The SIGACT Electronic Submissions Server

SIGACT has written some software for handling electronic conference submissions and provides the software and a centralized server (sigact.acm.org) that has a well-tested installation of this software. The server and software are both available to any conference with significant participation by the SIGACT community. Below are instructions for what to do if you would like to host electronic submissions on the SIGACT machine.
  1. Request an account for your conference by contacting Wolf Bein at bein cs.unlv.edu.
  2. When you get your account/password, log in as soon as possible and change your password to something more secure. If you know how to use it, we recommend that you use "ssh" for logging into the sigact machine, since it encrypts all sensitive data such as passwords. You can even set it up so that sigact does a cryptographic authentication of your identity before allowing you to log in.
  3. When logged in to your conference account, type esub_setup at the shell prompt. This will prompt you for all sorts of information regarding your conference, including submission deadlines and contact names and e-mail addresses. You can see a sample setup run to see what sorts of things will be asked. After successfully completing esub_setup, the software and submission instruction web page should be all set up automatically. Make a note of the URL of the submission instructions so that you can include it in your call for papers or other publicity.
  4. Carefully read through all the submission instructions yourself, and try out each command. This serves two purposes: first, it makes sure that the software is installed and working correctly. Second, it makes you familiar with the process so that you can help people who are submitting to your conference. Remember that I'm here to help you if something goes seriously wrong -- I am not here to run your conference submissions or to help everybody submitting to your conference!
  5. When you are confident that everything is working correctly and are familiar with the process yourself, publicize the submissions server and wait for papers to start pouring in!
Once you have all submissions, you can find them in your conference account under the conference directory and the subdirectory Submissions. For instance, for STOC '97, the submissions would be in STOC97/Submissions.

There is software available for printing out a list of papers submitted, and there is additional software for program committees to submit and collect comments on the submissions. Unfortunately, I don't have any experience with either of those, so instructions for their use will have to come from someone who has experience with that software. I'd be happy to add any instructions to this page if someone wants to send them to me!

Created by Steve Tate / srt cs.unt.edu
Maintained by Wolf Bein / bein cs.unlv.edu

Last modified: Wed Oct 2 13:43:04 PDT 2002