About

… the page

I have been collecting insights, observations, thoughts on the procedures of scientific conferences, in particular paper evaluation and selection. It is based on my chairmanship of ECRTS, participation in organization of other conferences as reviewer, technical program committee member, and chair, as well as author and participant of conferences in the field of real-time systems. 

I will list on one hand experiences from the evaluation process with hints e.g. for composing and running technical program committees, with focus on fairness, community involvement, and junior researchers.

In other parts, I reflect on what the way we run conferences implies. We have adopted mostly historically established models for conferences, with reasoning I often don’t understand (e.g. how can a small acceptance ratio be used as quality indicator? – why do we restrict access to our work for the profit of publishers? – is h-index quality indicator or counter productive?).
I believe new models of conferences are possible and needed which support the community and fit the needs of our times.

“1 is the only acceptable acceptance ratio” is of course a bit of a polemic title, I chose it to signify that we should challenge our long held believes for the benefit of our community. My thoughts on acceptance ratio 1 can be found in this post.

Let’s continue to talk! Collecting opinions, having formal and informal discussions have been a basis for my work as chair. I would be very happy to continue doing so via this page (or other forms of course): login in comment to any post, sign up for notifications about posts here.

Thanks! I have been very happy to work with so many talented and interested persons during my chairmanship. So many ideas, so many discussions, great! Much of the credit of this page goes to them. I am unable to provide a complete list, my latest count of ECRTS organizers I worked with is around 80, not including TPC members, TC, etc. Thanks “old” executive board, Sanjoy Baruah, Alan Burns, Isabelle Puaut, Sophie Quinton, and the “new” one, Sebastian Altmeyer, Sophie Quinton, Marcus Völp. Special mention goes to Chiquita Snipple-Marisa of Euromicro, who roped me in in the beginning and Sophie Quinton for the remarkable enthusiasm, creativity, and competence – and all the discussions in the final years.

When I write about ECRTS, I am only referring to the period I was Chair of the executive board.

... me

I have been Chair of the executive board of ECRTS, the Euromicro Conference on Real-time Systems, from 1998 to 2020.
At the beginning, the precursor of ECRTS used to be a workshop about to vanish, but then became a leading conference, maintaining top ranks in several ranking systems, introducing and implementing many innovations that have since been adopted by many other conferences, including Work-in-Progress Poster session, Call to Action, Artifact Evaluation, Industrial Challenges, Outstanding papers, First Timer Mentoring, and genuine Open-Access proceedings.

Currently, I am holding the position of Professor for Real-time Systems at the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany.