EasyChair Smart Program Technology

Have you ever run a conference? If yes, then have you ever tried to generate good quality conference pages including the conference program? Creating pages and a program for a tiny conference (say, 20 presentations), already creates a challenging amount of work. Creating them for a small to medium size conference (say, 25 to 100 presentations), is very hard and time-consuming. Creating them for a large conference, with parallel sessions and collocated conferences and workshops, can easily take several man-months or even man-years of work, normally resulting in poor quality content and inconsistent, out-of-date, difficult to modify information.

Developing pages with a program is not only a matter of your time and quality. Have you tried to find older editions of conferences, even the best conferences in your domain? One can argue they have great historical value. Programs, contents of talks, slides, photos - would you like to access them 5 years later? Would you like to see pages of even older ones? Pioneering conferences in your areas? Sadly, most of them are gone within one or two years.

The good news is that EasyChair smart program technology is there to help you.

A smart program page generated by EasyChair

Our Smart Program technology automates nearly every task required to create and maintain conference and program pages, and does much more than that. The result is a collection of pages of amazing quality and functionality produced at a very little cost to the conference organizers. To use it and create high-quality pages you do not have to study Web design, scripting, HTML or CSS, or exchange thousands of emails. You do not have to buy a domain or a Web server. Your pages and data can be updated by you, other organisers or authors at any time, and the updated program can be published on your smart program Web page in a single click.

As an example, take a look at the Smart Program pages of VSL 2014, a mega-conference consisting of more than 10 conferences and nearly 100 workshops. Start browsing it from a day program, and then follow the links. On June 5, 2014, this program comprised of 2196 Web pages. Most of them were created automatically by EasyChair using data provided by the authors, program committees and program managers. In many cases this data was taken from submissions already available in EasyChair, so very little work, or no work at all, was required to use this data in the online program.

The largest program created in this way consists of over 5,000 Web pages.

Smart program environment for program managers

This is an incomplete list of what Smart Program technology will help you to do.

  1. Web design carefully created by a professional Web designer and an artist. The design can be customized, for example, the Smart Program Pages of LPAR 19.
  2. A highly functional design convenient for the users. Generated pages are cross-linked so that various views of the program are easily available.
  3. Several ready solutions. For example, the program committee and accepted papers pages can be added to the program in a couple of minutes.
  4. Thousands of pages can be published in a single click.
  5. Data can be edited by the authors and the program managers at any time.
  6. Possibility to define and check various constraints on the program based on author-defined scheduling remarks.
  7. Schedule analysis can find constraint violations, including automatically found constraints, and other problems such as empty sessions, talks without presenters, a presenter scheduled to chair a parallel session and many others.
  8. Automatic discovery of similar talks, which makes mapping talks to sessions easier.
  9. Automatic schedule generation based on talk similarity.
  10. Creating a joint program of more than one collocated conference.
  11. Production of a printable high-quality editable booklet in Microsoft Word format including the program.