Week 36: A Trip To Houston

I have to admit it, I am impressed. Actually “impressed” doesn’t really capture it. I’m awed. On Friday we had the DAC Technical Program Committee (TPC) meeting in Houston—147 members of the TPC spent the day discussing the submitted papers. It was quite a scene. All of us were in one large room, with each big table representing one subcommittee. By the end of the day in Houston, the TPC members had built a total of 27 sessions, with 6 papers each.

Let’s talk for a moment about the numbers of reviewers. Before we all convened in Houston, 249 external reviewers who signed up through the DAC.com website commented on nearly all of the papers. Then came the work of the TPC, which did the exhaustive final reviews and put together the program. The TPC has 167 members and is broken into 17 subcommittees. On average, each TPC member reviewed 24 papers. This is amazing!

Seeing them all made me feel so grateful for their contribution to DAC. Without all the volunteers that work on DAC every year – from the executive committee to the subcommittees and paper reviewers – we would not have the industry’s most prestigious conference. You all deserve to hear once again how awesome you are! Thank you so much for helping make DAC such a great event.

In addition to the final paper selection on Friday we also finalized most of our invited content for all areas (Automotive, EDA, Embedded Systems, IoT, and Security), including tutorials, panels and special sessions. The accomplishment was definitely worth spending two days in an airport hotel.

Not to say that we’re finished. We’re still reviewing and finalizing the record number of IP and Designer track submissions and I need to wrap up two more SKY talks. Then we should be ready to go into promotion mode. And here you thought we were already doing that with the blog! We have such good content this year; now we need to make sure that the world will know about it.

Michelle Clancy is still looking for volunteers for the Local Area Committee that will help us in getting out the word to those thousands of designers, developers, engineers and tech journalists in the Bay Area that should attend DAC in June. Send me a note and I’ll let you know how you can get involved.