This is my opportunity to write a few lines, read by perhaps very few, about some really boring statistics. First, I would like to bring up an issue that deserves some thought. Between ACC, CDC and IFAC (or ECC, MSC, etc.) we write and review over 5,000 conference papers a year, this year a lot more! We seek at least two reviews per paper (done in less than a month), and increasingly demand little to no overlap with other conference and/or journal submissions. Naturally, we have developed an army of volunteers (see the numbers below), to handle all this. Is this sustainable? After thousands of reviews (which needed millions of reminders), we get something resembling a 3,000 page version of IEEE Trans. on …. , which of course it is not – nor it is meant to be. Should we expect something different, and more, from such a huge effort?
This year, we took some chances and did unusual things (mistakes are all mine). We have 10 sessions dedicated to tutorials and industrial sessions. They are quite varied. Some are demonstration projects for the Smart Grid, others are panel and group discussions on the grid, energy, or sustainability. We also have more traditional tutorials (say on nano-scale self assembly). We experimented with having past and future Program Chairs do a critical part of the job (putting the sessions and schedule together), weeks after the preceding CDC. Let us see how it goes. We invite you to give the powers that be some feedback (AACC Board of Directors, IEEE-CSS Board of Governors, etc.). You write the papers, review the papers, chair/co-chair the sessions (ok not all of you, only the nice ones!) and listen to the talks. What you say matters.
Now the exciting numbers: somewhere about 1450 papers submitted (depending on the precise definition of a submission), 972 presentations/papers accepted (18 parallel sessions of 6 papers, three times a day for three days). Depending on how you count things, an acceptance rate of anywhere from 63% to 63%. We had over 40 people in the program committee, and about 200 people as associate editors of different societies, handling all these papers. I simply do not have the space to thank them all. We are lucky to have them as colleagues.
The glue that kept all this together was Paperplaza and the two people who manage it, Alessandro Astolfi and Pradeep Misra. Not only there were indispensible, they were a pleasure to deal with. I must thank John Wen and Farshad Khorrami for being kind enough to help me throughout and Jurek Sassiadek for being the vice chair of Invited Sessions. Mehdi Admadian, Mayuresh Kothare and Martha Grover went out of their way to accommodate the program needs and showed wonderful patience and humor. Naturally the big boss Rahmat Shoureshi deserves all the blame for picking me as the Program Chair. He will live to regret that one. Richard Braatz, Dawn Tilbury and Danny Abramovitch, as past and future Program Chairs, were unbelievably helpful (and nice!)
I welcome you to the 2011 ACC and wish you a pleasant and enriching experience.
Faryar Jabbari
2011 ACC Program Chair