TCCC Meeting Minutes - Globecom '95 |
November 14, 1995, 5:30 pm
The meeting was called to order by the chair, Prof. Tatsuya Suda.
The chair recalled the scope and mission of the TCCC.
Conference and Workshop Activities
The following reports were made concerning our conference activities:
Workshop on Computer Communications
The IEEE 11th Annual Workshop on Computer Communications will
be held at Lansdowne Resort, Ashburn, Virginia, on September 15
through 18, 1996. The Lansdowne Resort is about a 10 minute drive
from Dulles/Washington airport and 40 miles from the Washington, D.C.
metropolitan area. The workshop is sponsored by the TCCC and the
George Washinghton University. Contact person for the TCCC is Dr.
Guy Omidyar (gomidyar@mailcenter.tsmi.iitri.com).
Infocom'96
INFOCOM
'96 will be held in San Francisco at the Hotel Nikko, March
1996. The conference general chair is Kazem Sohraby, and the TPC
chair is Biswanath Mukherjee. There will be 6
tutorials (Half day tutorials: Wireless Communication Networks, by Don
Cox, Stanford University; Image and Video Compression, by Avideh
Zakhor, UC Berkeley; Full day tutorials: Optical Networking, by Rajiv
Ramaswami, IBM; High-Performance Networks: From Ethernet to ATM by
Pravin Varaiya, UC Berkeley; Broadband Networking: Models and
Techniques for Control, Design and Management, by Debasis Mitra, AT&T
Bell Laboratories; Multimedia Conferencing over the Internet, by Van
Jacobson, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory). The final program is already
available. The Technical Program Chair, Prof. Biswanath Mukherjee
(mukherjee@cs.ucdavis.edu) presented a report on the conference
program. 590 papers were submitted, 176 accepted, with an acceptance rate of
29.8% (in 1995, the acceptance rate was 33.3%), 12 withdrawn, 131 TPC
members (13 ATPCs), 700+ reviewers and 1800+ reviews. The committee
detected concurrent submissions, namely 16 detected with TON and 8
with earlier Infocom. The committee gave the authors the choice to
withdraw their submissions; 8 authors withdrew their papers. Some
papers, under previous agreement with the authors, were pointed out
for a possible 'quick' review process to journals: 10 to Transactions
on Networking (August 1996 issue), 12 to WINET (August 1996 issue) and
7 to JSAC's issue on multipoint communications. The review
process was handled electronically; 30% of the final submission were
made by ftp. Where the paper was available in electronic form, the
paper was sent out via ftp to the TPC members.
Six panels
(Wireless Multimedia Networks: Issues, Challenges and Directions;
Inter-operability in Multi-vendor ATM Networks; Synchronization for
Multimedia Communication; Can high-speed wide-area networks be
effectively controlled?; Simulation Modeling of Communication
Networks: State of the Art and Challenges; The Economics of the
Internet) will be held.
So far there are already 95 registrations
for Infocom 96. The Keynote speaker will be Dr. Arno Penzias, Vice
President of Research at AT&T Bell Laboratories.
ICC'96
ICC '96 will be held in Dallas, Texas, June 23-28, 1996. Our
TC representative, Ibrahim Habib, can be reached at ibhcc@cunyvm.cuny.edu, phone
+1 212-650-7184, fax: +1 212-650-8249. A total of 625 papers were
submitted to the conference. The TCCC committee is sponsoring 11
sessions (7 full sessions, 2 half sessions and 2 co-sponsored sessions
with the quality assurance technical committee). It handled 126
papers, out of which 64 have been accepted, an acceptance ratio of
51%.
Globecom'96
Globecom '96
will be held in London, November 18-22, 1996.
Our TC representative is Doug Schmidt, schmidt@wustl.edu, phone: +1
314-935-7538, fax: +1 314-935-7302. The TCCC committee proposed to
sponsor 11 sessions and 1 panel. A conference meeting took place in
Singapore on November 15th, 1995. Help is needed to decide the
proposed hot topics and session names.
Infocom'97
INFOCOM '97
will be held in Kobe, Japan, April 7-11, 1997.
Tatsuya Suda is the technical program co-chair ( suda@ics.uci.edu ). The conference
co-general chairs are Prof. Hasegawa and Prof. Pickholtz. Prof.
