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R esearch conferences are often the most desirable venues for presenting our research results. For academic computer scientists and engineers , preferring conferences over journals is so common that we even lobby administrators to ensure that conference papers can be viewed in the same light as journal papers in other fields [1]. Hence, the health of conferences is vital to our research mission. One conventional indication of health is the number of submissions and the acceptance rate at the conference. The accompanying figure shows both statistics for four ACM conferences. Clearly, these conferences appear healthy from this perspective. I am concerned, however, about the overall impact of increasing workloads on program committees and conferences and of decreasing acceptance rates on authors, especially authors of papers focusing on big ideas or new directions. Calls for papers often include encouraging words for big idea or new direction papers. The problem is that reviewers see so many regular papers it is just too difficult to switch gears and be more understanding when evaluating bolder papers with holes in arguments or missing measurements. Program committees typically start with a ranked list of papers based on the average of numerical ratings in order to cope with the large number of submissions. Big idea papers are sure to get some poor evaluations, which cause them to drop down the list. Hence, the increasing workload makes it exceedingly difficult for big idea or new direction papers to be accepted when selecting tens of papers out of hundreds. Occasionally , a senior member will dive in to save such a paper from its low rankings, but it's rare. An Experiment I have a concrete suggestion for an experiment that I hope some conferences will consider and try. Let's set aside one session for such papers, and have a separate program committee to select them. This committee could consist of a few former program committee chairs and authors with a record of producing such papers. It can be small, as I wouldn't expect a flood of big idea or new directions papers. This committee could meet after the regular program committee in case the latter would like to pass along a few of its submissions. Evidence for evaluating this experiment might include attendance at the session, whether it led to effective discussions at the conference , whether it led to regular papers in later conferences, and so on. My …

The health of research conferences and the dearth of big idea papers