I recently had the honor of serving as the program chair for
ISSTA'11 and
PLDI'12.
In each case, I wanted to make a concerted effort to come up with a
well-balanced program committee that included active young researchers who had
not had the opportunity to serve on a major PC yet. To help me identify suitable
candidate PC members, I created
PC-miner, a tool that analyzes publications and program committee service
in the top conferences in Programming Languages and Software Engineering. Currently,
the tool supports the following conferences: ASE, ECOOP, ESOP, FSE, ICFP, ICSE, ISMM, ISSTA, OOPSLA, PLDI, and POPL
and it covers the years 1995-2013. Publication data was obtained from DBLP, and program
committee data was scraped from various conference web sites.
PC-miner runs in any web browser and shows, for a given author, his/her publications and
program committee service in the conferences listed above. It is possible to search for
authors by name, and to filter the search results to a subset of the supported conferences,
or to a subrange of the supported years. It is also possible to run queries such as
"show all authors who have published at least 3 papers in PLDI, and who haven't served on the
committee for PLDI yet", and to save the results to the clipboard. Here is a screenshot of
PC-miner in action:
An
open-source distribution of PC-miner is
available from Github.
Acknowledgements: feedback, contributions and suggestions from
Giuseppe Castagna, Matt Dwyer, Cormac Flanagan, Sam Guyer, Richard Jones, Max Schaefer, Alex Orso,
Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Jan Vitek, and Andreas Zeller are gratefully acknowledged.