It is a great sense of satisfaction that we were able to complete the review process for Profes 2010 in a record time despite we also had several email based discussions on conflicting reviews. Many of the reviewers actively were actively involved in the discussions and selection process. We are greatly thankful to the program committee for not only seeking almost double the number of submissions to this year’s Profes but also providing detailed and timely reviews – the volunteering spirit for the community service was commendable.

The other program Co-Chair, Matias and I carefully considered each of the reviews on the submitted papers and had useful discussions with Markku (GC) about the last year’s submissions and acceptance rate and this year’s submissions and reviews. Our selection decisions were influenced by the thoughts of all involved that Profes should enter to the second decade of its life with being more high quality conference despite we were aware of the vital need of attracting participants. We decided that we would try our best to attract more participants to Profes 2010 without lowering the quality of the program.

Hence, we accepted less papers despite more submissions compared with the last year. Our decision to introduce short papers’ track in Profes 2010 was also paid off as the short papers’ track chairs received around 32 papers, some of them were rejected from the main conference but were invited for the short papers track as their quality and ideas were liked by the program committee. By the end of the day, I am confident that we would have a really good quality program at Profes 2010.

For the main conference we accepted 28 papers out of 59 submissions. Out of these 28, 18 were accepted as conditional and authors were asked to seriously address the reviewers’ comments and/or provide counter arguments. All the authors wrote response letters, which were read by the program chairs and in some cases also forwarded to the relevant program committee members. This form of acceptance ensured that the reviewers’ comments were seriously considered and addressed before a paper was fully accepted. I really liked this idea (that is why I introduced it :-) as it provided the authors an opportunity to improve the paper and/or clarify the points that the reviewers could not fully understood. The response to this kind of acceptance was really great and I am going to propose/introduce this idea in other conferences in which I would be involved.

The short papers’ chairs are working on getting the 32 papers reviewed and soon we would have the news about the outcome of the short papers’ selection process. We also have planed workshops, tutorials, Doctoral Symposium, and panel sessions during Profes 2010. It is going to be a high quality program and fantastic gathering in Limerick, Ireland, this June.