Proceedings of the 5th international symposium on Memory management

The 2006 International Symposium on Memory Management (ISMM 2006) was held June 10-11, 2006 in Ottawa, Canada. ISMM 2006 is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN), with additional financial support from Intel Corporation. ISMM is the leading forum for researchers, developers, practitioners, and students to present research on memory management and garbage collection. Previous symposia in this series occurred in 2004 (Vancouver), 2002 (Berlin), 2000 (Minneapolis), and 1998 (Vancouver). The earlier workshops (IWMM) occurred in 1995 (Kinross, Scotland) and 1992 (St. Malo, France). Beginning this year, ISMM will be an annual symposium. We thank the authors of all submitted papers. Receiving a number of high quality submissions is obviously necessary to continuing to offer a high-quality program. We thank the program committee for their significant investment of time reading papers, writing detailed reviews, attending the program committee meeting, and selecting the program. They worked hard to offer useful feedback for both selected and rejected papers. An additional 16 outside reviewers also contributed expert reviews, for which many thanks. We especially thank IBM Research and, in particular David Bacon, for hosting the program committee meeting at their facility and providing food and refreshments to keep us going. Thanks to Rich Gerber for his timely support of the START web-based conference management system. In selecting the program committee, we followed SIGPLAN guidelines, working to balance a combination of factors such as research specialty, seniority, gender, academia/industry, geographic location, and rotation over time. We allowed submissions by PC members (but not the PC chair). We invited 14 individuals to serve on the PC to obtain a committee of 9 (plus the chair). The list of invitees was reviewed and approved by the ISMM Steering Committee. We had 45 submissions, from which we selected 17 to appear in the program. One submission was withdrawn. There were 3 PC submissions; all were accepted. Each paper received at least 3 reviews; a few received 4 or even 5. Thus, each PC member reviewed about 14 papers. We employed two review processes new to ISMM. First, we reviewed under conditions of author anonymity, that is, with the reviewers not knowing the identity of the authors (sometimes called double blind reviewing). This worked fairly well, but, as might be expected with something new, there were some glitches. A handful of authors did not obscure their identities. Most of those quickly submitted revised, anonymized, versions of their papers upon request. The 2 remaining papers we processed anyway because the requirement was new and not consistently advertised in advance. We recommend better and consistent notice to authors in the future, and that the PC chair check the submissions immediately after the deadline to give authors a short opportunity to correct papers that obviously reveal the authors. There were only a couple of cases where authorship was revealed by other means (e.g., a visitor giving a talk). We felt it adequate for the reviewers to indicate this in the private-to-the-committee section of their review. Second, we included an author response opportunity. Most authors took advantage of this. It is not clear whether it changed any outcomes, but it is possible, and we felt it a worthwhile practice. The committee suggests allowing more time between the author response period and the PC meeting, to allow the committee to read and consider the author responses ahead of the meeting. PC members declared conflicts of interest in reviewing papers following the ACM guidelines. We note that this was unexpectedly complicated by our institution of author anonymity (How can one declare a conflict with an author if one does not know who the author is?). The provider of the START conference management software, Rich Gerber, worked with us (and some future SIGPLAN conference PC chairs) to devise ways for (a) the PC chair to enter conflicts, and (b) for PC members to indicate institutions, etc., that are conflicts for them, which the system can check more directly. (We could use only (a) for ISMM 2006.) At the PC meeting, before discussing a particular paper, we revealed its authors. This was important since it could (and did, in one or two cases) reveal previously unknown conflicts. Those PC members with conflicts left the room; if the PC chair had a conflict, he designated a non-conflicting member to chair the discussion in his absence. We rated papers on a four step scale: A (will argue to accept), B (prefer accept but will not argue for it), C (prefer reject but will not argue for it), D (will argue to reject). Reviewers also self-rated their expertise in a paper's topic area on a three step scale. We did not discuss papers having no A or B scores, unless a PC member chose to add them to the list to discuss. The committee would like to emphasize their displeasure with those authors who did not revise their work rejected by previous conferences in line with previous reviewer comments. It is an abuse of reviewers to send them the same thing again. We held the PC meeting at Hawthorne, NY on March 2, 2006, with all members present except one participating by speaker phone. We discussed about two thirds of the submitted papers, hearing from all the reviewers, with the highest rating reviewer starting off. We did not return scores to the authors, either in the author response period or after the meeting. A number of reviews were refined as a result of the meeting, in hope of helping authors understand our decision and to revise better for future submission elsewhere. We received a few papers that the committee felt were out of scope for the symposium, and we suggest the next committee carefully review the call for papers and perhaps further clarify. For example, we felt that compiler optimizations and analyses not directed at memory allocation, reclamation, or locality did not fit. We identified several papers for PC mentoring (shepherding). In any group of papers, some are technically stronger than others. We felt it important to include in the program a number of papers that, while not ideal, we found interesting, intriguing, or of expected value to the community. Each selected paper was allotted 25 minutes for presentation and 5 minutes for questions. We also included an invited talk (the invitee chosen by the general and program chairs in consultation) and a Wild and Crazy Ideas session, organized by Chandra Krintz, whom we thank for undertaking that effort.

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