Confs: EC, FUN, WWW

Monday was the EC Conf Deadline. The day before, I had a 20+ pages of symbols and logic understandable only to the authors, so I had to sling that thing over my shoulder, go sleepless for a night, and produce the magical 10 or so, clear to everyone. Deadlines should end at sane local times so you can do something after. After the EC deadline, I went to catch The Stray Dog, part of the Kurosawa Centennial at Film Forum. Young Mifune is unrecognizable, made in 1949 this film is a gem, it is The Bicycle Thief of postwar Japan.

Deadline gets delayed: FUN moves its deadline to Jan 24. There is the constant din of conf discussions in our community, whether it is to accept innovative papers, or textbook algorithms or whatever. Also, there is a constant clamor for video talks or submissions and other tweaks. Seems to me that some of these would be appropriate for FUN, so we have a few days to "... sling things over ... shoulder...".

I was at a PC meeting the past few days. PC of WWW has a two-tier structure. Reviews review. Area Chairs (ACs) push reviewers to discuss if needed to reach consensus. Then, ACs represent the discussions to the rest of the ACs and defend and modulate the decisions. Also, there are secondary ACs to sanity check the primary ACs. Even with this process, at some point, the ACs meeting got tiring with ranks dwindling and clock running down, the PC Chairs Juliana Freire and Soumen Chakrabarti had to "sling things over ... shoulder.." and drive the PC to the conclusion. In general, I can switch context in research fairly easily, but even I was in a daze, following discussions on papers from equilibrium analysis for ads to approximation algorithms for social networks, machine learning for user behavior on the web, specification languages, user interfaces, systems, recommendations, annotations, twitter, mobile, and many many others.