-------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fifth International Conference on Formal Structures for Computation and Deduction (FSCD20) Minutes on the General Meeting - July 3rd, 2020, 16:30-18:00 (virtual Zoom session) Chair: Delia Kesner Secretary: Cynthia Kop -------------------------------------------------------------------------- AGENDA - Welcome by Steering Committee Chair: Delia Kesner - Election of two Steering Committee members * Outgoing members: Carsten Fuhs and Sam Staton * Candidates: Silvia Ghilezan, Stefano Guerrini, Temur Kutsia, Giulio Manzonetto - Report of FSCD'20 (Paris, France) * PC Chair: Zena Ariola * Conference Chair: Stefano Guerrini * Workshop Chair: Giulio Manzonetto - Small information session on FSCD'22 at FLoC (Haifa, Israel) * PC Chair: Amy Felty * Conference Chair: Nachum Dershowitz - Progress report on FSCD'21 (Buenos Aires, Argentina) * PC Chair: Naoki Kobayashi * Conference Chair: Alejandro Diaz-Caro * Discussion on virtual/hybrid organization of FSCD'21 * Discussion on virtual/hybrid organization of future FSCDs (≥ 2023) - AOB -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Welcome by Steering Committee Chair: Delia Kesner Delia Kesner welcomed everyone to the meeting and announced the agenda. She explains that the election will be unusual, since it will only take place after the meeting has completed. This is because the voting feature in Zoom is not available to people connected from their browser, and it was not desirable to exclude people. Instead, the vote will be done in a third-party application called Belenios, using the e-mail addresses of everyone who was present at the general meeting. 2. Election Two elected members from the Steering Committee are leaving this year, having finished their three-year term: Carsten Fuhs and Sam Staton. Four candidates are available for this position: Silvia Ghilezan, Stefano Guerrini, Temur Kutsia, Giulio Manzonetto. Information on the SC is available at: https://fscd-conference.org/organization/steering-committee Candidate statements are available at: https://fscd2020.org/sc-election The electronic vote will be on Belenios. Everyone attending the general meeting will receive two e-mails shortly afterwards, one with a username/password and one with credentials and instructions. The vote will be open for 24 hours. Candidates should be ranked 1-4. Damiano Mazza and Carsten Fuhs will be available to handle issues. (Announcement of the result under 8.) 3. Report of FSCD'20 * Report by the PC Chair, Zena Ariola: The PC had 35 members from 16 countries, including 11 women. Both regular papers and system descriptions were given 15 pages (plus 5 pages appendix for regular papers), and 16 pages for the final version. The deadline was postponed four days, but this was effective: during the delay, 40 additional abstracts were submitted, of which 26 led to a paper submission, and 12 were accepted. In total, only 81% of abstracts led to a paper submission. The overall submission and acceptance rate was very similar to 2016. France led in both number of submissions and number of accepted papers. There were 25 single-author papers; 6 of these were accepted. Most papers had 3 reviews, although some had 4 or 5. Following the rebuttal phase, there were very lively discussions, with reviews and scores getting modified; in the end, there was no need for a vote since the decision on all papers was clear. For the best paper awards for a junior researcher, the eligible papers were those where one of the authors had a PhD award date at most 3 years in the past, and for which the other authors declared that this junior researcher had done at least 50% of the work. Of the eligible candidates, 7 had an average score of 1.6 or higher. As the PC members found it difficult to compare between a single-author paper with a paper co-authored with an established researcher, two awards were given. Due to good reviewer comments, a new award was created for best system description for junior researchers, which had two eligible candidates. The proceedings are published as volume 167 of LIPIcs, at https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/portals/lipics/index.php?semnr=16152 Zena comments on the excellent support from Michael Wagner and Michael Didas. A special issue in LMCS is planned for the top papers. For the invited speakers, 87 names were originally submitted; the PC vote led to René Thiemann, Simona Ronchi della Rocca, Andrew Pitts and Brigitte Pientka. Two of these speakers contributed a paper, which went through a light reviewing process. Zena concluded by expressing her thanks to Delia, Sandra, Stefano and other members of the program committee all of whom contributed to the success of the event. * Report by the Conference Chair, Stefano Guerrini Initially, the combined FSCD/IJCAR