ConfSys: the CINDI conference support system

In managing an academic conference, the program chair (PC) is required to deal with many repetitive administrative tasks such as: interaction with authors and program committee members (reviewers), paper collection, paper allocation, distributing the paper to the reviewers, collating, sorting and tabulating the evaluations, orchestrating the debate of controversial evaluation of some of the papers, making the final tabulation and preparing the notification and comments to the reviewers and authors. The Conference Management System (ConfSys) presented here is a entirely a Web-based system which provides facility for the program chair(s) to set up the details for a meeting, allows authors to register and submit papers to the system on-line; records the topic of expertise of the members of the program committee members (reviewers); helps the PC by performing an automatic allocation of the submitted papers to the reviewers. The reviewers have a facility to bid in an auction for papers to review and later to download and review the assigned paper via the Internet. The ConfSys uses the DBLP database in the automatic assignment of papers to avoid any conflict of interest and thus helps in the allocation of papers to the reviewers for a fair and impartial review of each paper.