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Proceedings Office Editor Chief Report IPAC'18 Speaker: Jana Thomson (TRIUMF)

IPAC'18 - Ninth International Particle Accelerator Conference
Vancouver, BC Canada | JW Marriott Parq Hotel
April 30 - May 04, 2018
Contact: Jana Thomson / Todd Satogata / Volker Schaa

IPAC'18 JACoW Team - Total JACoW Team members invited to Vancouver: 28 Editors*, 2 in Speaker Ready, 3 in Author Reception. (not shown: the many TRIUMF staff having key roles)
Ivan Andrian, Paul Bennetto, Kip Bishofberger, Dave Button, Mark Caetano, Jan Chrin, Stefano Deiuri, Garrett de Villiers, Cathy Eyberger, Mitchell Hewes, Caitlan Hoffman, Charlie Horak, Dong Kim, Lu Li, Maggie Loera, Michaela Marx, Johan Olander, John Poole, Kathleen Riches, Rohan Rowd, Todd Satogata, Akihiro Shirakawa, Toshinari Tanaka, Manuel Tilmont
TRIUMF Staff: Jana Thomson, Raso Samarasekera, Rick Baartman, Lorraine King. (*If I have missed anyone - sorry)

Scientific Secretariat (SS)

Todd Satogata (JLab) graciously took on the role of Scientific Secretariat. Thank you!

This is not a trivial job, the job requires someone who can give it their all, which Todd did, even considering a bus got in his way. This is a big job where he was required to attend Scientific Program Committee (SPC) meetings, the first being SPC 1 (prior to IPAC'17), SPC 2 (at IPAC'17) & SPC 3 (after IPAC'18) . In this role he managed:

• the SPMS configuration
• took instructions and guided the SPC with the Invited, Oral and Poster presentations and program management and
• peer review and students

This role also required management and assisting the Student Program Coordinator (Oliver Kester) with SPMS and communicating with the students requesting Student Grants (financial assistance) and creating the Poster Session program. IPAC is still in its infancy with peer-reviewed papers. We all learned more about this function. The SS worked to assist Alex Bogacz (Scientific Publication Board Chair) and Shane Koscielniak (Conference Chairperson) with the configuration of SPMS's refereeing function. A feature that was "woken up" for IPAC'17. Its function was used for FEL whose papers are no longer refereed.

Proceedings Office Editor-in-Chief

My role as Proceedings Office, Editor-in-Chief initially was to be solely responsible for the Proceedings and everything required to facilitate that the proceedings would be published on time. Over the years I have been an Editor, the Editor-in-Chief as well as Scientific Secretariat for TRIUMF hosted conferences. We are a small lab and we multi-task. For a small conference you can get away with wearing many hats, but for an IPAC you have to have a larger team. I recommended to the Conference Chairperson, Shane Koscielniak that Todd Satogata would be a good fit for the Scientific Secretariat and that I would take the responsibility to make sure he has all the staff and help required from me to ensure a speedy publishing.

My main task was to look after the JACoW Team, starting with identifying and inviting the editors, ensuring we had the right amount of computers, identifying the rooms for each of the functions and direct IT to the software to be loaded and set up on the computers for Speaker Ready, Author Reception and the Proceedings office.

The refereeing function was a bit of a learning curve for not just Todd and I, but also for the Chairman and the Scientific Publications Board Chair and the referees. So I spent a bit of time creating a testing this function so that we understood what the referees would see. Matt was involved at this point because there were functions that were not working how the system was expected to work, and the Conference Chairperson wanted functions to be added. Matt created a "sandbox" so that I could create dummy abstracts and dummy papers to assign to the LOC Chairpersons and the Chairman to learn how the system assigned dots and worked.

I also did some PCO duties, such as contracting the accommodation for the editors assisting with registration of the delegates and as we got closer to the conference, the layout and printing of the Exhibition booklet, Conference Guide and printing the Student Poster booklet. As well as other tasks to take care of.

We had a few hurdles to get there though. As Todd pointed out in his talk, the LOC Chairperson has a very challenging job. They have to ensure the team works well together, cos .. there is no "i" in Team.

In October of 2017, our LOC Chairman passed away. There was then a hunt to find someone to replace Jozef. The Chairman decided to choose 2 LOC Chairpersons to replace him.

