WWW 2006 PC meeting

Just back from the WWW2006 Program Committee meeting in Edinburgh. Santosh and I joined the other track chairs to decide which of the record breaking number of submissions, should be accepted to the conference. In some cases it was an easy decision to make, but in others it was very difficult. Although judging the quality of papers within a given track is usually straightforward, in some cases we had to judge between tracks and that's not easy. However, at the forefront of everyone's minds at this stage was not protecting individual tracks, but ensuring that overall the quality of the conference was high. Sometimes this meant that uniformly excellent papers were rejected in favour of papers that had generated a lot of discussion within the review process, on the assumption that they would continue to generate good discussion within the conference.

It was tough. We had two sites for the track chairs going concurrently: Edinburgh and Boston. Because of the time difference we started at 9am and were going until 8pm. But as you can see, our host the National E-Science Institute, had some good surroundings.

In the end, of the record breaking 700+ submissions, we accepted about 11%. That's not 11% from each track, though. Some tracks had more accepted than others simply because of the quality differences between tracks.

One final comment: for my own track, it was nice to see more Web Services papers this year.