Campuses:
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The sorting categories guide people who are submitting abstracts. For example, without a dark energy category, no one sent us abstracts for that physics, but sent them to DAP instead.
The categories then help the sorters identify topics and know roughly how many sessions of what type will occur. There is no sorting software that matches categories to the final sessions (except an overall number of sessions) The sorters have to do it by hand. Since there will be 4 sorters, the categories will be divided between them to lighten the load - another reason it is good to have explicit categories. Each of the program committee members will also be assigned in groups of 3-4 people by subfield to help the sorter or fill in gaps when we don’t have a sorter in that subfield. See the list below to find the categories assigned to you.
Looking through the abstracts as they are coming in allows each small group to make suggestions ahead of time to the sorter as to how they can be turned into interesting sessions.
Finally - there should be symposia and focus sessions already defined. Many will have an invited talk (identified), but then a bunch of parallel talks. Those talks come from the abstracts, so we have to be ready to choose those from the categories and put them into special sessions.
Lessons learned and how to improve for next year - It took us long to sort our abstracts, because we spent time to sort out joint mini-symposia first. - Other divisions got to the white board before we did, took most of Saturday and Sunday slots. - After some semi-tense negotiation, we got some Saturday and Sunday slots, but we did not get a “fair share” of Saturday. Suggestions for future meetings - In ADVANCE of the sorting meeting, the program committee sorters agree on which time slots on Sat/Sun/Mon/Tue would be best for DPF sessions and claim them to get our fair share. - Or APS allocates slots for each day for each division, based on the number of abstracts.
Notes extracted from Feb 5, 2018 by Dmitri Action Items added in italics
a) ~230 total, 2 people had to sort in one day. Identify 4 people by September
b) quite a few abstracts came from other divisions as they matched DPF categories better; Better categories - help us draft them below.
c) as many decisions have to be taken “on the spot” it helps if between sorters we have individuals covering all DPF related areas (DNP has ~5-6 sorters for this reason);
d) some of the sorting categories had very few abstracts, like ~3 for the top quark studies;
e) typical APS parallel session has 9 talks, while between 6 and 10 is acceptable;
f) we can have access to abstracts as they come in (or after formal submission ends?), so we can provide feedback to the sorters in advance. We had access this year and divided people into groups to look at those abstracts, but very few did that. We cannot do it earlier, because it is timed to abstract submission. If we have 4 sorters from a range of disciplines, we can match the support group to the sorter expertise and the sorter can call a short teleconference ahead of time.
The names of the program committee members willing to help sorters with the defined categories is also shown. THe abstracts will be pre-sorted by the submitters according to this list. However, the sorters will be able to give different titles to the actual sessions depending on the submitted abstracts (for example mini-symposia or forums). This list helps the sorters identify the abstracts rather than necessarily group them in the same session. It can also be used to encourage submission of abstracts of a certain type.