Registration troubles surfaced with the in-house site designed to record the Industrial Exhibitors. Exhibitors had restricted spending limits on their credit cards, the processor (Moneris) thought these were fraudulent purchases and froze the system, nobody had informed them that big purchases would be put through. The Exhibition Manager and the IT support were not working on the same page. This meant that I had to assist with registration and I was pulled in a few directions.

On-site at the conference I appointed David Button as Room Manager, he kept things rolling in the room and when a decision needed to be made he would ask me first and then implement anything we had talked about.

Regardless of the bumps in the road we did pre-press on Friday, May 04 as planned with a very good number of papers. The total number of papers published on the JACoW site was 1502 total contributions, similar to recent IPACs. The proceedings was published on the JACoW site July 2018.

Speaker Ready Room

2 JACoW Team Staff - Takashi Kosuge (KEK), Vincent Mitts (LSU)

Author Reception

3 JACoW Team Staff - Sue Waller (STFC/DL/ASTeC), Christine Petit-Jean-Genaz (CERN), Sheila Poole (volunteer)
Author Reception was placed in the hallway between the Speaker Ready Room and the Proceedings Office. The binders were kept in the Proceedings Office. Sheila Poole maintained the filing and binder management. Sue and Christine were the front-line troops, assisting author enquiries. They also looked after the Title/Author check.

There was a draft from the windows behind the Author Reception that made the location a bit uncomfortable. They also were the first face attendees saw upon arrive from the hotel's inside elevators (these were guests staying in the hotel). Because there was a lack of signs on the first day they became an information desk.

Proceedings Room: (see IPAC'18 team figure caption for staff)

IT Team: >4 staff - Steve McDonald, Bob Chow, Davis Swan, Emile Vartanian, and the IT crew from Vernon Technology Solutions
TRIUMF IT Staff: Steve, Bob and Emile were on site to assist with set up and trouble shooting during the week.

Dot Boards:

Large 55 inch screen TVs (purchased for conference rooms at TRIUMF, and not yet installed) were used. The Speaker Ready room had a built in screen with a $400CAD/day cost that we negotiated to 0$. Speakers could test run the use of the Logitech pointers in the room prior to their presentation. The imposing of the use of the Logitech pointers for the presentations was a problem. Many authors prefer to use a laser pointer.

Computers:

• 26 Windows workstations rented for JACoW Editors, rented monitors desired resolution was 3840 x 2160 or 4K quality.
• Two rental iMacs with Windows 10 installed were preferred by two editors. The screen resolution of these are 5120 x 2880 or 5K quality.
• 4 rented workstation went to the Cyber Cafe.
• The 10 TRIUMF purchased Dell All-In-One computers were almost fully deployed. 4 in the Cyber Cafe, 2 in Registration/Finance, 2 in Author's Reception, one in Speaker Ready, and one spare. The 8 Cyber Cafe computers, 4 Mac and 4 PC, were well used.
• Four HP Colour laser printers were rented; three for the Editorial Room and one for Registration. We had a request for a printer in the Cyber Cafe, so the Registration printer was moved.

Oral Presenters Equipment:

• Microphones: Three handheld, two lapel mics per parallel room. Insufficient mics for runners during plenary, not all could be used from the central tech table, limited to 5 audio channels.
• Laptops (Three for presentations, one for speaker prep, this was adequate).

TROUBLES

• Signing of rental agreements with the hardware suppliers was delayed. At many times we were delayed with contract agreement with IEEE. In the end we took financial responsibility for the AV and IT (North America is not bounded to use IEEE (confirm), but they provide seed money and take financial responsibility if there are any budget overruns).
• Due to the late arrival of the computer equipment a poor decision was made with loading the software. TRIUMF has done many JACoW conferences in the past so we knew what needed to be done with the machines, but with the delay of IEEE accepting and signing the contract, we made a poor decision. Fortunately for us I had seasoned, JACoW team members with IT experience arrive earlier than the pre-team editors. Most issues were ironed out quickly.
• The lost time meant that the 'quality bar' that was high became inconsistent. Up until Sunday we were processing at a high standard. Editors started to be less critical of the formatting of the references. At QA the quality oversights were revealed.
• With the greater amount of time being spent on the references, less time is being given to JACoW paper formatting.
• Initially we had the use of a lounge down the hall for breaks and lunch, at a reasonable cost. The week before the conference the price for the room went up to a rediculous amount. For the first part of the conference the advance team and core editors were taken to restaurants in the complex. We lost 28 people hours of work leaving the room. A request was made to the hotel to bring lunch into the room, something I would have done from the beginning had there been better communication from the hotel.
• The hotel was brand new, we had problems with getting enough plug-ins for the Exhibitors, Author Reception, Registration and the Proceedings Office.
• The controls for the heat and A/C were centrally controlled off-site and it was difficult to create an agreeable temperature for all workers in the room (always an issue by the way) :-)
• The hotel's prime economic base is the casino. The hotel was designed to draw you to that area of the hotel. Students would have to show identification to show they were over 19 years old. Legal drinking age in British Columbia is 19 years old, gambling is 21 years old.
• In-house registration system: Our IT department just prior to IPAC saw the retirement and departure of 4 members. We did a major up-grade of the in-house registration system, which it needed, but this may have been too drastic and should have been tested on smaller conferences I had organized before IPAC. The new employees knew nothing about the system we had been using since 2009. We had a lot of bumps in the road.

