Program Chair Checklist for,

The International Conference on
Computer Aided Verification

This is a check list of issues, large and small, that should be addressed by the CAV Program Chair.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

The composition of the Program Committee should be set by the end of August. By tradition, it includes 2 members of the Steering Committee (rotating, in alternating years) and the immediate past and next Program Chair(s) (for continuity). If deviations from the list composed at the Steering Committee/Future Program Chair dinner are required, please coordinate replacements in consultation with the Steering Committee. Regarding replacements, please keep in mind the desire for balance with regard to expertise and geography, as well as academia vs industry. The Program Committee needs to be aware of the following rule: no Program Committee member is allowed to have her/his name on more than 2 submitted papers.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Call for Papers should go out by Sept 6. See a previous Call for format, schedule, and content. Please pre-distribute to the Steering Committee for a final proof-reading (if there is no objection in 5 days, consider it approved). The Call for Papers should indicate that a paper may be rejected without review if it is submitted after the deadline or exceeds the stated maximum length. The typical deadline for submission is late January. (See 7. below: state that the deadline is "now FIRM".)
CAV presently supports two categories of papers: regular papers, and "tools" papers, which are evaluated separately. This should be explained in the Call.
The length of CAV has evolved, in order to respond to members' requests for more accepted papers, without reducing presentation time or breaks. Presently, CAV consists of 4 days for regular and tools papers, plus 1 day (at the beginning) for tutorials, for a total of 5 days.

INVITED SPEAKERS, TUTORIALS, PANELS

Invited Speakers should be selected according to their ability to address issues, of interest to the CAV community, that are generally not addressed by the regular papers. This generally means that invited speakers should be drawn from outside the CAV community.
Proposals for Invited Speakers, Tutorials, Panels and Special Sessions (if any) should be forwarded to the Steering Committee as soon as possible, as lead-time (for speakers) is often required. Once the Steering Committee and Program Chair agree on these, invitations should be made right away. Since it should be expected that some invitations will be declined, it is useful to have a backup plan in the original proposal.

REGISTRATION FEE

The Registration Fee should be set according to the assumption that 125 full-fee and 25 half-fee (graduate student) registrations will be received. CAV Inc. guarantees to cover any expenses that may accrue as a result of a short-fall in registrations below this level. IT IS MANDATORY THAT PAYMENT OF REGISTRATION AND OTHER FEES BY CREDIT CARD IS AN OPTION. Please ensure that this is acceptable to your local arrangements organization, before entering into any agreements with them.

BUDGET

The budget from two years ago should be obtained from that Program Chair, or from the Steering Committee, and should be used by the Program Chair as a reference in making the budget; the budget from the preceding year will be made available to the Program Chair as soon as it is received by the Steering Committee. As soon as the Program Chair has a preliminary budget, it should be distributed to the Steering Committee for comment. While it is customary to enlist a professional organizer to help with local arrangements, the Program Chair is expected to keep the costs in line with the budgets from previous years. The professional organizer's fee is customarily limited to 10-15% of the registration fees collected. All receipts (including especially from corporate contributions) that exceed total expenses must be returned to CAV, Inc. in a timely fashion, together with a complete accounting of all receipts and expenditures. It is customary to pay the travel and housing expenses of invited speakers, and to waive their registration fee. It is customary to waive the registration fee for tutorial organizers and support the costs for the distribution of notes. These may be covered by an additional fee for the tutorial. Program and Steering Committee members are expected to pay their own expenses and to pay the registration fee. It is not customary for the organizers to allocate funds for their personal use in organizing the meeting. All surplus funds should be remitted to CAV, Inc. after the end of the meeting, once all expenses have been paid.

FACILITIES

The Program Chair should make a proposal for the meeting facilities and housing available to the Steering Committee for comment as soon as possible. Please keep in mind that facilities and housing may need to be arranged far in advance. CAV Inc can pay for facility deposits as required (to be reimbursed as funds are generated).
The meeting room should be chosen with attention to acoustics and line-of- sight (it should be possible to see the projected image without being blocked by the speaker or the overhead projector or other obstructions, from 250 seats). The meeting room should have sufficient space for comfortable seating and note-taking. Several microphones should be disbursed throughout the hall, for questions. A technician should be available for any audio-visual system problems that may arise. Backup projectors and microphones should be provided. A pc projector with adequate luminosity for the room, should be provided. Adequate ventilation (almost always this means central air conditioning) should be available so that unexpectedly hot or humid weather will not interfere with the functioning of the meeting.
Space adjacent to the meeting room should be available for breaks and lunch.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE FUNCTIONING