Hasegawa assured us that Kobe will have recovered from the earthquake by
1997. The Gigabit Networks Workshop will be held back-to-back with
Infocom 1997. Prof. Miyahara gave some information about Kobe city,
the conference site of INFOCOM 1997. Kobe is located in the Kansai
area, which includes Osaka, Kyoto and Nara, in the south-west of
Honshu, the biggest island of Japan. Kobe has been known as an
international port city since 1868 and has become one of the largest
trade ports in the world. Kobe is also a cosmopolitan city. The
mixture of cosmopolitan and international flavor gives Kobe a unique
flavor not seen in nearby Kyoto and Osaka and attracts many,
especially, young people. Kobe can be reached in three hours and 20
minutes from Tokyo by Shinkansen (the bullet train), and only 32
minutes by high-speed jet foil from the Kansai International Airport.
The conference site of INFOCOM '97 is located on the International
Conference Center Kobe. The International Conference Center Kobe on
Port Island can be reached from the Kansai International Airport by
jet-foil. The official hotel of the conference is Kobe Portpia Hotel
near the conference center.
Prof. Suda introduced and thanked
Prof. Masayuki Murata, Osaka University, for Local arrangements;
Prof. Tetsuya Takine, Osaka University acting as the Treasurer; Prof.
Yuji Oie, Nara Institute of Tech. acting as the Publicity co-chair;
Dr. Aihara, NTT acting as an advisory committee member, and Prof.
Hideo Miyahara, Osaka University, acting as Technical Program
Committee Co-Chair.
ICC'97
ICC'97 will be held in Montreal, Canada, June 8-12, 1997.
Our TC representative is Zygmunt Haas (haas@acm.org). Prof. Suda showed a
report he had received from Dr. Dinesh Verma, Philips Labs, (dcv@philabs.philips.com) and
Dr. Weiguo Wang, ISS Singapore (wwang@iss.nus.sg) on the
conference. For more information the contact person is Celia Desmond
(Celia_L._Desmond@stentor.ca).
Globecom'97
Globecom'97, will be held in Phoenix, Arizona. Volunteers
are needed to work on the preparation of the conference.
ICC'98
ICC'98 volunteers are needed to work on the preparation of
the conference.
Other Business
The presentation of Prof. Biswanath Mukherjee about INFOCOM'96
provided the motivation to discuss some interesting general issues,
though a formal conclusion was not drawn. Prof. Suda suggested to
bring the discussion to the next TCCC meeting and to have a discussion
follow-up through the TCCC mailing list. The following summarizes
the discussions.
Concurrent Submissions
Prof. Akyildiz says that some calls for papers include a written rule
to avoid concurrent submission and suggests to include such a written
rule also in the call for INFOCOM. Prof. Daigle observes that for a
paper to be considered for publication in the Network Magazine, the
presentation of a related paper to a conference is requested. Prof.
Akyildiz noted that the round trip time in the review process of journals
such as Transaction on Networking is at least 8 months and a
relaxation on the rules for concurrent submission to a magazine should
be considered. It was also pointed out that concurrent submission
to multiple conferences should be avoided.
Review Process
The accuracy of the review process is questioned and the need to have
extensive feedback, and not only scores, sent to authors both in case
of acceptance and of rejection was raised by Prof. Boisson De Marca.
Prof. Suda emphasized that the review process is a resource demanding
process in terms of number and quality of the people involved in it.
The issue of blind reviews was raised and Kai Eng suggested that the
names of the reviewers should be published together with the paper in
a journal in order to identify clearly the responsible
reviewers. Alternatives on the organization of the review process were
debated by Profs. Decina, Daigle, Akyildiz and others including a
larger number of TPC members versus a hierarchical or a matrix
organization of the TPC members.
Conference Papers and Journals
The choice of the INFOCOM'96 TPC to point some outstanding papers
directly to journal's editors for a fast review process was discussed.
All participants agreed on the fact that conference reviews are not
the same as journal reviews. The review for a journal should be a
more in-depth process and the flavor of a paper in a journal should be
different than that of a conference paper. On the other hand,
everyone seemed convinced that timely contributions can hardly cope
with the round-trip times of a conference review process cascaded with
the review process of a journal. Prof. Decina said that if it is
decided to route outstanding conference contributions to journals, he
would encourage the submission to journals run by the IEEE
Communications Society.
Written by Vittorio
Trecordi, edited by Henning Schulzrinne, Duke P. Hong and Tatsuya Suda.
Last modified: December 4, 1995