From:           "Joseph O'Rourke" <orourke@grendel.csc.smith.edu>
Subject:        Minutes of SoCG Business Meeting
To:             compgeom-announce@research.bell-labs.com
Date:           Thu, 25 Jun 1998 17:30:44 -0400 (EDT)
Cc:             clarkson@research.bell-labs.com (Ken Clarkson)

Minutes of SoCG Business Meeting
7 June 1998, Minneapolis, MN, USA

1. Reports on 14th SoCG (1998)

Ravi Janardan reported that there were approximately 140 registrants for the conference, including 30 students. The Program Chairs reported the following submissions and acceptances:

Ken Clarkson noted that all but three theory track submissions were sent via email, using the SIGACT server, and all but one accepted paper was sent using the SIGACT server.

2. 15th SoCG (1999): Miami Beach

Victor Milenkovic, 1999 Conference Chair, detailed the plans for the 15th annual conference, to be held June 13-16 on Miami Beach, FL, USA. The rooms at the Radisson Hotel are $98+tax per night. The Program Chairs for the applied and theoretical tracks are John Canny and Marshall Bern respectively. Jeff Erickson will chair the Video Review.

3. 16th SoCG (2000): Hong Kong

Two bids were offered: Hong Kong (Otfried Cheong [né Schwarzkopf] and Siu-Wing Cheng) and Israel (Klara Kedem). After a discussion of both options, a vote was taken, with Hong Kong favored by the majority (50 vs. 31). Although the airfares are expensive (currently $700-$800 US/Canada-Hong Kong; $1200 Europe-Hong Kong), lodging costs and registration fees are expected to lower the total cost toward comparability with a North American site.

4. 17th SoCG (2001)

There was a discussion of attempting to co-locate with another relate d conference in 2001, and the Steering Committee was given freedom to investigate possibilities and report back to the community.

5. e-Print Archives

I informed the community that the Los Alamos LANL e-Print archive (http://xxx.lanl.gov) is expanding into Computer Science [it started in Physics in the early 1990's, and has since expanded into Mathematics], and that I volunteered to Joseph Halpern (Cornell), who chairs a committee on this topic, to help moderate in computational geometry. The response at the meeting was enthusiastic, with the only cautionary note concerning whether computational geometry papers will have a natural category, or will it be so fractured across classification boundaries that focus will be difficult.

Subsequent to the business meeting, this issue has advanced in two ways. First, Jeff Erickson has volunteered to share the moderator duties with me. Second, I have written to Joe Halpern to convey the community's concern on categorization, and he is very sympathetic, and hopes that this can be addressed by, e.g., filtering mailing lists by keyword.

6. Procedures

Mark Overmars walked through a number of points from a SoCG Procedures document he drafted, an attempt to make explicit how we intend to run the conference in the future.

1. Conference format: Four days, two nonparallel tracks (applied and theoretical), 50-60 total presentations of 20-25 minutes each. No short communications.

2. Two program committees, whose chairs are selected by the Steering Committee. Recommended 6-8 committee members for each track.

3. Ten-page abstracts submitted to a particular track. No submissions by program committee members to their own track (but they may submit to the other track).

4. The selection process should be essentially the same for both tracks: same deadlines, same guidelines, same committee size, same type of feedback to authors, either both have a committee meeting or both run the selection electronically, etc.

5. No track switches after reviewing, but the two chairs should try to meet early on and move papers (with permission of the authors) to the other track if they deem it appropriate.

Various people spoke for or against specific points, but the basic outline-- emphasizing continuation of this year's format coupled with uniformity and collaboration between the two tracks--was accepted.

Joseph O'Rourke, Secretary of the SoCG Steering Committee. (orourke@cs.smith.edu)