Sixth International Conference on Formal Structures for Computation and Deduction (FSCD21) Minutes on the General Meeting - July 21st, 2021, 10:30-12:00 UTC-3 (virtual Zoom session) Chair: Delia Kesner Secretary: Beta Ziliani -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ## Agenda - Welcome by steering committee chair: Delia Kesner - Some news (account, who’s who, core, workshop scheduling committee) - Information about FSCD mailing list - Information about upcoming call for location for FSCD 2023 - Information about the election of two new steering committee members - Report on FSCD’21 (Buenos Aires, Argentina) - PC Chair: Naoki Kobayashi a. Conference chair: Alejandro Díaz-Caro b. Workshop chairs: Mauricio Ayala-Rincón and Carlos López-Pombo - Progress Report on FSCD’22@FloC’22 (Haifa, Israel) a. PC chair: Amy Felty b. Conference chair: Nachum Dershowitz - Thanks - AOB - Handover to new SC Chair -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ## Welcome by Steering Committee Chair: Delia Kesner Delia Kesner welcomed everyone to the meeting and announced the agenda. ## News ### FSCD Account There is a new bank account for FSCD, opened in 2020. Hosted by the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), it needs a special agreement between CNRS and the paying institution. Can pay usual expenses, although not all of them. For instance, it cannot pay awards. It is expected to be available in the near future. ### Who’s who @ FSCD FSCD has now a useful tool to plan future conferences: a historical record of containing the authors, PC members, invited speakers, steering committees, etc, counting now 400 people (FSCD 2021 included). This file is shared among the SC committee members, and it is important to keep it updated with the latest information, as it can help PC chairs and SC members to plan future conferences. ### FSCD asked to be ranked by the CORE ranking. The [CORE ranking](http://portal.core.edu.au/conf-ranks/) is a tool that is used by institutions to evaluate the impact of CS conferences. It ranks conferences as A* (best), A, B, C, and Other. The rankings are managed by the CORE Executive Committee. Currently the ranking coordinator is Lin Padgham. Last year there was a call for submission (November 2020, deadline: 30th December 2020), and FSCD asked rank A. In 2018, CORE lists RTA as A, and TLCA was not ranked. As a result, FSCD got "unranked:NEW". The justification was: > This conference made a submission to be added at rank A. > This is a new conference which grew out of a merger between 2 other > conferences, one of which was RTA, previously ranked A. The other > was not ranked in CORE. It was considered not possible to get > sufficient data at this stage to establish it as an A and it was > felt better to tag this as unranked:NEW which is reserved for > conferences that have started within the last 5 years, in order to > allow time for data to accumulate. It is not known when there will be a new deadline. We are ready to submit a new one when the time comes. ### The workshop scheduling Committee This is a new committee, constituted with representatives of all the FSCD SC workshops, FSCD local workshop chair(s), and SC workshop chair. Goal: structure the FSCD pre-workshops and post-workshops, avoid overlaps, agree on the schedule, share invited speakers, etc. Since it is a new committee, it would benefit greatly from an assessment to understand what can be improved in the coming years. ## Mailing list of FSCD There is a new mailing list, everyone is invited and encouraged to subscribe. http://lists.dcc.fc.up.pt/mailman/listinfo/fscd.conference There will be future CFP, CFL, CFN, etc. ## Future FSCD Locations FSCD has decided to join FLoC every 4 years. However, the pandemics make it hard to plan (FLoC 2022's location was decided last month). In 2022 FSCD will (hopefully) be located with FLoC in Haifa (see below). As for FSCD 2023, it should have been voted today, but given the pandemics the voting got delayed. The CFL will come soon. ## FSCD Steering Committee and 2021 election The following is a list with the current members within FSCD. Some members' periods are ending, being substituted or elected. | Name | Period | Condition | Substitution | |-----------------------|-----------|-------------------|---------------| | Mauricio Ayala-Rincón | 2018−2021 | Elected Member | 2021 Election | | Cynthia Kop | 2018−2021 | Elected Member | 2021 Election | | Damiano Mazza | 2019-2022 | Elected Member | | | Jakob Rehof | 2019-2022 | Elected Member | | | Silvia