Data-driven PC-chair-in-the-loop Formation of Program Committees: An EDBT 2023 Experience

The formation of a quality program committee (PC) for a conference venue is critical for a high-quality scientific program. Traditionally, PC chairs take a "manual" approach to form a PC. In practice, however, such an approach, might not create a diverse PC w.r.t. certain dimensions. Furthermore, it has been reported that the traditional manual approach may lead to dense coauthorship networks among PC members. All these aspects can easily make it challenging in practice to ensure fair and quality assignments of reviewers to submissions. In this article, we share our experiences and results of installing a novel data-driven PC-chair-inthe- loop PC formation framework for EDBT 2023 to mitigate some of the challenges brought by traditional PC formation methods.