funding projects from the ARC, and for the RQF, the research quality framework in Australia. It is also not clear (to me and most people I know) if this is an one-off thing or there is some intention to keep these lists updated.

CORE (= the academics in australia) recently published rankings for computer science conferences. There is a description of the process that was followed and a description of the tiers.

My understanding of the process, is that it was very much ad-hoc, and involved lots of people saying their opinion about conferences ("this conference is top because i have a lot of papers in it") and then some select core committee put everything together.

My interpretation of the intended meaning of the tiers is as follows:

• tier 1: the top conferences in the field
  
• tier 2: respectable entries in your CV
• tier 3: still in your CV but it's "your student's paper" if anyone asks. no-one will ask though.
  
• tier 4: you wouldn't include these in a promotion or grant application (in a reasonable place) and the only acceptable excuse would be that the conference was in bora-bora or hawaii.

I am guessing that Tier 5 would be conferences of the type "dear author, your paper has been accepted, even though you haven't sent one. By the way, please consider submitting more than one papers, you only have to pay registration once"

The tiers were at some point renamed to A+, A, B, C.

I filtered out some theory conferences from the list.

• A+ conferences include: STOC, FOCS, SODA, CG
• Tier A: ALENEX, APPROX, CCC, COCOON, EC, ESA, FST&TCS, GD, ICALP, IPCO, ISAAC, RANDOM, SAT, STACS, SWAT,
• Tier B: ALEX, ANALCO, AofA, AWOCA, CATS, CCCG, COCOA, DMTCS, FCT, FUN, ICTAC, LATIN, MFCS, SIROCCO, WG
• Tier C: ACID, AWOCA, EWCG, ICTCS, WALCOM, WAW,

List with complete names follows.

Tier A+

• ACM SoCG ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry
• FOCS IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
• SODA ACM/SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms
• STOC ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing

Tier A

• ALENEX Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments
• APPROX International Workshop on Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems
• CCC IEEE Symposium on Computational Complexity
• COCOON International Conference on Computing and Combinatorics
• EC ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
• ESA European Symposium on Algorithms
• FST&TCS Foundations of Software Technology & Theoretical Computer Science
• GD Graph Drawing
• ICALP International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming
• IPCO MPS Conference on integer programming & combinatorial optimization
• ISAAC International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation
• RANDOM International Workshop on Randomization and Computation
• SAT International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing
• STACS Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science
• SWAT Scandinavian Workshop on Algorithm Theory

Tier B

• ALEX Algorithms and Experiments
• ANALCO Workshop on Analytic Algorithms and Combinatorics
• AofA Conference on Analysis of Algorithms
• AWOCA Australasian Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms
• CATS Computing: The Australasian Theory Symposium
• CCCG Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry
• COCOA Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications
• DMTCS International Conference on Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science
• FCT Fundamentals of Computation Theory
• FUN Conference on fun with algorithms
• ICTAC International Colloquium on Theoretical Ascpects of Computing
• LATIN International Symposium on Latin American Theoretical Informatics
• MFCS Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science
  
• SIROCCO Colloquium on Structural Information and Communication Complexity
• WG Workshop on Graph Theory

Tier C

• ACID Algorithms and Complexity in Durham
• AWOCA Australasian Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms
• EWCG European Workshop on Computational Geometry
• ICTCS Italian Conference on Theoretical Computer Science
• WALCOM Workshop on Algorithms and Computation
• WAW Workshop on Algorithms and Models for the Web-Graph

Australian journal ranking - Part II

I feel very proud of myself. I finally took time to write a couple of proposals for the Australian journal ranking. I wrote proposals for the three computational geometry journals (DCG, CGTA and IJCGA) and Algoritmica. I proposed to rank all of them as Tier A journals (categories are A+, A, B, C). This might not be entirely fair, however, if you look at the other journals ranked as Tier A+, A and B I think it's an accurate ranking. A+ only contains three journals from my field: JACM, SICOMP and ACM Transactions of Algorithms, which I think is reasonable. Tier A contains all other decent journals and Tier B and C contains the rest. There is also category U containing journals that haven't been ranked yet.

Free registration for chairs?

I just found out that only one of the two co-chairs for each conference at ACSW'08 is allowed a free registration. I found it a bit strange, especially since the two co-chairs do all the work (except the local arrangements). Without the chairs there would be no conference.