DOI: 10.1145/1866739.1866740
Moshe;Y.;Vardi
My initiation into the computing-research
community was a workshop on “Logic
and Databases” in 1979. I was the only
graduate student attending that workshop;
Where have all
the Workshops Gone?
my graduate advisor was invited, and
he got permission from the organizers
to bring me along. In spite of the informality of the event I was quite in awe of
the senior researchers who attended
the workshop. In fact, I was quite in
shock when one of them, an author of
a well-respected logic textbook, proved
to be far from an expert in the subject
matter of his book.
Throughout the 1980s, workshops
continued to be informal gatherings
of researchers mixing networking with
work-in-progress presentations and
intellectually stimulating discussions.
A workshop was typically a rather intimate gathering of specialists; an opportunity to invite one’s scientific friends
to get together. While conferences were
the place to present polished technical
results, workshops were a place to see if
your colleagues were as impressed with
your new results or directions as you
were. The pace was leisurely, many presentations were done on blackboards,
and it was perfectly acceptable to ask
questions during presentations. Organizers may have posted an occasional
“call for abstracts,” but never a “call for
papers.” In fact, workshops typically
had no formal proceedings.
Such informal workshops are almost
extinct today. As selective conferences
become our dominant way of publish-
ing, workshops have gradually become
mini-conferences. Today’s workshops
have typically large program commit-
tees, calls for papers, deadlines, and all
the other accoutrements of computing-
research conferences. What they usu-
ally lack is the prestige of major confer-
ences. Furthermore, most workshops
today do publish proceedings, before
or after the meeting, which means a
workshop paper cannot be resubmit-
ted to a conference. As a result, today’s
workshops do not attract papers of the
same quality as those submitted to ma-
jor conferences.
Moshe Y. Vardi, EDIToR-In-CHIEF