SPMS was used as the gateway to our in-house system (external registration mode), pre-populating the fields that were identified in SPMS to fill. Once payment in full was received and processed through our payment processor and merchant account, then SPMS was updated. We were, for this TRIUMF hosted conference for once, able to see whether to work on a paper or not. (if they were not registered, or paid-in-full, a paper is not worked on).

If you have the ability to help the Chairman of the conference with date selection, encourage the date selection to not straddle 2 months. IPAC'18 is April 29 - May 04. When the conference is listed in a paper's bibliography, it lengthens the citation. All promotional material (poster, signs, booklets) the date isn't tidy looking,

IT Problems - Lessons Learned

• Do not use the old bundle - this has been discontinued.
  • We needed to make a decision much sooner than we did to rent or own computers. This process was stalled and impacted the proceedings office set up.
  • We had to make a decision to have something on the machines, and in the end installing the bundle caused more work for the proceedings office.
  • Acrobat needed to be un-installed and Acrobat 2017 installed
  • Acrobat and Distiller settings needed to be set at the conference.
  • Pitstop needed to be re-installed and settings configured
  • MSWord settings needed to be configured
• Registration was identified to have a printer but it was pulled to use elsewhere. In the end it was evident that they did require one.

"Things to consider for the team"

• IPACs do not have excursions, so attendees and team members need to plan if they wish to discover the location where an IPAC is located.
• Although the hotel stated NO outside food to be brought into the hotel, I had a staff member do a run to a local warehouse store to purchase 'snacks'. We had to do two runs for snacks. Items well received were: trail mix, unsalted nuts and other snacks. Editors like something to nibble on during the day.
• Initially I had planned that breakfast was not included at the hotel the team was staying at and I was going to give additional 'pocket money' to cover the cost of breakfast. Some labs had different rules and it was asked that I have breakfast included for all the team members staying at the Georgian Court.
• 2 editors stayed at the conference hotel for specific reasons.
• The Team stayed at a hotel that was within easy walking distance of the venue hotel, close to 'watering holes' and restaurants.

Volker likes a hoppy beer. Central City Brewing was located just down the street from the Team hotel. Lunch in the room is very important.

"Don't overlook what is happening in your city"

Vancouver is a destination city. IPAC'18 competed with a "city wide" what that means is that during the time of our conference there was a music concert (Shania Twain), on Saturday and Sunday night after the conference, a marathon on Sunday (ask Rohan about it) and other large conferences in the city. This meant that the hotel room rates were escalated for those nights. I suggested to attendees and the JACoW team who were planning to stay on after the conference to explore, that they leave the city and then come back. Go to locations like Whistler or to Victoria on Vancouver Island, stay overnight and enjoy those places, then come back to Vancouver and fly out.

ON A POSITIVE NOTE:

• The reference "cheat sheet" that was created by Lorraine King (TRIUMF) and approved and reviewed by Jan Chrin (PSI) helped editors a lot.
• The room had windows on 2 sides, this did not seem to cause a problem with viewing screens and provided to the team a nice distraction and a very happy room (I think).
• Nice executive chairs on wheels for all editors & JACoW Team staff
• 2 coffee machines (well used)
• 1 fridge with soft drinks and water, I don't think we did have enough diet coke for Todd
• 2 printers in the proceedings room
• 2 printers at the Cyber Cafe were used
• Cyber Cafe was well used by attendees

I leave you with a picture of elephants in Addo Elephant National Park (photo credit: Sue Waller)