Attending: Linda Almstead, Duane Bailey, Larry D'Allesandro, Mary D'Amelia, Chris Fernandes, Dale Fish, Frank Ford, David Hemmendinger,  Tim Huang, Amruth Kumar, David Levine, Brad Richards, Bill Taffe, Charles Welty, Karl Wurst, Richard Wyatt

Apologies received from: Danny Kopec, Scott McElfresh,  Ingrid Russell

Missing:  Dick Close, Ralph Morelli, Viera Proulx

Mary D'Amelia is Union College's local arrangements staff person.  She will help in making local arrangements.  She had another engagement so we covered items that would affect her before going into other matters.

Possible accommodations

1.  Holiday Inn ($80 - 90/night)  There will probably be no free rooms.  We will block 100 rooms now and update the number in January.
2.  Day's Inn (~$60/night)  (Mainly for students?)
3. Glen Sander's (B & B, more expensive)
4. Parker Inn (downtown, also more expensive)
5. Ramada Inn (Latham, about 8 miles away.)
6. Airport strip hotels (expensive but probably available at the last minute).

The main accommodations will be the Holiday Inn and the Day's Inn.  Rooms will be blocked under the name "CCSCNE".  Information about these and other accommodations will be available in 2 weeks.
 

They should be near the social hour, talks, posters, etc.  If they give presentations they must not conflict with other talks.

Food for 100 people at breakfast and lunch.
Contest Breakfast - coffee, bagels, juice.  Put food in larger contest room.
Contest Lunch could be at Hale House or give contestants tickets to the cafeteria.

Platforms - Linux, Windows, C, C++, Java (IDEs m- BlueJ, Eclipse(?), JDK).

Automatic scoring is going to be ready by then.  Frank will talk to people at TuringsCraft. People suggested other possible scoring software.  One possibility is Harvard software which can be made compatible to Windows.  Another one from Taylor University (Steve Brandle) could be useful.  In any case we need a back-up plan.  TuringsCraft requires Internet access.  What if it is down?  It was suggested that since TuringsCraft is a for profit company they should really work to make a good showing.

Contest rooms -  It is best to have both platforms in same building but that may not be possible.  It is nice to have a room without machines for discussion.  Judges room can be in another building.  Need a projector to project the real time scoreboard.  If Linux is put in Olin Hall, Chris needs to find out how much notice is required to set it up.

Contest constraints - Printed materials are OK, but no electronic aids.  No internet access for aid.  Teams using the Web for aid will be dropped from the contest at the time they are caught.

Number of teams - About 32 maximum.
 

Breaks - 2 Friday (2:30 and 5:00), 1 Saturday (10 am)

Conference Breakfast - Saturday with vendors.
Conference Lunch - The 2003 conference had 150 at lunch.  Ours may be smaller due to the travel distances involved.  Lunch will probably be at Old Chapel (seats 250), Hale House (seats 125), or Upper Class (seats ?).

Add to the registration form questions as to whether attendees will be attending the lunch and dinner.  This may help is our estimate.
 

In Olin Hall.  At least 4 possible rooms (Olin 106, 306, 307, 107).  More rooms will be available in other, nearby buildings.

All rooms have jacks, computers, and overhead projectors.  Should have 5 student volunteers (paid in conference attending and food) available to aid with A-V.  Should also have a knowledgeable employee available to handle larger problems.  Student volunteers would know who this is and go to that person in emergencies.

Usually 2 concurrent workshops, should be hands-on but sometimes are not.  Lots of possible rooms.  Steinmetz 110 was mentioned as one possible place.  Lunch for workshop participants will be at the Student Center, they will pay for themselves.

Need 1 student there all the time.  Will have programs, goodies, proceedings.  Often a local company will contribute goodies, money, or food.  A folder with a pad and room for meal tickets, conference badge, etc. is needed.  Often a school folder with school imprint on it.  It was suggested that a bunch of pens be left out on the registration table for people wanting them instead of having them in the folder.

Nott-Seward lot.  Cannot rope off a section of any lot.  Suggest people walk to the meeting if possible (from Holiday Inn or Day's Inn).  Perhaps there will be a shuttle from the Holiday Inn.

Need a room to accommodate 30 people after the conference lunch.  Should be no problem.

Call for Papers (CFP) will be sent by US mail.  All other advertising will be electronic (web page).

