ESOP - European Symposium on Programming

Steering Committee

The Steering Committee (SC) is formed by six members: three permanent members, including the SC Chair, elected for at most six years by the steering committee itself; three rotating members, formed by the Program Committee (PC) Chairs of the previous, current, and next editions of ESOP. In case of several co-chairs they will count collectively as a single member. In case one of the permanent members is also a rotating member then the PC Chair of the two editions before sits in the SC.

The SC must perform essentially three tasks:

1. Select the PC Chairs of the (n+2)-th edition right after the n-th edition of ECOOP.
2. Elect new permanent members and SC Chair to replace members whose mandate has ended.
3. Ensure the quality and criteria of the selection process over the different editions.

Program Committee Chair

The Program Committee (PC) Chair is responsible for selecting the members of the PC, organizing the selection process, and preparing the final program and the proceedings. The PC Chair has great latitude in organizing her/his tasks. However, since ESOP is part of ETAPS, the PC Chair must abide some common rules. In particular she/he:

• must propose to the ETAPS Steering Committee the composition of the Program Committee and some substitute members before contacting them. This is necessary to let the ETAPS SC verify whether there is any overlap on the PC's of the six main conferences composing ETAPS.
• must strictly adhere to the deadlines set by the ETAPS Steering Committee. In particular she/he must not extend the submission, rebuttal and final version deadlines, and must strictly respect the dates of notification and the dates for sending to the ETAPS SC the proposals of PC members, invited speaker, and paper nominations (see below).
• must enforce the ETAPS multiple submission policy
• must comply with the decision of the ETAPS SC Chair on the maximum number of accepted papers (usually the minimum between 33% of the submissions and the number of slots available for the conference).
• must choose with the PC an invited speaker for ESOP
• must decide with her/his Program Committee whether among the accepted papers there enough of them that would match the acceptance criteria and the prior publication policy of TOPLAS and, if so, handle the preparation of a ESOP collected papers issue of TOPLAS (see timetable below).
• must take part in the selection of the two ETAPS unifying speaker
• must nominate papers for the EAPLS, EATCS and EASST Best Paper awards
• must be present at the conference
• must prepare a conference report to be presented in person at the ETAPS steering committee
• must sit in the ETAPS SC for two years and in the ESOP SC for three years
• Finally the PC Chair of ESOP X must sit in the committees of the ETAPS (X+1) "PhD dissertation award" and the ETAPS (X+3) "Test of the time award"

The PC Chair is advised to consult the following Handbook where she/he can find useful information to organize the selection process. The PC Chair is also advised to add the PC Chair of the following year to the PC, even though she/he will be designated after the CFP are printed and distributed.

PC submissions are welcome and will be handled by the program committee (there is no ERC). The PC chair must not submit. As all discussions will be electronic, the below policy should suffice to ensure a fair evaluation of PC submissions and avoid strong bias in favor or against them.

• Each PC submission will receive an extra review from an external reviewer.
• PC submissions are accepted only if:
  • they do not face strong opposition after the discussion and
  • they are not involved in discussions of relative merits. That is, if there are more papers above the bar than can be accepted (ESOP has a limited number of paper slots determined by ETAPS) and if the group of relatively-weakest papers in this range includes PC submissions, then those get rejected first.

Timetable for ESOP 20nn

• After ESOP nn-2 (right after summer break): ESOP SC chooses the ESOP nn PC Chair and designates her/him as representative for ESOP in the ETAPS SC
• Fall nn-2 PC chair proposes PC members and ETAPS SC comments on the proposals; ideally, PC chair finalizes the PC by November.
• Late Fall nn-2: ETAPS SC proposes, debates and elects unifying speakers; ideally, unifying speakers are confirmed by the end of September nn.
• Early Winter nn-2: PC chair proposes ESOP invited speaker, SC comments on the proposal, and then PC chair invites the speaker. Ideally, the ESOP invited speaker is confirmed by the end of October.
• Early Winter nn-2: PC chair proposes to ETAPS SC the text for the call for papers, PC chair fixes the text by early January.
• Early October nn-1: Deadline for submission.
• October/November nn-1: ETAPS SC chair decides maximum number of papers that can be accepted for each conference, based on submission rates
• Mid December nn-1: Notifications.
• Mid December nn-1: The PC Chair and the PC determine whether there are enough candidates for TOPLAS submission and, if so, sends to TOPLAS Editor in Chief (EIC) a list of papers for approval.
• Late December nn-1: PC Chair proposes sessions; ideally the final program is finalized before Christmas. PC chair nominates papers for the EAPLS, EATCS and EASST Best Paper awards.
• January nn: Camera ready version.
• End of January nn: PC Chair invites authors of selected papers to submit an extended and revised version of their paper to the TOPLAS submission site by the end of April nn
• March/April nn: ETAPS
• April nn: PC Chair sends the reviews of the submitted papers to TOPLAS EIC. TOPLAS EIC dispatches the papers to the associated editors together with the reviews and with the recommendation that the whole acceptance process MUST be completed before March nn+1 or the papers would not be included in the "collected papers" issue.
• March nn+1: All accepted papers are collected in a single TOPLAS issue and announced on the ESOP nn+1 website.

ESOP Collected Papers in TOPLAS

ESOP has an agreement with ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems to produce an issue of the journal collecting selected papers of the conference. The PC Chair of ESOP has the task to determine whether among the accepted papers there are enough of them that would match both the acceptance criteria and the prior publication policy of TOPLAS. In January, the authors of the selected papers will be invited to prepare a revised and expanded version of their work to be submitted to TOPLAS right after the conference. In order to ensure rapid decision and, in case of acceptance, timely publication, the PC Chair of ESOP will forward the reviews of the papers to TOPLAS. The papers will follow the normal TOPLAS reviewing process but TOPLAS will grant them a speedier treatment so that the composition of the TOPLAS issue will be known before the next ESOP edition. It will be announced on its website.