------------------------------------------- Report on review process for PSE-ESCAPE'97 by Sigurd Skogestad (IPC chairman) ------------------------------------------- Prepared: 23 May 1997 Updated: 19 May 1998 The review was organized in five subject areas Area 1: Design and synthesis Area 2: Process control Area 3: Modelling and simulation Area 4: Intelligent systems Area 5: Industrial applications and case studies (Intelligent systems includes also operational issues such as scheduling and planning, decision support systems, and plant and conditioning monitoring, as well as AI methods and neural networks.) For each area there were two coordinators plus about 8 reviewers (see the list of IPC members) A web-page was set up for electronic submission of both abstracts, full paper and final paper (about 78% used this option). The web page also contained the information in the 2nd announcement (program and printable forms for registration and hotel reservation). 24 Jun 1993: Proposal made to organize ESCAPE-7 in Trondheim 24 Jan 1994: Proposal made to combine this event with PSE-97 07 Jun 1995: Preliminary announcement of joint conference 01 Feb 1996: Distibution of 1st announcement with "call for papers" (6000 copies) 10 Jun 1996: Abstract due date 19 Aug 1996: Accepted abstracts notified by email/fax (written send later) 13 Nov 1996: Deadline full papers 09 Jan 1997: Accepted papers notified by email/fax (written letter with reviewers comments send about 1 week later) 24 Jan 1997: Draft session program available on the web 21 Feb 1997: Revised/final paper due date 28 Feb 1997: Printed 2nd announcement (2000 copies) with prelim. program send to authors to inform about presentation form (plenary oral, regular oral, poster) 07 Mar 1997: All final papers send to Pergamon press The international program committee (IPC) did not meet, except at the ESCAPE-6 meeting on 28 May 1996 were a little over half of the IPC members were present. A brief description of the statistics of the review procedure is given below. Total no. of abstracts received: more than 600 No. of abstracts received in time to be reviewed by the committee: 575 The abstract review was performed by the 8 coordinators for area 1-4 and by the entire committee for area 5 (industrial). The results of the abstract review were as follows: Area 1: 105 abstracts 46 accept 26 possibly accept 33 reject Area 2: 137 abstracts 30 accept 39 possibly accept 68 reject Area 3: 140 abstracts 30 accept 47 possibly accept 63 reject Area 4: 116 abstracts 27 accept 28 possibly accept 51 reject Area 5: 77 abstracts 30 accept 8 possibly accept 39 reject TOTAL 575 abstracts 163 accept 158 possibly accept 254 reject TOTAL accepted: 321 abstracts (accept + possibly accept) Based on the abstract reviews I wrote to the area coordinators: >In the end we aim for about 200 papers. Assuming a total return >of 80% for the ACCEPTED (after loosing about 10% submissions and rejecting >about 10%) this leaves room for 70 of the 158 POSSIBLY ACCEPTED >papers. To make it clear to the authors that the rejection rate >may be quite high we have written the following: > The IPC has made the following decision regarding your abstract: > POSSIBLY ACCEPT > This decicion means that the IPC has had some doubts about accepting > your abstract, and before putting efforts into preparing a full paper we > warn you that the rejection rate for papers in > the category may be quite high. Nevertheless, if you feel > you have a relevant paper of high quality and originality, then we > encourage you to go ahead and prepare a full paper. This worked quite well as we received full papers from 75% of all accepted abstracts. But note that 89% of authors with "ACCEPT" returned a full papers, whereas only 60% of authors with "POSSIBLY ACCEPT" returned a full paper. The papers then went through a careful review procedure with two quite detailed reviews for each paper. Reviewers were the IPC members. The results were as follows: Papers with "ACCEPT": 150 received, 139 accepted, (7% rejected) Papers with "POSSIBLY ACCEPT": 93 received, 62 accepted, (33% rejected) TOTAL: 243 received, 201 accepted, (17% rejected) The rejection rates where quite evenly distributed in the five areas. The accepted papers were distributed as follows: Area 1 (Design and synthesis): 50 papers Area 2 (Process Control): 43 papers Area 3 (Modelling and simulation): 40 papers Area 4 (Intelligent systems): 36 papers Area 5 (Industrial applications): 32 papers Total: 201 papers In addition to the 201 contributed papers, we have invited 4 plenary talks; two of which submitted papers to be included in the conference volume (Westerberg and Rosenbrock submitted papers; the plenary paper of Morari did not make it into the proceedings but is available on the internet; whereas Harg did not provide any paper). Note that the above area designiations were used mainly for review purposes, and the final sessions are set up as a mix of papers from various areas - this also applies to the four poster sessions (see http://www.kkt.chembio.ntnu.no/research/PSE_ESCAPE/sessions_ref.html where the first number refers to the above areas). The symposium is organized over 4 days with plenary sessions before lunch, and 3 or 4 parallel sessions after lunch. The poster session is late Tuesday afternoon. The presentation form for the 201 accepted papers is as follows: Oral plenary (30 min): 8 papers Oral in parallel sessions (20 min): 141 papers Posters (with 3 min presentation): 52 papers In addition, the four plenary presentations are 60 min each. We organize an Education session with two contributed papers and the rest of the session organized by EURECHA and CACHE. We organize a plenary panel discussion on "Industry-academic interactions and Open standards". The panel has 10 members, most of them from industry. -Sigurd Skogestad