Minutes of business meeting, SoCG'03

[Marc van Kreveld]

Business meeting at SoCG 2003, San Diego, June 9, 2003
------------------------------------------------------

Minutes of meeting,
by Marc van Kreveld (secretary of steering committee)

Chaired by Joe Mitchell (chair of steering committee)


Joe started the business meeting at 18.10 with a list
of agenda items:

1. Report of Steve Fortune as organizing chair of SoCG'03
2. Report of Dave Mount as PC co-chair (with Mark de Berg)
3. Report of DVD/Video committee chair Erik Demaine
4. SoCG'04 announcement by John Iacono, organizing chair of SoCG'04
5. SoCG'04 announcement by Jack Snoeyink, PC co-chair (with
   Jean-Daniel Boissonnat)
6. Location of SoCG'05: presentations for Cracow, Pisa, Japan
7. Announcement by Jeff Erickson about the latex style file
8. Straw vote on color pages in proceedings


1. Steve Fortune reported on SoCG'03. There were 125 attendees,
of which 46 were students, 67 were members of ACM, and 12 were
late registrants.

2. Dave Mount presented the usual, entertaining statistics on
the paper submissions to SoCG this year. There were 118
submissions, of which 42 were accepted (35.5%). Acceptances
in recent years were: 2002: 35;  2001: 39;  2000: 41;  1999: 44.

As the theory and applied tracks have been merged recently, it
is also interesting to consider how many applied/experimental
papers were submitted and accepted. Although it is often hard to
say for several papers whether they are applied or not, Dave
classified 33 out of 118 submissions as applied/experimental,
and 11 of these were accepted.

Dave and Mark were positive about the use of the Echelon system
(developed at the University of Maryland, and likely to have a name
change before public release) for electronic PC discussions. This was
new this year.

They also thanked the many people who contributed to the
conference: the PC (Prosenjit Bose, Erik Demaine, Tamal Dey,
Olivier Devillers, Leo Guibas, Matthew Katz, Joe Mitchell,
Takeshi Tokuyama, Gert Vegter, Emo Welzl, and the co-chairs).
They also thanked all sub-referees and submitters of papers.

3. Erik Demaine reported on the DVD/video submissions this year. For
the first time, submission was possible in many different formats,
including PowerPoint with a sound track.  There were 12 submissions and
9 of these were accepted.  Erik learned a lot during the process and
has several suggestions for how to reduce the effort in future years;
his experiences and suggestions will be communicated to the next
DVD/video chair (Remco Veltkamp). A hearty thanks goes to the MIT
video guru Tom Buehler, without whom the DVD production would not have
been possible.

The DVD contributions will become available on compgeom.org, kindly
offered by Herve Bronnimann.  Temporarily, they are available at
http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~edemaine/SoCG2003_multimedia/webproceedings/.

Jack Snoeyink mentioned that we also have a poster session from
FCRC, with interesting computational geometry related topics.

4. John Iacono announced that SoCG'04 will take place on June 9-11,
2004, at Brooklyn Polytechnic (New York).  The new dorms will be
available as the primary accommodation; a single room will cost
approximately $60/night, and a double will be approximately $40/night
per person. Each suite of 2 rooms has one shared bathroom.
Participants may also choose to stay at any hotel facilities in the
City, but there will be no blocks of reserved hotel rooms.

5. Jack Snoeyink spoke on behalf of Jean-Daniel Boissonnat and himself
as co-chairs of the PC of SoCG'04. The PC will be announced shortly.
Jack pointed out that the conflict with Solid Modeling'2004, which
takes place in Italy during the same dates as SoCG'04, causes some
difficulty in recruiting PC members from some of the applied
areas. Jack suggested that conflicts with Solid Modeling be avoided in
the future; Joe Mitchell indicated that the steering committees for
SoCG and for Solid Modeling are in communication to discuss the issue
of avoiding conflicts and possibly co-locating the two conferences in
some future year.

6. Three locations were candidate for SoCG'05.  Jurek Jaromczyk
presented a bid for locating in Cracow, at Jagiellonian University.
Marco Pellegrini presented a bid for locating in Pisa, Italy, on the
CNR campus.  Tetsuo Asano made a bid for hosting the conference at
JAIST in Japan.  All three bids were well received and found to be
quite attractive. (Guenter Rote even suggested that we should be able
to vote up to three times instead of once.)

The vote turned out in favor of Pisa (36 votes), with Cracow receiving
22 votes and Japan receiving 12 votes.  In Pisa, the conference will
be held at the CNR campus.  The co-organizer is Giuseppe Liotta. Dates
will probably be June 6-8, 2005.  Accommodations will be downtown, in
various hotels, where single rooms are roughly 82 Euros and doubles
are roughly 92 Euros, for 3-star hotels.

7. Jeff Erickson announced that is in the process of writing a new
latex style file to be used in the future for the SoCG proceedings.
This won a round of applause.  He asked the community for constructive
and clearly stated suggestions.

8. Joe Mitchell called for a straw vote to see if the proceedings
should contain color pages. A group of 1-8 pages will add
approximately $500 to the total conference budget, while a group of
9-16 pages will add about $1000. The pages will need to be
consecutive, e.g., in the middle or at the end of the proceedings.
The program committee would have authority to assign color page
resources to individual papers.  The straw vote showed about 18 people
in favor of this option.

At 19.30 Joe closed the business meeting.





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