Ghilezan | 2020-2023 | Elected Member | | | Stefano Guerrini | 2020-2023 | Elected Member | | | Hélène Kirchner | 2018−2021 | PC Chair | N. Kobayashi | | Herman Geuvers | 2019-2022 | PC Chair | | | Zena M. Ariola | 2020-2023 | PC Chair | | | Luke Ong | 2018−2021 | Former SC Chair | D. Kesner | | Delia Kesner | 2018−2021 | Chair | H. Geuvers | | Jamie Vicary | 2018-2022 | SC Workshop Chair | | | Carsten Fuhs | 2020-2024 | Publicity Chair | | Two elected members from the Steering Committee are leaving this year, having finished their three-year term: Mauricio Ayala-Rincón and Cynthia Kop. We have three candidates for these two positions. Information on the SC is available at: https://fscd-conference.org/organization/steering-committee Candidate statements are available at: https://fscd2021.dc.uba.ar/sc-election.html The electronic vote will be on Belenios. https://belenios.loria.fr Everyone attending the general meeting will receive two emails shortly afterwards, one with a username/password and one with credentials and instructions. For that, it is important that the names appear visible in the Zoom list of attendees. The vote will be open for 24 hours, starting after the general meeting. Candidates should be ranked 1-3. Damiano Mazza (damiano.mazza@lipn.univ-paris13.fr) and Carsten Fuhs (carsten@dcs.bbk.ac.uk) will be available to handle issues. Damiano and Carsten explain that the system used for the election is the borda method. The result is taken as the sum of points given to each candidate, with the first position getting 3 points, the second 2 points, and the third 1 point. The results will be given by email and published on the FSCD site. ## Report of FSCD 2021 ### Report by the PC Chair, Naoki Kobayashi: There were 31 PC members, 9 women (29%), from 19 countries: – 5 from France – 3 from Italy, Japan, UK – 2 from Germany, US – 1 from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden In sum: 20 from Europe, 3 from North America, 4 from Asia, 1 from Oceania, 3 from South America. Regular research papers were allowed to extend for 15 pages (excluding references and appendix); there were no page restrictions on the appendix. System description papers were allowed to extend for 15 pages, excluding references. In both cases the final version were allowed to stretch to 16 pages (excluding references and *title page*), with 4 pages total for appendixes. The abstract submission date was delayed for three days (from Feb. 12 to Feb. 15). Likewise, the paper submission date was moved for a week (from Feb. 15 to Feb. 22). The rebuttal took place from the 2nd to the 5th of April, with notifications being sent on the 19th of April. The final version was due on the 3rd of May. There were a total of 79 abstracts submissions and 72 paper submissions, comparable to 2019 (77 and 70, respectively). Except for one paper, the 71 remaining papers were regular papers. There was a 39% acceptance, similar to previous years, with no system papers being accepted this time. There were more reviews than in the last four editions, totalling 254 reviews (130 external reviews). Every paper got 3 or more reviews. Reviewers were asked to advance an estimated confidence in order to identify papers that needed experts. Every submission got at least one review >= 4 (high confidence). Naoki showed two graphs obtained from Easychair about the set of submissions. The first one showed the number of submissions per country, and Naoki pointed out that there seems to be a correlation between the number of PC members from a certain country with the number of submissions from that country. The second graph lists the topics, automatically collected by Easychair. The rebuttal process had a soft limit of 800 words. The PC discussion ran from April 6 until April 18, totalling 475 comments, 55 reviews modified, and 28 regular papers accepted (as mentioned, no system paper). Deepak Kapur pointed out that in his experience the modified reviews were not necessarily related to the rebuttal process, but of the discussion and reviews by other PC members. Naoki wished PC members would have updated more reviews to reflect the author response but he did not force the PC members to do so due to the pandemic situation. There were 4 invited talks, two women and two men, from Asia, Europe, North and South America. Following the accepted papers, there were 28 regular talks. Many talks are given live, with pre-recorded videos for backup. There were 7 affiliated workshops. There was a Best Paper Award. As a condition, at least one