ConfSys - An Intelligent Conference Management System

This paper offers a brief history of, ConfSys, a conference management system, that has been used for over 15 years to support a number of international academic conferences. It is a complete system that has all functions automated with the possibility of the program chair overriding any of its decision. We have found that in most instances, the decisions made by the system need very minor changes. This paper describes another step in its automation process involving the submission made by authors and its processing by a proposed intelligent module. The new module will extract the salient metadata which we believe are more relevant than the ones entered by authors. This would ensure reliable paper-related details like title, author, coauthor, organization, abstract, keyword, etc. are being captured instead of users adding these details first-hand. The system requires users to verify the extracted information and correct them if required, further improving the paper allocation process to reviewers based on matching the reviewer’s interests with extracted keywords and topics, thus improving the quality of relevance of the reviews and comments to the authors. This in turn would improve the quality of the publications.