Conference on Reliable Awesome Projects (no acronyms please)

Symposium Overview

The Conference on Reliable Awesome Projects (no acronyms please) is now accepting submissions. Submissions should be awesome, and likely reliable, but most certainly they should be projects. They should also never, ever, refer to Conference on Reliable Awesome Projects (no acronyms please) by its acronym. Ever!

Topics of interest to the Conference on Reliable Awesome Projects (no acronyms please) include

Systems-ish things
Hacking
Measuring
Building
Virtualizing
PL things (if you must)
DBMS stuff (if you must)
Papers on all other topics will be rejected, including anything tangentially related to AI.

Reviewing of full papers will be done by the Conference on Reliable Awesome Projects (no acronyms please) program committee, which consists of me (Remzi). Papers must use a typeface no smaller than 10 point, and be no longer than TEN (10) 8.5" by 11" pages including everything (text, figures, references, and so forth). All papers must be submitted as PDF.

Program Committee

Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, University of Wisconsin, Madison, (Program Chair, General Chair, Decider-in-chief)

Important Dates and Locations

Paper submissions are due by 6pm, Friday, May 16
Date of conference: Conference will unfortunately never take place.
Why not? Because of something you said to me once, a long time ago.

Submitting a Paper

As described above, submitted papers must be no longer than TEN single-spaced 8.5" x 11" pages, including figures, tables, and references, using 10 point or larger fonts. Papers longer than TEN pages will be ripped to bits by the program chair and automatically receive a very bad grade, like a D. Papers so short as to be considered "much too short" will not receive full consideration and thus also a bad grade, like a C, but probably also a D. Papers should be in two-column format. Papers must be submitted in PDF.

Submissions will be judged on originality, significance, interest, clarity, relevance, and correctness. Unlike most other conferences, all papers will be accepted and distributed via the online electronic proceedings. Thus, submit and join us in celebrating Conference on Reliable Awesome Projects (no acronyms please) !

Paper Organization

A good paper will likely have the following components:
Title and Author List: should be self-evident.
Abstract: Describe in short what you do, how you do it, and the results.
Introduction: Spend a little more time. Motivate the problem. Start with generalities, and narrow in on your problem. Describe your approach. What is good about it? Potential weaknesses? Summarize results. Give an outline of the rest of the paper.
Related Work: Write about other similiar work. What is different than what you did? What is similar? Try to draw general conclusions about what others have missed.
Description of what you did/built: Use pictures and words to show what you did. Be detailed. Think about how to organize what you are doing.
Results: Graphs and tables, all clear and understandable. Full description of each experiment and the results. What is the point of each graph? What conclusions can you draw from it?
Conclusions: Appropriately drawn from the work described, as general as possible, with a hint of "lessons learned"; what did you get out of the study? Summary is what you did; conclusions are what you learned.
One good way to structure a paper is to find a paper you liked in class and copy its structure (loosely).

Some suggested readings (to make you a better writer):

Read this paper about how to write a technical paper
Read this paper about how to write sentences, paragraphs, etc.
And, of course, read Strunk and White. Many times.

If you plan on using latex (which is great for this sort of thing), click here for an example Latex template (in tar format). If you plan on using MS Word, please make sure you know how to generate PDF. Also, make sure to make your paper non-ugly, which is hard if using Word.

Authors of all papers will be expected to provide an HTML page containing the abstract of and links to their paper, and to the software and experimental data described in their paper. Papers, software, and data will all be collected for inclusion in an electronic version of the symposium. Also, make sure to include your talk slides.

Deadline and Submission Instructions

Submitted papers must be received by 6pm, May 16, 2008. Submission of all papers must be made in electronic form, in PDF format. As stated above, an HTML page, containing the abstract and author information, and including a link to the paper, should be submitted. A template of the abstract page is available. All submissions should be sent to remzi@cs.wisc.edu, and the email should consist of a link to the HTML page and related documents and software.

Best Paper Award

An award will be given for the best paper at the symposium. Unfortunately, due to the poor exchange rate, you will likely receive very little money for this.

Sister Conferences

Conference on Reliable Awesome Projects (no acronyms please) is the latest in a series of systems conferences based around CS 736. Its sister conferences are USEDNIX, BAD, SOS-Please, OS-DIE, BS (Big Systems), and maybe some others I have forgotten.