Description

ABSTRACT

Academic conferences play a key role in exchanging research ideas between participants and keeping researchers current. Many academic conferences, in various fields, are held annually. This leads to a dramatic increase in the number of submitted papers, and substantial effort to manage these many submissions. Such an intricate workflow of conference management results in frustration among many conference organizers. In this paper, we propose an online system to support the management and control of academic conferences.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

COVER PAGE

TITLE PAGE

APPROVAL PAGE

DEDICATION

ACKNOWELDGEMENT

ABSTRACT

CHAPTER ONE

• INTRODUCTION
• BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
• PROBLEM STATEMENT
• AIM AND OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY
• SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
• SCOPE OF THE STUDY
• PROJECT JUSTIFICATION

CHAPTER TWO

LITERATURE REVIEW

• REVIEW OF RELATED WORK
• IMPORTANCE OF THE SYSTEM
• REVIEW OF EXISTING SYSTEMS
• FRAMEWORK FOR COMPARISONS
• 2.5     SYSTEM FUNCTION COMPARISON
• 2.6    CONFERENCE FUNCTION COMPARISON
• 2.7    TECHNICAL PROGRAM COMMITTEE
• 2.8   ASSIGNING REVIEWERS AND TPC MEMBERS

CHAPTER THREE

METHODOLOGY

• SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
• USE CASE MODELING
• SYSTEM DESIGN
• SYSTEM CHARACTERISTICS

CHAPTER FOUR

4.0      SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

• DATABASE DESIGN

CHAPTER FIVE

• CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION

REFERENCES

CHAPTER ONE

1.0                                           INTRODUCTION

1.1                             BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

For faculty and researchers, attending at least one academic conference annually in their fields of interest is inevitable. In such conferences, many stakeholders are involved in various conference tasks. These include, but are not limited to, program committee chair, program committee members (reviewers), general chair, publicity chair, and authors (Huang,, 2009) and (Noimanee et al., 2009). For a conference organization to be successful, a process should be in place. The process of conference organization consists of many phases, such as call for papers, paper submission, paper review, review discussion, paper re-submission, and author notification (Noimanee et al., 2009). Stakeholders with varying viewpoints, in addition to the complex conference organization process, make organizers, especially those without any prior professional organization skills, feel unenthusiastic about managing an academic conference, and possibly quit the task.

With the presence of advanced technology affecting all perspectives of our life, academic conferences are increasing in great number. This is accompanied by an enormous increase in the number of submitted papers. To cope with such large a number of papers and to keep reviewing loads manageable, the number of program committee members has to significantly increase. Consequently, scheduling a face-to-face program committee meeting to review and confer paper submissions is deemed impractical (Franklin, 2004).

 

Based on what is mentioned above, it is vital to develop an online conference management system that facilitates the task of conference organization using the techniques of software engineering. Software Engineering first emerged in the 1968 NATO Software Engineering Conference (Wang,, 2000). It is defined as “The application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation and maintenance of software; that is, the application of engineering to software” (Wang,, 2000). Currently, various methods are available to assist software engineers in the analysis, specification, design, implementation, and verification of software products. Furthermore, software developers have improved their comprehension of the activities involved in the software development process. Generally speaking, the software engineering process is divided into the following sub processes: requirement engineering, software design, testing, and maintenance (Pfleeger et al., 2010).

This study is about academic Conference Management Online System which provides an easier way of managing events when conducting a conference. The system will be specifically built for the convenience of educational system in managing online submission of papers and procedures with relation to  the Event, Reviewers and Authors.

1.2                                                  PROBLEM STATEMENT

Normally, conference management system involves very complicated and time consuming manual operations. In mid-90’s, email become a reliable and cost-effective way to send binary files attachment and it also facilitate the possibility of sending papers electronically instead of sending through post or fax. When submission of paper increases to large extent, the task of dealing with these submissions manually for an organizer becomes difficult. This often results in problems such as noting down the wrong information of author, neglecting some submission unintentionally and slows down the process of conference organization. These problem lead to introduction of an online educational conference management system which came to overcome the mentioned challenges with traditional educational conference management system.

1.3    AIM AND OBJECTIVES

The aim and objectives of this project is to design an education Conference Management System that will replace the manual method of conference management.

1. To prevent loss of data and records during fire outbreaks, thefts etc.
2. To provide an easy way of accessing information.

• To provide a reliable and cost-effective way to send binary files attachment

1.4    SIGNIFICANCE OF STUDY

This study is targeted at utilizing the vast potential and benefits of the internet judiciously and effectively (i.e online education Conference Management System) this will increase the awareness of management towards new innovations, better their correspondence with other institution raise the standard of school as well as it efficiency and to reduce the problems associated with manual education Conference Management System.

1.5                                     SCOPE OF THE STUDY

The scope of the study covers building an educational Online Conference Management System to assist the conference chair in organizing the academic conference that follows the process of software engineering. It is a browser/server (B/S) based system, and runs under the .NET platform. The programming language C# is used to implement the system.

• JUSTIFICATION

The justification for the work is a follows to

To allow for effective academic conference over the web without office visitation.

To do away with the traditional method of using papers in academic conference which could easily be misplaced.

To contribute to the enormous change in information technology.

1.6                                 PROJECT ORGANISATION

This chapter one deals with the introductory part of the work. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: in chapter two deals with the literature review, chapter three is in system requirements, both functional and nonfunctional, will be presented. Chapter four will introduce the characteristics, architecture, and user interface of the proposed system. Future work and conclusions are presented in the last section.

CHAPTER FIVE

5.1                                             CONCLUSIONS

With the increase in the number of academic conferences, in the number of papers submitted to such conferences, as well as the complexity of managing such conferences, it is critical to promote an online conference management system that facilitates the task of conference organization using the software engineering process. This paper presents the requirement analysis and design of An Online Conference Management System. Both functional and non-functional requirements are examined. The architecture and data modeling of the system are introduced. Furthermore, a user interface design is proposed and is being implemented. A C# implementation of the system is in progress. For our final version of the system, we plan to improve the system’s design to support multi-track conferences and multi-conferences…