Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 22:38:23 -0400
From: "Daniel Parrott Ashbrook" <
>
Mostly because each paper needs to have several reviewers. Many
reviewers end up reading quite a few papers - I've reviewed 10-15 for
past conferences. Last year there were more than 700 pages worth of
submissions - do you really want to spend a week doing nothing else
than reviewing? Feel free to volunteer! Once papers come back from
reviewers, the program committee has to go through all the reviews and
pick out which ones to accept, which can be a difficult process. Then
we have to let the authors have time to submit the final draft - this
is where updates to technology can be integrated. If you think you've
got something that's relying on advancing technology so much that an
extra four months will completely change it, then there are a variety
of other conferences you can submit to whenever it's ready.
In addition (speaking as someone who's been on at least a dozen
program committees, though never for this conference), there are often
other issues. For example, once accepted, authors need enough lead
time to make sure they can make it to the conference. This can
include:
o Making sure they're not doing something else then
o Arranging flights (often months in advance for Europeans)
o Lining up funding, for those authors with tight budget issues
o Getting relevant visas (particularly a problem from '01 to 04
or so; we had many issues where even six months of notice was -not-
enough time for an author to get through US paperwork to be allowed
to come here to present!)
Unless they're presenting, many authors might not be able to get the
funding necessary, or permission to take time off from their jobs.
Thus, they can't even -start- any of the above steps until -after-
paper reviews are done. When you add up the lead times of the two
processes, things can really stretch out.
This is also quite field-specific, and often an issue for journals as
well as conferences. I recall issues a decade ago where typical AI/CS
journals could take 1-3 -years- to finally have a paper hit the
streets, which looked to me like the field was moribund. On the other
hand, there were certain molecular biology journals which required a
paper review to be done in 3 days and turned the entire cycle around
in 1-2 weeks, exclusively by fax (since many biologists didn't have
email then, especially email that could handle the sort of complicated
markup required of a paper---CS people take LaTex and Postscript for
granted, but the biologists still depended on paper). The fact that
the biologists could move so fast using just paper and faxes, compared
to certain AI/CS journals, was quite suggestive of the sorts of
deadline pressures that sometimes arose in a rapidly-moving field
where getting scooped really mattered and was quite a likely outcome.
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