conferences were planned in a new and modern conference center in northern Paris; there were 23 workshop proposals accepted which led to the addition of an extra workshop day. The organizers expected about 300-400 participants for FSCD/IJCAR, and about 500-600 for the workshops. However, existing plans for the conference organization and social events were put on hold when the COVID outbreak hit Italy in February, and in March the decision was made to move to a fully virtual conference. Some workshops opted to cancel or postpone, but 16 still wished to join the virtual conference. There were many decisions to be made. After some discussion with the SCs of the main conferences, Zoom was chosen as the video tool. There would be live talks (following the structure of a traditional conference), but participants could submit a recorded talk as an alternative. Safety was a key concern; for example avoiding zoom bombers and supporting participants who would prefer not to install the software. Unfortunately, this did penalise socialising. In the end, the main conferences and larger workshops used a webinar model, while smaller workshops used a meeting model (which allows for more interaction). In the business meeting, more interaction was allowed by just promoting everyone to panelist. Since the model is new, there were many lessons to be learnt. Authors and chairs were contacted for testing/practicing sessions. And the organizers also had their own testing and practice to do. Budget-wise: many hard expenses vanished in the virtual model; the concrete cost was less than 2000 euros for Zoom, 2220 euros for lipics, around 800 euros for EasyChair and 1800 euros for the awards (and could have been less; not all bought features were used). However, there were also new costs that were unaccounted for. In particular, there is much more active and skilled work needed during the conference, as well as technical infrastructure (e.g., hosting multiple zoom sessions required a setup with multiple laptops). This task has largely been done by the main organizers and thus does not appear in the budget, but arguably this should be done by a professional company, which would be very expensive. There were many problems and misunderstandings with Zoom sales and customer care. They only got access to the full platform on 26 June, which means that configurations and final tests could only be done in the weekend before the event. Also, EasyChair did not include an important feature that they had paid for: the integrated program. Thus, they had to implement their own tool for the integrated program. On the upside, there were very few technical issues, and the quality of Zoom was good. However, Zoom is not really adapted to this kind of event, for instance making it hard to switch between sessions or (for the organizers) to control multiple sessions in parallel. In the end, there were about 1000 participants pre-registered for FSCD-IJCAR, and about 300 people registered on each track via Zoom. In the end, organization was a very stressing and tiring job, but they are happy with the results. * Report by the Workhop Chair, Giulio Manzonetto Originally 11 FSCD workshops were planned and 12 IJCAR workshops, including two new workshops. Due to the COVID crisis, 5 IJCAR workshops were dropped or postponed, and 1 FSCD workshop; the others opted to join the virtual event. There were quite a few pre-registrations for the workshops. Not all pre-registered members participated in the end, but the overall turnout was still good. We have not been the target of Zoom bombers, likely due to (a) having restrictive but safe configurations, and (b) links being sent by private email only one day in advance. The coffee break common rooms were unfortunately not very successful. For next year, Giulio recommends hiring external technical support, and adding Slack for asynchronous communication. 4. Small information session on FSCD'22 at FLoC (Haifa, Israel) * Report by the Conference Chair, Nachum Dershowitz FSCD'22 is scheduled to be held in August 2022 in northern Israel, at the Technion on Mount Carmel. It will be part of the Federation Logic Conference. This will be the eight FLoC. Despite the current COVID crisis, planning for the event is continuing. The kick-off meeting for all conference chairs has been postponed to 2021 (rather than this autumn); however, everyone is hopeful that the event can take place in a non-virtual way. 5. Progress report on FSCD'21 (Buenos Aires, Argentina) * Report by the PC Chair, Naoki Kobayashi The first call for papers has already gone out; it is much the same as in previous years. The abstract submission deadline will be on 12 February; the submission deadline on 15 February. The rebuttal and notification will be in April, with the final version to be submitted on 3 May. * Report by the Conference