Dear colleagues,
ICCT 2000 is a TC6 event which is a part of the IFIP world congress. The world congress consists of eight conferences, ICCT is the second biggest of them. ICCT has already a tradition in China (the present event will be number nine or so), it has been integrated into IFIP for the first time.
The schedule of ICCT and the world congress is as follows:
Monday, 21 August 2000: Plenary sessions for whole IFIP (many greeting addresses, panels with general topics), i.e. not too much TC6 specific.
Tuesday, 22 Aug. ICCT conference; a huge (!) event with very many - Thursday, 24. Aug.: papers: more than 300 papers in six parallel sessions; acceptance rate was around 75 percent; a somewhat smaller acceptance rate would have been a matter of serious discussion but an accepted manuscript delivers (at least) one paying (!) participant - and the organisors need many paying participants since the conference location (the international convention center) is expensive.
By the way: - Every participant (apart from the invited speakers) will have to pay the registration fee of US dollar 530 (for early registration, USD 580 otherwise)!
- The organisors would appreciate it very much if some TC6 delegates would be willing to chair a session; names of chairpersons must be fixed by the end of May, thus we can discuss that in Paris. I have already expressed my concern that the willingness for paying the registration fee for the task of chairing a session (and to attend the banquet on Monday evening) will probably be rather limited. My proposal was that the registration fee is waived for TC6 delegates who chair a session but the chairpersons would in that case also not go to the banquet (forget about the banquet: there are so many other alternatives for a good meal in Beijing which cost a tiny fraction of the banquet's price). It appears that this registration fee waiving might be accepted but we will have to clarify this.
- All the three days of ICCT 2000 have this huge number of six or even seven parallel streams with one exception: Wednesday morning (this might still be changed to Thursday morning) is a plenary session consisting of 4 invited presentations: One by Nokia, one by Lucent, one by a Chinese leading reasearcher and one by Andre Danthine; 45 minutes per presentation. The organisors will ask Augusto Casaca for chairing that session.
- TC6 delagates will depart by bus to the venue of TC6 meeting 2/2000 on Thursday afternoon.
The organisors will ask for an IFIP grant in order to facilitate the arrangements for ICCT 2000. Indeed that is what I proposed to them. They affirmed that they would follow the IFIP rules for such a grant. The size of such a potential grant and for what such a grant should be used will have to be discussed at meeting 1/2000 in Paris.
Best regards Otto Spaniol