CENG 491 Proposal: A Conference Management and Hosting System

October 18, 2012

Shortname: CONFMAN Team: cengizover Members: Birand Koray Eren Ahmet Anl Pala Mustafa Yavuz Burak n

1. Motivation
In METU, many national or international conferences have been organized many faculty members of computer engineering department . Before the conference begins, documents planned to be used in the conference are submitted by the speakers, evaluated by the referees. These documents are rated and feedback papers are sent back to the users who loaded them. Although there are some commercial and free alternatives[1,2] to make the process easier, none of them are satisfactory in terms of their set of available features or usability. The existing tools lack of some desired features mentioned below: A person may have more than one role in a conference. To accomplish his jobs, he has to login to the one roles account, perform the tasks of that role, log out, login to the account for the other role. In other words, there is no synchronization between the accounts owned by the same user. At the stage of evaluation, the user does not know which referee will evaluate his paper. Moreover the referee does not whose paper he is evaluating. The user has no information about the attitude of the referee, leading to blind review. After the conference, papers used in the event are published. However, the publisher has no idea about the format of the paper to be printed. There is no mechanism to make the process of publishment convenient. Before the conference, presentations to be presented are scheduled to avoid conflicts as much as possible. Nonetheless, scheduling process may be put into systematical way, including some criteria such as importance. In this project, a comprehensive conference management system that can host multiple conferences and their all web based activities will be developed.

2. Background
In a conference, researchers present and discuss what they have done. Conferences provide exchange of information between researchers through scientific journals. Conferences are composed of presentations. The work may be bundled in written form as the conference proceedings. abstracts are peer reviewed by members of the program committee or referees chosen by them. Abstracts include the hypothesis, tools used in research, data collected and a summary of interpretation of data. They undergo peer review after which they are accepted or rejected by the conference chair or referees chosen by them. In some cases, submission of full paper may be required before final acceptance. The whole process up to here is called abstract management[3] Since abstract management was time consuming, web-based conference management softwares have evolved to automate the process. These function around typical conference workflows. Although it varies in details, there exist a submission phase, reviewing, decision making, building of conference programme and publishing of the programme and abstract papers. Submission phase involves the authors in preparing their abstracts and sending them to the conference organizers through an online form. The abstracts are either uploaded as documents or plain texts unless tables and figures are required. The software acknowledges the email of the author to inform him whether or not his abstract has been accepted after decision making. Reviewing phase is more complex than submission as the process is frequently blinded or anonymised. Reviewers have particular interests or specialisations which should be taken into account when assigning abstracts to them, and they may have conflicts of interest. Reviewers should not be able to see other reviews before they have submitted their own. Abstract management software must provide this for independency. The programme committee will require extensive reporting and access to the abstracts and reviews. Software will usually support ranking of reviews and setting an acceptance threshold. Some software products provide further functionality for the conference organisers. This often includes an email facility to report reviewers' comments and committee decisions to authors, programme building tools and online publishing. Abstracts may reside in a computer having enough capacity. On the other hand, that computer may crash suddenly. Therefore, it is thought that the copies of these abstracts must be kept on the online document tools.

There are a few main approaches employed in designing and developing document sharing systems[4,5] in terms of where the data originates from and where it is stored. Firstly, some systems feature peer-to-peer networking protocols that allow sharing of documents among various members of the network. In this type of document sharing systems, there is no central location where the documents are stored. On the contrary, a document can exist more than one location and as a direct consequence of this, it can be downloaded from multiple locations. In simple words, each member of the network can swap the roles back and forth between being a server and being a client. This makes the system more error-tolerant. Additionally, this kind of systems often makes use of distributed hash tables. Second approach is having one server, most of the time implemented on a web server so that client can access it without installing any additional software on his computer, another advantage of such a system is easy-management since all controls are implemented on server-side. Some more elaborate design which makes it possible to synchronise files on client-side and server so that client-side users can modify files on his computer. All the information belonging to the conference(referee, abstract, etc.) should be written in tables that reside in databases. Scripting languages[6] can insert information fetched from the user to the tables. A database management system[7,8] will make control of tables convenient. Because it is web-based application, a server[9] is necessity to run scripts. Additionally, this server should be close to the attacks. One solution to this problem may be membership system. A user who wants to have a role in a conference fills a registration form, waits for confirmation and may login to the system if he is confirmed. Nonetheless, information entered by the user must be checked apart from this solution. User interaction is an important issue; therefore web frameworks[10] can be preferred to build the application. Another preference may be scripting libraries[11] to do more work using less code There are some software packages[12] that bring database management, scripting language and the server together without having to configure them manually.

3. Proposal
CONFMAN will combine the features of the existing systems with the new features in a web based application on user-friendly interface. Users having more than one role in a conference will have synchronized account which helps them to do tasks required by each role they have at a time . When dealing with scheduling problem in order to carry out scheduling of the conferences, genetic algorithms will be made use of. The revision stage of conference management will be clear. That is, there will statistics about the referee that can be seen by the user and vice versa.

Optionally, electronic payment property is planned to be used in the system so that participants will be able to pay for accommodation.

4. References
[1] Easy Chair Home Page - http://www.easychair.org/ [2] OpenConf Home Page - http://www.openconf.com/ [3] Abstract Management Wiki Page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_management [4] Gnutella in Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnutella [5] BitTorrent in Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent [6] PHP Home Page - http://php.net/ [7] MySQL Home Page - http://www.mysql.com/ [8] phpMyAdmin Page - http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/index.php [9] Apache HTTP Server Project Home Page - http://httpd.apache.org/ [10] Django Project Home Page - https://www.djangoproject.com/ [11] jQuery Home Page - http://jquery.com/ [12] XAMPP Home Page - http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html