Chair, Alejandro Diaz-Caro Next year's conference will be 19-25 July, in Buenos Aires. It will take place in a new, modern building, the "Cero + Infinito". The conference will be organized in a hybrid model: local talks will be streamed, and speakers may give talks over a video conferencing tool that are projected for local participatns. Several other conferences are currently planning a similar setup. This setup has the dual advantage that it is more inclusive to people who do not have the funds or health or freedom to travel, and that it is relatively easy to move to a fully virtual conference if it seems unlikely that a phsyical conference cannot take place. If this indeed seems unlikely, the organizers will decide by February (before the deadline) to move to a virtual conference. 6. A discussion on future conferences Delia proposed to start a discussion on two questions: * Do you agree with the hybrid model for FSCD'21? * What would be an ideal conference model for FSCD after FLoC? This led to a large discussion, both with speakers on the microphone and in parallel many good arguments in the chat. There was almost universal agreement that a hybrid conference model is a good idea, not only for FSCD'21 but also permanently. Compared to a fully virtual model, it allows for a greater degree of interaction. Compared to a traditional conference, it is more inclusive for people who have a limited ability to travel (be it for budget, health, visa or family reasons), and much better for the environment. However, there is the risk that only richer research groups can send people to conferences. Some people did raise issues that need to be taken into account in designing such a hybrid model, however: * Clément Aubert pointed out that we may need our own (open-source) technical solutions for the long term. If we rely too much on Zoom, EasyChair or other outside service, we risk being locked in to a private system that may change its conditions on a whim. * Carsten Fuhs pointed out that various ingredients for hybrid conferences are already there: ICFP 2017 broadcasted talks and allowed questions via Slack, and PLDI provided places for socialising by moving an avatar into a virtual room. * Lorenzo Tortora suggested that it may be worthwhile to make conferences longer, which would both allow the people who do attend more time for interaction, and make it easier for those who do not to view all the talks they are interested in. Alejandro Diaz-Caro noted that due to timezone differences, it might indeed be necessary to compress the talks into fewer slots, and adding extra opportunities for interaction may be a way to fill the remaining time for on-site participants. * Lorenzo also pointed out that some people might not be comfortable with their talk being reported and broadcast all over the world. * It is unclear how a hybrid conference should be funded, although there are various possibilites; it would be natural to make the physically present people pay more. * Jakob Rehof mentioned a discussion at the IFIP group regarding the future of conferences. Moshe Vardi had argued that computer science has created a monster of constant travel, by entangling publications with conferences -- and it's a monster we need to get rid of. A hybrid model for conferences may be a good way to migrate into an unknown future. Overall, several people noted that the community is now at a time of rapid change, and we will need to evaluate both the various forms of virtual conferences that are held this year and the new conference designs emerging in the coming period. We have new ways to communicate, and have to explore the available options to use this at its full potential. It will likely take years to find the ideal new model. 7. Closing of the meeting by Delia Kesner. Delia closed the meeting with thanks to the reviewers, PC chair Zena Ariola and PC members, the organizing team and conference chair Stefano Guerrini, workshop chair Giulio Manzonetto, IJCAR conference chair Kaustuv Chaudhuri, FSCD steering committee chair and session chairs, FSCD SC workshop chair Jamie Vicary, FSCD publicity chair Sandra Alves, general meeting secretary Cynthia Kop, electronic vote organizers Damiano Mazza and Carsten Fuhs, LIPIcs, EasyChair and the sponsors, and last but not least, all the invited speakers and paper authors. 8. Announcement of election outcome After the vote was completed (a day after the general meeting), the results were announced via e-mail: * Silvia Ghilezan scored 144 points. * Stefano Guerrini scored 140 points. * Giulio Manzonetto scored 132 points. * Temur Kutsia scored 114 points. The points come from the borda method: 4 points for the first preference, 3 points for the second, 2 points for the third one and 1 point for the last one. Silvia Ghilezan and Stefano Guerrini were elected to the SC.