[TYPES/announce] Two phase reviewing for POPL; a response

[Rod Moten]

I haven't been to a POPL conference in years, but shortening the 
presentations to 10 minutes is a bad idea. You should give more time 
instead of less. How long does it take to determine your findings that 
you present at POPL? How many people did it take to determine those 
findings? How much funding was needed? How valuable to the community are 
the findings? I think the answers to these questions should determine 
the selection process and the length of presentations. Just my $0.02.



Stefan Monnier wrote:
> [ The Types Forum (announcements only), 
>      http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-announce ]
>
> 1. random-choice is good
>
> Since people seem to agree that the current selection process is
> somewhat arbitrary, and too conservative, I think that the human
> selection should only be used to select the "acceptable papers", and
> then a random choice can be used to pick the N papers we can accomodate.
>
> This has already been suggested here, where "acceptable" is used to
> decide whether to include it in the proceedings and the random choice
> decides whether you get a time slot, but if noone likes this option, we
> could use the random choice directly to pick the set of papers to
> include in the proceedings.  It may sound outrageous (to quote David
> "imagine your student has one great result and one great POPL paper and
> a coin flip means they don't get to ..."), but it's not clear it would
> be worse than what we already have, and it would probably reduce the
> load on PC members.
>
> 2. shortening presentations
>
> To take an example from yet another field: in literature, conference
> presentations don't come with papers at all.  You submit an abstract
> (like half a page) and the rest is purely oral (even slides are
> unusual).  It shows that proceedings and presentations really don't have
> to go hand in hand.  So we may want to make the link between the two
> a bit more loose.  In many ways, conference talks are ways to promote
> the article: 25 minutes aren't enough to really show much more than the
> very general idea and the kind of problems it might solve.
> So shortening some of the talks even more might not be such a bad idea.
> I might go even further and suggest we shorten all the talks down to
> 10minutes.  We could link that idea with stronger "sessions" that add
> a longer discussion period shared among all the presenters, so the few
> talks that need/deserve more time get it back in the form of
> a discussion.  This might also make the conferences themselves more
> lively (rather than only having life in the backroom talks).
>
>
>         Stefan
>
>