The call for papers for the first annual conference on Innovations in Computer Science has been released. ICS is a new theoretical computer science conference, with a very small but stellar program committee (Avrim Blum, Shafi Goldwasser, Sanjeev Khanna, Christos Papadimitriou, Rafael Pass, Nir Shavit, Vijay Vazirani, Andrew Yao (Chair)) with the goal of “encouraging new ideas, approaches, perspectives, conceptual frameworks and techniques.” To quote further from the call for papers:
- Novel and promising ideas will be given preference in the selection process. The program committee of ICS will assign significant weight to the conceptual message communicated by the submission.
- The program committee will prefer papers that open new and fruitful directions of explorations. In other words, ICS will prefer papers that make first steps in new directions and raise new questions, over papers that provide the last word on a well-established direction.
- At the discretion of the program committee, the evaluation process may be interactive, so as to include questions to the authors and clarifications by them, if necessary.
Or as Vijay Vazirani said at lunch, they want the first paper (of many) on a topic, not the last (or even worse, the next).
Submissions are due September 15, 2009, which might be after the announcement of papers accepted to SODA 2010, in case you're thinking of submitting a paper that SODA will find too novel, promising, or conceptual. The conference itself is January 4-7, 2010 in Beijing, roughly two weeks before SODA.
More details are promised at the business meeting tonight.
Were any examples provided of papers that would fit in well (and more importantly), papers that sort of fit in ? I'm trying to figure out what it means for something to "open up a new area". Does it have to be a new area of computation ? For example, would the original Kleinberg HITS paper have been appropriate ?
Posted by: Suresh | May 31, 2009 at 07:04 PM
It's easy enough to list examples of papers that "open up a new area" now, after they have already done so. It's a little harder to pick the winners ahead of time. Perhaps we should chip in to buy the program committee a time machine.
Posted by: D. Eppstein | May 31, 2009 at 11:46 PM
"We only want papers that are going to be cited a lot."
Posted by: Matt | June 01, 2009 at 08:42 AM