There is a tremendous amount of administrative work to be done during the three month period between when the submissions start arriving and when the notices go out to the authors and session chairpersons. You may want to make arrangements for additional clerical assistance during this period. A database management program, such as the CONFORG documented in the appendix, will be of help for organization.
As submissions arrive, they must be logged, acknowledged, assigned handling numbers, entered into the data base, and sorted by Technical Committee and category. Submissions that could fit into several categories should be sorted by the first category listed by the author. You will need a count of the number of papers assigned to each of the Technical Committees. To expedite the submission process, consider providing for electronic mail submission and establishing a central FTP for dial-in update of paper status.
Based on the paper counts and historical data about the number of sessions and papers for each Technical Committee, make preliminary assignments of the number of poster and lecture sessions for each Committee, and the number of papers for each session. The Conference Board requires a minimum of 15 minutes per lecture and a maximum of 12 (preferably 11) presentations per lecture session. Poster sessions can handle twice as many. Communicate the preliminary assignment to each Technical Committee.
The Technical Committees must be sent copies of all of the submissions to be reviewed, collated by category. They will need a minimum of six weeks for reviewing. Each Technical Committee must meet at least once before the final meeting, to preliminarily place papers in sessions. The final meeting should take place (if possible) in New York, at the IEEE Headquarters. At this meeting, the final acceptance of papers and the organizing and ordering of papers in sessions is done. If the Technical Committees are adequately prepared, this final meeting should be smooth.
You should monitor the committees through the review process, and alter your initial allocation of sessions slightly if there is an unusually large percentage of good papers in one area or another. The committees are not obliged to use all of their allocated sessions.
The committees will tell you which papers should be accepted, and will suggest how they are to be grouped into sessions, the session types, what the session titles will be, and a preliminary ordering of the papers. They may also suggest names for the session chairpersons and appropriate times and meeting room sizes for the different sessions. It may save you some work to arrange for the Technical Committee Chairpersons to select and confirm the session chairpersons. Any disagreements between the SP Technical Committees and the ICASSP Technical Program Committee must be negotiated at this time.
Several things then must happen quickly so that the authors can get their papers to the publisher on time, and so that the publisher can mail the Advance Program early enough for it to be useful. You must:
During the last few months before ICASSP, you may need to give some assistance to your session chairpersons and organizers of special sessions. The poster sessions at ICASSP-93 included a 15 minute overview in which the session chairperson gave a five-minute outline, then each author gave a one-minute summary of their paper. Authors were instructed (and restricted) to use only one viewgraph. Check with the publications committee that they have up-to-date room assignments, times, session chairpersons, and papers for the session posters. Arrange for one or two alternate session chairpersons in case there are a last-minute cancellations.
You will also need to designate someone to receive information from session chairpersons about audio-visual equipment needs and to arrange for the presence of that equipment and personnel to operate it.
When you arrive at ICASSP, make sure that the meeting rooms and audio-visual equipment are all in good order, that the session posters are set up, and that all the session chairpersons are present. You may have to take some corrective action.
After ICASSP, it is appropriate to send thank-you letters to everyone who helped make the technical program a success.