author should be a junior researcher: either a PhD student or with a PhD awarded in less than three years from the first day of the meeting. The co-authors of the paper should testify to the PC Chair that at least 50% of the contribution was made by the junior researcher. Half of the papers were eligible, and the winners were Tom de Jong and Martin Escardo's paper titled "Predicative Aspects of Order Theory in Univalent Foundations". There will be a special issue planned for LMCS. Selected papers will be invited to participate after the conference. Naoki concluded thanking the invited speakers, the authors of submissions; the PC members and external reviewers (in particular given the current pandemics); the local organizers (especially the Conference Chair, Alejandro Díaz-Caro); the SC members, including Delia Kesner, Carsten Fuhs, Zena M. Ariola (FSCD 20 PC Chair), and the workshop organizers. Also, he thanks the LIPIcs team for excellent support for the Proceedings, the supporters and sponsors of FSCD 2021, and all the participants of the virtual conference. Deepak Kapur raised the concern about whether FSCD was the right place for the rewriting community, Delia mentioned that the idea of FSCD was to bring the two communities together, and also to grow it in new topics (like type theory). Naoki noted that If FSCD seems underrepresented by RTA papers, it is simply because the number of RTA submissions was small this year. The acceptance ratio for RTA papers was roughly the same as that for the whole topics. ### Report by Conference Chair Alejandro Díaz-Caro: Alejandro started giving the numbers of attendees: 345 registered participants, out of which 203 were general attendees and the remaining 142 were authors or invited speakers of the different events that took place. Participants were asked to mark the expected dates of attendance, and those numbers vary from 110 for the last day (July 24th) to 203 (for the second day of the main conference, July 20th). Alejandro pointed out that there are still very late registrations, probably the numbers of the last days will increase. Participants come from 45 different countries, with representation of every continent. The majority come from Europe (206), North America (without Mexico) (50), Latin America (45), and other regions (Middle East, Oceania, North Africa) (7). The real participation for pre-conference workshops varied greatly according to the time. It peaked at 79 for HoTT/UF, 54 for ITRS, 61 for UNIF and 31 for WPTE. As for the first two days of the main conference, participation varied from 62 to 80 users. In terms of funding, we had a total expenses of 5658 USD, distributed as: Easychair (360 USD), Clowdr (7 USD per 350 users = 2450 USD), LIPIcs (60 EUR per paper = 2260 USD), Best paper award (500 EUR = 588 USD). The funding comes from a variety of sources: two private companies based in Argentina (Onapsis and CertiSur, Diamond and Bronze respectively), two French public organizations (Irif and Sinfin, Diamond and Gold), and three public local organizations (Conicet, Agencia and Fundacen, the first two being Diamond sponsors, the last being Platinum). Thanks to the sponsors, it was possible to avoid charging participants. The guiding principle was to not charge unless the number of participants surpassed that of the funding received, in which case later participants had to pay for the 7 USD of the Clowdr platform. But so far that was not necessary. To conclude, Alejandro mentioned the people participating in the organization, with 6 local organizers and 4 external collaborators. Deepak Kapur mentioned that the agreement with LiPics was successful. ### Report by Workshop Chairs, Mauricio Ayala-Rincón and Carlos Lopez Pombo A total of seven workshop proposals were submitted, and all of them were accepted. There was a new procedure, as advised by the SC, with a Workshop Scheduling Committee (WSC) to coordinate the sessions and avoid critical overlap. | Workshop | Chair | co-Chair | |-------------|-----------------------|-----------------------| | UNIF | Alexander Baumgartner | Franz Baader | | IWC | Samuel Mimram | Camilo Rocha | | HoTT/UF | Benedikt Ahrens | Krzysztof Kapulkin | | WPTE | Keisuke Nakano | Adrian Riesco | | LSFA | Eduardo Bonelli | Mauricio Ayala-Rincón | | ITRS | Ugo de Liguoro | Jeremy Siek | | IFIP WG 1.6 | Cynthia Kop | Carsten Fuhs | The pre-workshops (UNIF, ITRS, HoTT/UF and WPTE) totalled 39 talks, with the total number of registered attendants split as follows: - 17th July (ITRS, HoTT/UF): 165 - 18th July (WPTE, HoTT/UF, UNIF): 191 The actual number of attendants was between 50 and 75 per workshop. The post-workshops (IWC, IFIP WG 1.6 Rewriting and LSFA) are expected to deliver 24 presentations, including a presentation on the Confluence Competition (CoCo). As for registered attendants, they split as follows: - 23rd July (IWC, LSFA): 129 - 24th July (IFIP WG 1.6 Rewriting, LSFA): 110 Suggestion to FSCD SC and community: keep the WSC, reduce overlaps and help improve socialization. We did not succeed in promoting the sharing of invited speakers, but still it helped with the socialization. The Workshops Chairs effusively thanked the organizers. Beta Ziliani asked the Conference and Workshops Chairs about how effective socialization was, given the online nature of the conference. Alejandro Díaz-Caro mentioned that Clowdr alone does not work well, as it severely restricts the times of the talks to stick strictly to the program, without any flexibility. But Clowdr + Zoom worked well. While socialization was not ideal, as any virtual conference, there were papers being discussed after their presentation. ## Progress Report on FSCD’22@FloC’22 (Haifa, Israel) ### CFP FSCD 2022 (Amy Felty) Next year FSCD will be co-located with FloC in Haifa, Israel. There are 32 members on the PC, diversely distributed in geographical areas. FLoC will have two conference blocks of 4 days each with a day in the middle for an excursion, and 2 days for workshops before the first block and another 2 days after the second block. FSCD will take place in the first conference block (Aug 2-5). An author must be present, unless the situation prevents an author from flying to Israel. ### Organization of FSCD 2022 (Nachum Dershowitz) FSCD 2022 will be located, as mentioned, in Haifa, Israel. More precisely, it will be held in Technion, Mt. Carmel. In terms of facilities, there are 10 lecture halls and 40 classrooms, all air-conditioned (important in the summer), and in adjacent buildings. In terms of accommodations, Hotels are spread out in neighborhoods in Haifa. In order to guarantee a good price, block reservations were made, and to facilitate transport there are shuttles planned. There is an effort in making it affordable for students, providing dorms on-campus. The SC of FLoC consists of a General Chair (Alexandra Silva), and Advisory Chair (Moshe Vardi), two Local Co-chairs (Orna Grumberg and Eran Yahav), and the SC of each of the conferences within FLoC: Daniel Kroening (CAV), Emmanuel Hebrard (CP), Ante Đerek (CSF), Delia Kesner (FSCD), Marco Gavanelli (ICLP), Franz Baader (IJCAR), Lawrence Paulson (ITP), Gerhard Lakemeyer (KR), Dale Miller (LICS) and Armin Biere (SAT). In terms of scheduling, FSCD will be held the first week of FLoC, overlapping with, among others, LICS. But it will not overlap with IJCAR (scheduled for the second week). The Call for Workshops is due on September 21 this year. Nachum invites past FSCD workshops to submit. As for the latest updates on the organization of FLoC, as mentioned by Amy, the intention is that authors should be present in Haifa. Still, exceptions can and would be made. It is planned to have several interactive activities: poster sessions, interactive sessions, social events and short talks. If this optimistic plan turns out to be impossible (pandemic or political), then it will go virtual/hybrid, delaying a physical conference to 2023. The current pandemic situation in Israel is optimistic: while the delta is causing a little tick raising the curve, the number of severe cases is not increasing as fast. Nachum hopes to see everyone in Haifa, reminding that it is a sunny city, with beaches and a beautiful garden. ## AOB Delia Kesner points out that the notes are going to be approximately one week after the general meeting. There were no further subjects to discuss. ## Thanks Delia Kesner provided effusive thanks to the people in charge of FSCD 2021. ## Handover to new SC Chair, Herman Geivers Delia Kesner introduced Herman Geuvers, the new SC Chair of FSCD. He will take the position of SC Chair. Herman thanked Delia, and mentioned he is honoured by the position. He is happy to know Delia will be around as Chair. ## Announcement of the election As mentioned before, the election was based on the borda method. In total, these are the score of each participant: Alejandro Diaz-Caro scored 101 points. Giulio Manzonetto scored 61 points. Luigi Liquori scored 78 points. This vote indicates that Alejandro Diaz-Caro and Luigi Liquori have been elected as new members of the FSCD SC.