Welcome from the Con. Gen Chair
Interview with PC Co-Chairs
Window on the World
Issue 1
An Interview With the Program Co-Chairs
By Jon Cooks
We caught up with Mehdi Jazayeri and Alex Wolf to see what they might reflect on.
Q: You both have been PC chairs before, right?
Yes, Mehdi was PC Chair of ESEC/FSE '97, and Alex was PC chair of Coordination '99, WACC '99, ISAW-2, and IWSSD-8.
Q: What was the best thing you did this time that you didn't do before?
Electronic submission and reviewing; much more careful planning and organization of the PC meeting; we did not grant any extensions on submissions. Finally, we got excellent reviews from PC members, and on time; it was a very conscientious program committee. [Wolf] Nothing to add, except to say that it was a great experience working with Mehdi!
Q: What was the worst thing you did this time?
Cannot think of any :-). Maybe accepting hard copy (there were four!).
Q: Can you give us stats on the number of papers submitted, etc.?
We had a record 335 papers submitted. About half of them were submitted on the day of the deadline! We accepted 49 for technical sessions; some others were referred to other tracks.
Q: We noticed that there was no "best paper from 10 ICSEs ago" this year. Is there a story behind that?
Hmmm… This is an intricate and important issue on which we spent a lot of time. The actual title of the award is "most influential paper". The idea behind it is to recognize papers that have had a profound impact, something which can only be recognized by looking back over an extended period of time. For example, one of the previous award-winning papers was the original paper on slicing by Mark Weiser. The award is made by a vote of the PC of the current ICSE. While there were many good papers presented at ICSE-12, none was judged to have had the impact in the 10 years since to have merited the award.
Q: What do you wish you had done earlier than you actually did it?
Actually, the schedule we had was fine and we never faced a crunch.
Q: To what extent did you use the WWW to help with the PC tasks?
A great deal. It was great and it made our job a lot easier. We used the CyberChair software and really appreciated it.
Q: So using the WWW was a success?
Yes, indeed.
Q: What would you have done differently on the Web if you could have?
The only serious problem that we faced was the inability of US printers to print Postscript papers submitted in A4 format. This caused a lot of headaches. Requiring PDF would have greatly helped this situation, but it would also have required people to purchase PDF writers. It's not clear what to do about this
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