Referee request

Today I got a request to referee a paper for a conference (which will remain unnamed). Usually a request is polite and friendly. However, this request was more demanding:

"You have been assigned as a reviewer for the paper XXXXX submitted to XXXXXX'08."

Thus not even asking me if I would like to be a reviewer. Further down in the mail it says:

"The review is due by Jan 26, 2008 10:00 PM, and it is very important that the review be turned in before this deadline."

It then continues:

"If you are unable to complete this review assignment for any reason, please send an email to the TPC chairs indicating the reasons for which you are unable to do this assignment."

So if I won't accept the kind invitation I have to motivate my decision? Can it be that the TPC won't accept my motivation? If so, do I have to referee the paper? What annoys me the most is that I actually sent a polite reply containing a short explanation why I couldn't referee the paper.

ISAAC - Day 3

Today I gave my two presentations. Both papers are about trajectories, or what is sometime called geospatial lifelines, which is the the research topic of our project in Sydney. In the first paper we consider the problem of compressing, or simplifying, trajectories such that both the spatial and temporal information is preserved. The problem has been studied earlier in the database community, however, we gave a first method that guarantees that approximate versions of standard operations such as where_at, when_at and nearest neighbour are "sound". We also showed how the simplification can be done in O(n log^3 n) time (in practice the standard Douglas-Peucker algorithm in 3D works like a charm).

The second paper considered the problem of computing a "popular place" in a set of trajectories. A popular place is just a region, in our case a square of given side length, that is "visited" by at least k different trajectories. Our main result is a quadratic time algorithm with a "matching" 3-SUM hardness proof.

Both presentations went okay and hopefully some of the participants now have an idea of the existing problems in the area.

Finally I had sushi!

Tomorrow I'm going back to Sydney and my new office which is on the top floor of the School of IT building at University of Sydney.

ISAAC - Day 2

I overslept and missed the invited talk by Robin Thomas. The rest of the day I again mostly listened to geometry papers, except a presentation on game theory by Stefan Schmid (Eidenbenz, Oswald and Wattenhofer). They considered an extended version of the prisoners'dilemma. I'm far from an expert in the area but it seems to have some relation to the concept of putting taxes on edges in a network as proposed by Cole, Dodis and Roughgarden.

Another talk that I found interesting was by Tetsuo Asano who gave a talk on triangulations with Steiner points. That is, the aim is to triangulate a polygon while optimising some criterion. However, you're allowed to add, say k, Steiner points in the interior. How will you add the Steiner points such that the criterion is optimised? They showed polynomial time algorithms for adding a constant number of Steiner points while optimising the maximum interior angle.

Today was also the day of the conference banquet. We were served a French/Italian dinner. I still haven't had any sushi since I arrived!!!

ISAAC - Day 1

After a week of diving in Thailand (Similan Islands) together with my fellow blogger Tasos, I'm now attending ISAAC in Sendai. Yesterday there was a workshop in the honour of Prof. Nishizeki's 60th birthday. Prof. Nishizeki founded ISAAC in 1990 in order to expand the research community to Asia and the Pacific. Unfortunately I missed most of the talks but during the afternoon I attended a talk by Dorothea Wagner. She talked about her favourite topic, routing in transportation networks. This is a topic that I find very appealing. Dorothea and her group use more "algorithmic engineering" than what I'm used to but I still find both the problem and the techniques used to obtain a practical solution very interesting. She covered the algorithmic engineering approaches which proves that a good theoretical understanding of a problem can give very fast and effective solutions.


The first talk at ISAAC was an invited talk by Pankaj Agarwal. He talked about I/O-efficient algorithms for analysing terrain data. As usual Pankaj gave an excellent talk that was easy to follow and still gave some insight into the problems in the area. The rest of the day I mainly attended the computational geometry sessions. It's surprising how many of the papers that are in the computational geometry field. I went through the program and concluded that almost half the papers are geometry related.

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.