ASPLOS

The ASPLOS program is the result of a very careful evaluation process. We started by recruiting 57 Program Committee (PC) members, experts about equally distributed across the three ASPLOS areas. We paid special attention to gender, employment (academia or industry), geography, and seniority level balance. We also recruited 109 External Review Committee (ERC) members.

This ASPLOS was especially challenging for program selection, with a new record in number of submissions (which we expected), along an unexpectedly high growth in submissions (which we did not expect). Based on prior ASPLOS growth, we were expecting about 400 submissions. It was quite a surprise to receive 486 of them! This required some tough workload management decisions. Most notably, we adopted a 3-phase review process, with some papers rejected with 2 reviews in the first phase, some more rejected after 3 reviews in the second phase, and 235 papers making it to the last phase. During the review process, we also requested a small number of expert reviews on a case-bycase basis, mainly driven by the expertise level of other reviewers. This year we did not use bidding to assign papers to reviewers. The only input we collected from them was their expertise in different areas, and we used these declared areas and our knowledge of their work to assign them paper submissions to review. Overall, the PC, ERC, and external experts produced about 2000 reviews. To encourage robust online discussion ahead of the physical PC meeting, we asked PC members leading paper discussions to write summaries of reviews and key discussion points/questions. Those were shared with authors after the meeting. We believe this worked well to both guide the discussion, as well as to provide thoughtful and actionable feedback to authors. After a thorough and robust online discussion of all these papers, we selected about 100 of these submissions to cover at the in-person, single-track PC meeting, during a beautiful Seattle day in late November, 2019. 54 of the 57 PC members attended. Jim Larus also attended and handled all of our conflicts. We did not set a maximum number of papers we could accept. During the meeting, we accepted 66 papers and conditionally accepted 20 others, subject to shepherding. All the shepherded papers were carefully revised under the shepherd's supervision and ultimately accepted. To complete the program, we invited a panel moderator, Dr. Kathryn McKinley, and two keynote speakers, Dr. Frederic Kaplan and Dr. Tommaso Boccali.

As part of our program selection process, PC members were asked to nominate submissions for the Best Paper award. These nominated papers, along with papers ranking very high in a metric combining overall score, novelty, and potential impact dimensions, were provided to unconflicted PC members for voting, and the top paper selected for the award.

We also selected a paper for the SIGARCH/SIGPLAN/SIGOPS ASPLOS Influential Paper award. Papers that appeared ten or more conferences before this ASPLOS (i.e., 1982-2010) and had not yet received this award were eligible. The first step in selecting the papers involved PC members going over the most highly cited of these papers, according to Microsoft Academic citation counts and nominating candidates (16 in total). Next, these papers were ranked by PC members and these votes passed to the ASPLOS Steering Committee (SC), which selected the award winner(s) for this year.