The Program Chair should distribute submitted papers immediately after the final deadline. (It was a "tradition" to announce a 1-week extension of the submission deadline shortly before the announced deadline. This tradition was replaced in 2003 by advancing the due date to it's last possible point -- late in January -- and announcing in the Call For Papers that the date is FIRM.) Each submission should be sent to 3 reviewers, chosen for their expertise in the subject of the paper. In addition, a list of all submissions (title/authors) and the papers themselves should be made available to all Program Committee members. Typically, any PC member can choose to review *additional* papers beyond those assigned. (However, self-selection without an initial assignment does not work.) The Program Chair reserves the right to set aside (essentially, ignore) any reviews of self-selected papers, as in a case where conflict of interest is suspected.
To the extent practical, the Program Chair is urged to send similar or related papers to the same set of reviewers, in order to obtain consistency of results.
It is the responsibility of the Program Chair to establish a clear criterion for tools papers, and to communicate this to the Program Committee. Generally, we like to strongly encourage the submission of tools papers by accepting any original paper of the allowed length that cogently describes a tool that has not been described before within the CAV venue. Conversely, we discourage acceptance of tools papers that merely describe new features of a tool that has previously been described in a CAV tools paper.
The Program Chair must allow 3 weeks for the review process that takes place AFTER all reviews have been submitted by the Program Committee members.
The review process is conducted by email. Reviews of papers are made available to ALL Program Committee members, EXCEPT that it is the responsibility of the Program Chair to ensure that no Program Committee member is shown the reviews of any paper on which that member is an author. Program Committee members who have not reviewed a paper may participate in the discussion of that paper.
There should be three stages in the reviewing process:
  1. reviewers review and report on their assigned papers;
  2. reviewers assigned to the same paper open an email discussion of that paper, in an attempt to rectify differences and reach a consensus;
  3. all reviews/discussion (assigned and self-assigned) are made available to the entire Program Committee -- except that any review/discussion of a paper on which a Program Committee member is an author must not be seen by that Program Committee member. In this stage, all Program Committee members are invited to add comments to the discussion. However, normally, only the assigned reviewers (and any additional reviewers assigned by the Program Chair) are allowered to participate in the voting and assignment of scores.
Adequate time in the over-all schedule must be allowed for these three stages.
The ultimate decision on the ranking of papers is left to the Program Chair, who should take into account not only the numerical scores assigned by the reviewers, but all other material circumstances, in order to finally arrive at a selection of the best papers.
One exception to this is that any Program Committee member may not be an author of more than 2 accepted papers. Moreover, any paper on which a Program Committee member is an author is to held to a somewhat higher standard, so that a marginal paper authored by a Program Committee member may be rejected in order to accept a somewhat lesser valued paper authored by non-Program Committee members. The Program Committee reserves the right to reject a paper that is late or longer than the stated maximum length, but also may accept such a paper if doing so is deemed in the best interest of the conference. It is the responsibility of the Program Chair to advise all prospective Program Committee members of these conditions, prior to being seated on the Program Committee.

PROCEEDINGS

The Program Chair needs to make arrangements with Springer to have the program: all accepted papers (regular and tool), and an abstract, extended abstract or full paper from each invited speaker published in the LNCS series. This needs to be done in a timely manner so that the books may be distributed at the conference.

CORPORATE CONTRIBUTIONS

The Program Chair is expected to make a good-faith effort to solicit industrial contributions. This has importance beyond the contributions themselves: it helps to maintain the very important industrial connection with CAV. Industrial contributions typically are $2000 each, and total to around $20,000. However, any amount is gratefully accepted (and $500 is better than nothing). Each contributing company is listed in the program and in the Proceedings. A list of contributing companies and who to contact, as well as a sample solicitation letter will be provided by the Steering Committee.

THE PROGRAM

The Program Chair should organize the program in a manner that allows 30 minutes for each paper and a couple of minutes for questions after each talk. Time for questions need not be explicitly scheduled: it may be averaged over a block of talks by allowing sufficient "break" time between blocks of talks to absorb the time used for questions. While this allows for greater flexibility, sufficient time for breaks must be scheduled. Adequate breaks facilitate discussions, central to the the success of CAV. Talks in blocks of 1 hr (invited talk) to 1.5 hrs (3 regular talks), separated by a 1/2 hr break seems to work well (and can absorb time used for questions after the talks). Likewise, a lunch break of 1.5 hrs seems to work well. Coffee, etc. should be made available during the breaks. To save time, lunch is usually provided in the space used for the breaks.
The complete program should be made available to those who have pre-registered, in advance of the meeting. The order of the papers in the proceedings should be the same as the order in the program. An alphabetized author index should be included at the end of the proceedings.

PUBLICITY

It is the responsibility of the Program Chair to provide publicity for CAV. This includes broadcasting/posting the Call for Papers and (once the program is set) a Call for Participation that includes the program. Channels for publicity should be obtained by the current Program Chair from the previous Program Chair. In particular, appropriate announcements should be placed in the LICS newsletter. Instructions for submitting an announcement to the newsletter can be found here.

SATELLITE WORKSHOPS

One or two days of satellite workshops "affiliated" with CAV has become a successful practice. The Program Chair should solicit and/or accept proposals for such workshops, and decide which ones to attach to CAV. Such workshops are announced in the Call for Participation, and are listed in the CAV program.
Each workshop must be organized, funded and run independently of CAV. In particular, no money or support included in the CAV registration fees should pass to the workshops, except that workshop registration fees may be collected together with CAV registration fees. Each workshop organizer is free to make arrangements with the CAV meeting organizer, concerning rental of meeting facilities, unless these can be provided free of charge. Once selected by the Program Chair, each workshop organizer has complete control over the workshop program and budget. CAV Inc. will bear no liability for any financial obligations incurred by the satellite workshops. This must be clearly stated to the workshop organizers by the Program Chair.

SPECIAL MEETINGS WITHIN CAV

The Program Chair should organize the following separate meetings in CAV:

ATTENDANCE LIST

A list of the names and contact information of all those registered for the meeting should be distributed during the meeting. If this is not feasible, a list of those pre-registered should be provided with the registration material.

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