To decide the scheduling of the coming FOCS, and of any conference with parallel sessions, it would be great to have the following tool: a site where prospective participants can browse the list of accepted papers and their abstracts, decide which talks sound interesting, and select them in a checklist. After a while, based on the lists and some simple algorithm (probably, spectral techniques would work), a program automatically selects a schedule with few conflicts and with similar papers in the same session.
Optionally, after the schedule is finalized and the submission of lists is closed, the site could send a “you might also be interested in…” list to the registered users who sent in their lists, as a “reward.”
Does something like this exist? If not, would any reader(s) want to take it on as a volunteer project? It would have to be done within the next two weeks or so, but I believe that for someone who knows how to use the right tools it is a matter of a couple of days of coding. I can host the site at Stanford.
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June 22, 2010 at 10:01 pm
Suresh Venkatasubramanian
fantastic idea. I only wish I knew enough to help in the time frame you’re thinking about.
June 22, 2010 at 10:46 pm
lifeofpi
Absolutely great idea! Should have been done much earlier.
Will the list of accepted papers be out tomorrow (Wednesday)?
June 23, 2010 at 12:26 am
Mohammad
this was done several years ago, i think for STOC. Michel Goemans was the chair. i wrote a simple html form to collect the data, and Michel wrote the algorithm for scheduling. I think it was something like a min-weight matching algorithm.
June 23, 2010 at 12:28 am
Mohammad
btw, I’d be happy to help, in return for getting the data that this system generates!
June 24, 2010 at 3:18 am
Dan Spielman
I thought about doing something like this for FOCS 09. Rather than collecting data, I considered using data I already had: the list of papers each committee member wanted to review.
The problem I found was that my approach generated incoherent sessions.
Once I decided that I wanted sessions with some intellectual coherence, that most sessions should have 3 or 4 papers, that sessions with the same numbers of papers should be scheduled against each other, and satisfied constraints of individual speakers, partitioning wasn’t very useful.
The one thing I used my code for was to produce scores of how much one proposed session conflicted with another. But, it was a low-order effect on the final schedule.
In the end, I spent around two days pushing talks around.