In my
previous post I exposed my thought on the format, but I guess that, since
Julian has also touched on it, I should refer to the quality of papers. I agree with him; in general, it's a congress where quality papers abound, including some papers that become benchmarks to be compared with. Many top-swords in the area don't wait to publish in IEEE TEC or ECJ and publish results directly in PPSN. Said that, it's also true that normally there's some bias in the selection: it's easier to find papers about Evolution Strategies, and theoretical papers, here than in some of the other conferences, and papers go more in depth. There are four reviewers, which means that only the best survive.
However, to have a tight selection has also got some influence in that. This time the acceptance rate has been higher than usual; normally, it is lower than 50%, while it's been higher this time: 114 out of 206 submissions. That statistic is meaningless, since we don't know in advance what's been the score cut; it could have been higher than in other conferences, but it's also true that I have found at least a paper (which I won't name) that wasn't up to par, and some authors have confessed that they were quite surprised their own papers were accepted.
It's no big deal, anyways: a small difference does not make a trend, and there were lots of good papers to attend to anyways, if you had the time and disposition. Plus they were interesting, usually trying to cater to a wide audience, instead of focusing on a very small aspect that could have interested just a very narrow group.
I don't have anyting particularly good or bad to say about keynotes. I missed all of them, but the truth is that none of them particularly called my attention. I attended a bit of the first one, and found that it catered mainly to its own field, which probably meant that he lost most of the audience after a few slides. I heard good comments on the last one, on philogenetic tree reconstruction, from the point of view of the content
and the delivery, but this is not a topic on which I have been particularly interested.
So, in general, except for a few
buts, good all around conference. Of course I'll keep atending in upcoming years, whether it is in Krakow or in Taormina.
