MCS Thesis Examination: Yogesh Yadav

Abstract

    ConfSys, a conference management system, has been used for over 15 years to manage a number of international academic conferences, such as C3S2E, IDEAS, and ICCM. It supports multi-event, multi-track conferences with a large number of user participation and submissions. It provides essential services from setting up a conference, user sign-ups, call for papers, paper submissions, paper auction, paper allocation and review, blind debate, paper decision, author registration, final version submissions, automatic session management, program generation, and electronic proceedings creation to efficiently manage and support the running of academic conferences and journals.

This thesis presents the fourth iteration in the ConfSys system to further accelerate enhancements and to incorporate new features keeping in sync with recent technological advancements. It also presents a newer approach to the previous work of Automatic Semantic Header Generation (ASHG) in Information Retrieval from academic documents such as research papers. Conf-Sys4 includes two new modules with respect to previous versions of ConfSys to improve the paper submission and single/double/triple-blind review process. These new modules are responsible for extracting salient metadata present within the document and classifying documents into system defined categories (subject classifications). This will ensure reliable paper-related details such as title, abstract, keywords, author names, emails, organizations, locations, affiliations, author references,

and automatic tagging to subject classifications are being captured directly from the underlying document instead of users entering these details first-hand. Furthermore, the extraction of author-related details helps to verify the author metadata and references section in the underlying document. The verification ensures whether author-related details or reference citations should be included depending on the selection of single/double/triple-blind review by the author during paper submission process. The new system also includes improvements to existing features, such as adding automatic reminder emails to program committee members for updating their topics of interest to improve the allocation of papers, updating author pairs identification process to use entity

matching technique for conflicting users, updating payment interface for PayPal Payment mode to facilitate secure and reliable payments, and PDF document generation for the preliminary/final program created for the event and payment invoice receipt for user registration to events. These improvements in ConfSys4 ensure consistent metadata generation for papers, improved transparency, ease of usability, and operability for organizing committee members, authors, and system users of the ConfSys system.

Examining Committee

• Dr. Sabine Bergler (Chair) 
• Dr. Bipin Desai (Supervisor)
  
• Dr. Nematollaah Shiri (Examiner)
• Dr. Sabine Bergler (Examiner)