I agree with Nitin. Let nature take its course. We will find that the best conferences will survice the test of time as they have over the past 50 years and those that are not will eventually wither away!
I am not saying don't do anything about the issues of "too many conferences" or "tccc-sponsorship", "metrics / parameters and quality". I know that our community has very dedicated and very smart people who will come up with solutions to all these issues. Let us not lose focus of seeing the "big picture" and perhaps more imprtant problems in the horizon such as getting more bright students to go to Engineering! Best Wishes Ravi Sankar -----Original Message----- From: Vaidya, Nitin H [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, June 02, 2013 7:20 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Tccc] ComSoc technical cosponsorship - rating the review process >> I sympathize with the notion that there are probably too many >> conferences and workshops I say let a thousand flowers bloom ... no one is forcing anyone to read all those papers. My views on this have changed over the years, mellowing with age -:) But it seems to me that many conferences that are not considered top-tier are serving some useful purpose. And surely there are some gems published in these conferences waiting to be discovered by others. Perhaps the real issue isn't that we have too many conferences, but that there are too many of us working in the area, and increasing in numbers each year. I wonder if the number of conferences is growing at the same rate in other research areas. I don't see any noticeable increase at all in my other area of interest, namely, distributed algorithms/theory, but then it is not a "hot" topic the way networking is. - nitin P.S. - somewhat off topic, but see https://www.simonsfoundation.org/features/science-news/unheralded-mathematician-bridges-the-prime-gap/ for evidence that sometimes excellent research comes from "unexpected" places (unexpected only because of prejudices). _______________________________________________ IEEE Communications Society Tech. Committee on Computer Communications (TCCC) - for discussions on computer networking and communication. [email protected] https://lists.cs.columbia.edu/cucslists/listinfo/tccc
