Combinatorial design for a conference: constructing a balanced three-parallel session schedule

Ibrahim, Haslinda; Ramli, Razamin; Hassan, Mohammad Hasnan

doi:10.1080/09720529.2008.10698186

Cited by 9 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…The work uses a greedy scheduling algorithm, but no empirical results or computational analysis are presented. Ibrahim, Ramli & Hassan (2008) focus on assigning talks to time slots across a number of days in 3 concurrent sessions. Each talk belongs to a field or topic and the goal is avoid scheduling talks of the same topic concurrently.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Avoiding “conflicts of interest”: a computational approach to scheduling parallel conference tracks and its human evaluation

Manda

Hahn

Beekman³

2019

PeerJ Computer Science

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Conferences with contributed talks grouped into multiple concurrent sessions pose an interesting scheduling problem. From an attendee’s perspective, choosing which talks to visit when there are many concurrent sessions is challenging since an individual may be interested in topics that are discussed in different sessions simultaneously. The frequency of topically similar talks in different concurrent sessions is, in fact, a common cause for complaint in post-conference surveys. Here, we introduce a practical solution to the conference scheduling problem by heuristic optimization of an objective function that weighs the occurrence of both topically similar talks in one session and topically different talks in concurrent sessions. Rather than clustering talks based on a limited number of preconceived topics, we employ a topic model to allow the topics to naturally emerge from the corpus of contributed talk titles and abstracts. We then measure the topical distance between all pairs of talks. Heuristic optimization of preliminary schedules seeks to balance the topical similarity of talks within a session and the dissimilarity between concurrent sessions. Using an ecology conference as a test case, we find that stochastic optimization dramatically improves the objective function relative to the schedule manually produced by the program committee. Approximate Integer Linear Programming can be used to provide a partially-optimized starting schedule, but the final value of the discrimination ratio (an objective function used to estimate coherence within a session and disparity between concurrent sessions) is surprisingly insensitive to the starting schedule. Furthermore, we show that, in contrast to the manual process, arbitrary scheduling constraints are straightforward to include. We applied our method to a second biology conference with over 1,000 contributed talks plus scheduling constraints. In a randomized experiment, biologists responded similarly to a machine-optimized schedule and a highly modified schedule produced by domain experts on the conference program committee.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Avoiding “conflicts of interest”: a computational approach to scheduling parallel conference tracks and its human evaluation

Manda

Hahn

Beekman³

2019

PeerJ Computer Science

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“…Most popularity predictions based on this input turned out to be accurate during the actual conference. Ibrahim et al (2008) focus on a conference scheduling problem where talks need to be assigned to time slots (spread over a number of days) in 3 parallel tracks. Each talk belongs to a field, and the schedule should be such that talks of the same field do not occur simultaneously.…”

Section: Attender-based Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

“…As no individual participant preferences were available, the authors have randomly generated this data from historical attendance data, for various choices of the standard deviation of the number of preferred talks per participant. Notice that the issue of grouping talks into sessions is not included in this problem, in fact, as in Ibrahim et al (2008), each talk could be seen as a session.…”

Section: Attender-based Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Combinatorial auctions: theory, experiments, and practice

Vangerven¹

2018

4OR-Q J Oper Res

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The proverb 'the longest mile is the last mile home' quite accurately describes my feelings at the end of this PhD journey. As usual at the end of your PhD, there is one thing left to do to complete the doctoral dissertation: writing the only part of this behemoth that people might actually readthe acknowledgements. Acknowledgements are usually quite non-consequential, in the sense that people are rarely evaluated on them (unlike, hopefully, the rest of this work), yet they do matter. Amidst the celebration, the right people require thanks in the right way. As is tradition, the first paragraph is dedicated to the advisor. Fun fact; while writing these acknowledgements, and going over how some of my predecessors handled it before me, I noticed that it is even tradition to mention that it is tradition to mention the advisor first. Fortunately, I had the privilege of having not just one, but two advisors. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my advisors Prof. Dr. Frits Spieksma and Prof. Dr. Dries Goossens for the continuous support of my PhD study and related research, for their patience, motivation, and immense knowledge. Their door was-usually-open whenever I ran into a spot of trouble or had a question. Their guidance and attention to detail helped me bring iii v Van der Auweraer (check out the Nerf Super Soaker Zombie Strike Revenge Contaminator), Silvia Valeria Padilla Tinoco (pura vida!), and Sebastian 'speedy' Gonzalez, Finally, the newcomers: Heletje Van Staden, Laurens Deprez, and Kim De Boeck. It falls on you to keep the cake traditions alive! Phew, I really hope I did not forget anyone in that list.. . A lifelong friend obviously deserves mentioning. Tommy Graindourze, I like to think your philosophical ways kept me sane(r) during my PhD journey. The computer and board game distractions probably also helped. Finally, this last paragraph is dedicated to family. Special thanks go to my sister, her husband and their lovely daughter, my (first) godchild. I also want to express my deep gratitude to my parents. Both have instilled many admirable qualities in me, and have given me a solid foundation in life. They provided me with unfailing love, support and continuous encouragement throughout my years of study and the process of researching and writing this thesis. This accomplishment would not have been possible without them. The clichéd 'words cannot express' is fitting. Still, I will try: mom and dad, I profoundly thank you.

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“…From the literature, it shows that the research trend for conference scheduling is moving into generating a schedule that is based on participants' preferences [1][2][3][14][15][16]. Many approaches and methods have been used to improve the quality of the conference schedule, such as using goal programming [1], bi-criterion approach [2] that were inspired from Sampson's PBCS [3], integer programming [16], granular processing and Domain Transformation Approach (DTA) [17][18] and many more.…”

Section: State Of the Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many approaches and methods have been used to improve the quality of the conference schedule, such as using goal programming [1], bi-criterion approach [2] that were inspired from Sampson's PBCS [3], integer programming [16], granular processing and Domain Transformation Approach (DTA) [17][18] and many more. It was reported that these methods produced very encouraging results.…”

Section: State Of the Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Incorporating capacitative constraint to the preference-based conference scheduling via domain transformation approach

Jaafar

Rahim

Omar

et al. 2018

J. Fundam and Appl Sci.

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Organizing academic conference often creates conflicts among presenters in the form of unsatisfactory assignments of papers to time slots or sessions during the conference. This paper proposes an enhanced technique of scheduling the conference pap sessions by applying Domain Transformation Approach (DTA). The objective of this work is to generate a conference schedule that satisfies hard constraint which ensures all papers associated with presenters and participants are schedule the numbers of papers in the overall slots. According to the results, the schedules generated are of high quality which managed to satisfy the constraints imposed. Based on our findings, DTA produced competitive sched participants' preferences and balancing the allocation of papers to time slots. the numbers of papers in the overall slots. According to the results, the schedules generated are of high quality which managed to satisfy the constraints imposed. Based on our findings, ules efficiently as expected which satisfied all of the conference scheduling; domain transformation approach; capacity optimization.

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Combinatorial design for a conference: constructing a balanced three-parallel session schedule

Cited by 9 publications

References 10 publications

Avoiding “conflicts of interest”: a computational approach to scheduling parallel conference tracks and its human evaluation

Avoiding “conflicts of interest”: a computational approach to scheduling parallel conference tracks and its human evaluation

Combinatorial auctions: theory, experiments, and practice

Incorporating capacitative constraint to the preference-based conference scheduling via domain transformation approach

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