Communication Theory Technical Committee (CTTC)

ICC 2006

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

DETAILED MINUTES

Meeting called to order at 5:45 PM

Andrea Goldsmith, Vice-Chair, conducting

A. Goldsmith mentioned Marvin Simon's medical condition and

circulated a book for attendees to sign and wish him well.

1) Announcements

    1-a) The CTTC Awards Committee has been formed and is chaired by A.

    Goldsmith with 4 committee members. Awards will be given at CT

    Symposium at ICC and Globecom, starting at this conference and going

    forward.

    1-b) Recipients of the CTTC Service Award:

    Robert Lucky, Jack Salz, and Don Schilling.

    Citation: "for your vision in initiating the communication theory workshop and
    your long-standing service and contributions to the communication theory community."

    1-c) Recipients of Best Paper Award:

    "Iterative Network and Channel Decoding for the Two-Way Relay Channel," Christoph Hausl

    and Joachim Hagenauer.

    Honorable Mention: "Trapping Sets in Irregular LDPC Code Ensembles," Olgica Milencovic,

    Emina Soljanin, and Philip Whiting

    1-d) A. Goldsmith summarized the purpose of the 6 parts of the

    Policies & Procedures Document, namely, to provide a form of

    institutional memory for future TPCs for issues such as reviewing

    papers, timelines, common pitfalls, etc. Also, the CTTC will go back

    to ComSoc to recommend that other ComSoc committees form their own

    such documents. She then opened the floor to comments and suggestions.

    + D. Taylor recommended the 6 separate documents be merged into a

      single document, the less documents the better. Also, the document

      should have a full list of contacts for IEEE and ComSoc, and links to

      other documents, such as plagiarism policies.

    + E. Ayanoglu would like to suggest an alternative to the averaging

      process currently used to rank papers in the Symposium.

    + S. Galli said that the average score AND the span of the min and max

      score could be combined somehow to produce a final rank of the

      paper. E. Ayanoglu said his idea was along these lines. This might

      reduce the problem, brought up by D. Taylor, of 3 very positive

      reviews and 1 very negative review and the paper gets rejected under

      the current scheme.

    + Some committee members expressed concern that some authors have 10-12

      papers at the conference. The discussion concluded that not much can

      be done since, for example, an advisor can have many students with

      papers at the conference.

    + M. Chiani brought up the idea of having double-blind reviews in the

      symposium. There was some consensus that even though the authors'

      identity can often be guessed, it seems that double-blind reviews

      might help less-known authors, who do not get the preferential

      treatment that can sometimes be enjoyed by well-known authors.

No action items resulted from the above discussions.

2) Conference Symposia Reports

2-a) ICC 2006, S. Benedetto was delayed by another meeting and was  not able to give a report.

2-b) Globecom 2006 (H. Jafarkhani) The committee will meet tomorrow to discuss the papers.

265 papers were submitted, 108 will be  accepted. Each paper received 3 reviews.

A first draft of the list of accepted papers has already been prepared. This will be reviewed

in the meeting tomorrow.

2-c) ICC 2007 (P. McLane) TPC has 48 members, correspondence with these members will begin shortly. The EDAS web page is now active. The TPC has been told by the conference organizing committee to get 3 TPC reviews for each paper PLUS 3 reviews outside the TPC. Their goal is to get 1 TPC review for each paper plus 3 other reviews (4 in total). The TPC was considering whether to have one invited talk (just a talk, not an invited paper). This would take up one slot for a talk in the symposium.

He opened this topic for discussion. D. Taylor pointed out that ComSoc policy is against invited papers at conferences. A. Goldsmith called for all votes in favor of an invited talk at the symposium: 0 votes were counted. As a result, no vote was taken against. The attendees were reminded of the  scheduling conflict between ICC'07 and ISIT'07.

2-d) Globecom 2007 (S. Ulukus) Still forming TPC, the goal is 50-60 committee members,

volunteers are invited to step forward.

2-e) ICC 2008 will be held in Beijing. A. Goldsmith reminded the attendees that potential

volunteers can visit the CTTC volunteer web  page.

3) CTW Reports

3-a) CTW 2006 (A. Goldsmith and J. Andrews) The location was great.

There were 80+ attendees. There were panel discussions each

afternoon, which was a new feature. There was a strong information

theory and networking emphasis to the presentations. This topic was

opened for discussion, but no detailed discussion ensued, other than

the mention of minor complaints that were received. J. Andrews

mentioned that, based on the experience of CTW'05, they were very

aggressive about the budget and also very aggressive about

publicity. Both efforts were ruled a success.

3-b) CTW 2007 (J. Zhang) Will be held in Sedona Arizona, May 20-23.

The organizing committee was wondering if there was sufficient

interest in 3 full days of sessions instead of 2-1/2 days. Votes in

favor of 3 full days: 8, votes against 3 full days: 3. A. Goldsmith

requested J. Zhang put together a paragraph regarding this issue and

give it to the CTTC for e-mail distribution to the committee at large

for further comment.

Attendance: 49

The meeting was adjourned at 6:30 PM.