Frank needs information from everyone about dates, submission method.  All submission will now be electronic. Also wording should be included about our definitions of panel, workshop, and tutorials.  Duane will handle panels, tutorials, and workshop information.  Brad - Posters.  Larry - papers.

Frank also needs contact information.  This means email addresses.  We have put our phone numbers on the page in the past.  There was some opposition to this due to its potential intrusiveness.  It was not decided as to whether or not phone numbers are to be in the contact information.  It seemed that the default would be the old way - put phone numbers on the web.

Frank will get the CFP ready as soon as the needed information is sent to him.  He will run it by the committee before distribution.

Charlie will disconnect all submission materials from last year's site.  Charlie will also send the CFP for last year to Richard.
 

Decided at last meeting to be Friday, Nov. 14, with slippage to Monday allowed.  If most papers are submitted on Friday, the committee will be able to process most of them over the weekend.

Format will be decided in January.

Last time we decided to have the posters judged only on the poster itself, not on ancillary materials or the explanation of the poster by the students.
 

There was a discussion of who should referee panels, tutorials, and workshops.  The minutes say it may not be the committee chairs.  Thus we will need to send them out for external review.  If we do this we need to have their due dates be earlier.  (This was left as a decision for the regional board meeting.)

Duane - Possible workshops and panels - Women in Computing and/or Retention in General.  NSF wants to come and make up for its nonappearance last year.  NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) GenBank: Bioinformatics.  CCLI recipients discuss their grants.  Student job placement.  How to change the CS curriculum to address the problem of outsourcing.  Versions and variations of CS1.  Using HCI in a variety of computer science courses (Larry).

Karl asked that people specify their needs when a tutorial is first submitted,  Enrollment limitation, special A-V, etc.
 

Can it be online this year?  In order to have it online we must be able to accept payment online.  Richard has brought this up at national (e.g. use of PayPal).  National is moving slowly on this.

Should there be one registration form for papers, posters, contest, and attendees?  There was much talk about this.  Frank and Karl will work on a single form.
 

What to do with them?  We have up to $5000 to be used to enhance this conference.  Suggestions were to

• have subsidies for small schools who have not yet sent people.
• include a nice item in the goodie bag (e.g. like the laser pointers that Amruth found).
• reduce or eliminate student fees for this conference (this was not well received because it could set a precedent for future years).
• have better food and drink (quite popular).
• scholarships to first time attendees (honor system, if they say they are first time we accept it).
• excellent speaker (more travel money and higher stipend)  This was not well received due to previous experience.
• electronic program (?).
• capital investment for software (seemed not to enhance this conference).
• dinner at a restaurant or place of local interest (e.g. museum).  David will investigate this.

Speaker suggestions

• Kent Beck
• Cornell people
• RPI (e.g. David Musser - STL, generic programming - workshop?)
• Henry Walker - head of SIGCSE
• David Parnas - Queens College
• David Gelernter
• Randy Pausch - Carnegie Mellon (very favorably received by the group)
• Bioinformatics (MIT, other places)
• Fred Martin - Mindstorm - mainly interested in elementary and secondary education - UMass Lowell
• Eric Lander (genomics, MIT)

Tour of the campus facilities.

Olin Hall
• Room 110 - 4 teams/ table.  5 tables  20 teams.  Check if 60 people is too many for the air conditioning and if it is in the limit set by the school and fire laws.
• Room 102 - 10 teams - need to do some rearranging.
• Room 106 - programming contest and/or sessions.  Holds 40 people.
• Second floor was locked.  Room 210 - posters?
• Room 306  26 machines - 20 teams.  Also good for workshops, sessions.
• More smaller rooms available for sessions.
• Olin Rotunda - probably too small for vendors.  Could use it for overflow vendors and milling around.  Put vendors and food in a large room on the first floor instead of programming contest.


Nott Building - very impressive.  Excellent place for vendors, posters, reception, breaks. Requires a bit of walking to get to.  Do not know if the college would let us take it over for the period and allow food and drink.  David will check on this.  Problems:  Vendors need lockable space to store their materials.  Getting vendor materials to the building.

Vendor location possibilities (also breaks, reception, posters)

• Nott building is the first choice.  This will be checked out.
• Second choice is first floor room in Olin with Olin Rotunda used for overflow and informal discussion.  Some chairs should be put in rotunda for informal discussions.  Food, registration, etc. would be in the room with the vendors.

Adjourn  3:20 pm.  By acclamation.

Respectfully submitted,

Charles Welty
Secretary