History and Scope of IPCO



Karen Aardal, Ravi Kannan, and William R. Pulleyblank



There are two key features of the IPCO conferences: First, there are no invited talks, instead a program committee selects the contributions on the basis of extended abstracts submitted by prospective participants. Second, the papers at the meeting are presented in a single stream (no parallel sessions) and preliminary versions of all papers are provided to participants at the time of the meeting.

The format of IPCO, although new to our community, has been used by computer scientists for many years. It was the STOC and FOCS meetings, organized by ACM and IEEE, that gave Ravi Kannan and William Pulleyblank the idea to propose a conference of this format. They presented their idea to the Mathematical Programming Society in 1987, and the society responded very positively and agreed to be an official sponsor. The first IPCO conference took place May 28-30, 1990 at the University of Waterloo, Canada, organized by Ravi Kannan and William Pulleyblank. The following two meetings were held at the Carnegie-Mellon University May 25-27, 1992, organized by Ravi Kannan, Egon Balas and Gerard Cornuejols, and at Centro Ettore Majorana in Erice, Italy, during April 20-May 1, 1993, organized by Laurence Wolsey and Giovanni Rinaldi. The meetings are held every year in which no International Symposium on Mathematical Programming takes place, which means that the next ones will be held in the spring of 1995 and 1996. The location and dates are Copenhagen, May 29-31, 1995, with Egon Balas, Jens Clausen and Jorgen Tind as organizers, and Vancouver, probably in the week of June 3, 1996, organized by William Cunningham and Maurice Queyranne. You will be able to read more about the Copenhagen conference elsewhere in OPTIMA.

The two themes - integer programming and combinatorial optimization - are viewed in a broad sense, to include algorithmic and structural results in topics such as geometry of numbers, graph theory, matroids and submodular functions, in addition to more traditional fields. IPCO is not restricted to theory. Computational and practical work belong to our field, and sigificant contributions involving implementations and applications are most welcome.

The main acceptance criteria used by the program committee are the quality and originality of the research plus its interest to people working in the field. These acceptance criteria have made it possible for younger, less established researchers to present their results in an attractive format to a large audience of active researchers. In the first three meetings, a substantial portion of the presentations were given by graduate students and recent Ph.D. graduates, which is a sign of the vitality of the field.

For the first three meetings, there were 76, 74, and 83 submissions, respectively. In each case, approximately 35 were selected for presentation.

Submission deadlines for IPCO conferences have been in the late fall of the year preceding the meeting. The submissions are in the form of extended abstracts each of at most ten pages. All submissions are read by the program committee and the decisions regarding which papers will be included in the meeting are made within about two months.

An extended abstract should contain a clear statement of the results, their relevance to the field including their relation to other research, their applicability, and an outline of the proofs or justifications for the main assertions. It should not be a complete journal paper.

The program committee normally consists of established researchers from a broad variety of fields. Therefore someone preparing an extended abstract can safely assume that a large portion of the committee will not be experts in the topic of the paper. These are precisely the readers to whom the abstract should be directed. Of course, correctness and newness of the claimed results is necessary for acceptance, but this alone is generally not sufficient. It is also crucial that the importance of the work be understood by the committee in general.

Authors of an accepted papers are asked to submit a final version, which may again be an extended abstract or a full paper. These are then printed in the Proceedings, which are provided to all participants at the time of the conference. These proceedings serve as a conference record as well as a means of rapid dissemination of results, since they are published within about six months of the time of submission. In many cases, revised versions of these papers appear subsequently in refereed publications. Most journals, including Mathematical Programming, do not view the publication of an early version of a paper in an IPCO Proceedings as a prior publication, which could make the paper unacceptable.

The tight timing constraint places a heavy demand on the Program Committee members. It is appropriate here to remind authors that the submission of an extended abstract constitutes a commitment that if the paper is accepted, they will provide a Proceedings version and at least one of the authors must be present at the conference to present the paper. At two of the three IPCO's so far, it has been possible to provide very limited support for some participants who need it. This may or may not be possible at future IPCO's.

Presentations at the conferences are 30 minutes in length. Similar guidelines apply to them as to extended abstracts: It is generally neither necessary nor desirable that presentations give full proofs or justifications (the proceedings serve this purpose better); they should convey the main results, an idea of why they are true and their relevance.

Back to "Guidelines on preparing an extended abstract".

Back to the IPCO 2001 Conference home page.