CCS

It is our pleasure to report that the tradition of excellence established in previous years will again be manifest in this year's ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2010), held October 4 - 8, 2010 in Chicago IL, USA.

We received a record 325 submissions from 36 countries. Each paper was reviewed by at least three of the 54 program committee members, with 20% of submissions receiving additional reviews (in some cases, up to 6 total reviews). This effort corresponded to a massive 1029 reviews, with each PC member responsible for 18 papers on average. The evaluation was made on the basis of each submission's significance, novelty, and technical quality. After the reviews were completed, the program committee conducted a month-long online discussion for each submission. Of the papers submitted, 55 were selected for presentation at the conference (with two of these submissions merged into a single paper), representing an acceptance rate of 17%. The quality of many of the papers that we could not accept was also very high; we are confident that with only a little (if any) additional work, many will be accepted and appear in other high-quality conferences. In this, we hope they will have benefited from the hard work of the excellent program committee members whom we had the pleasure to work with. We wish to thank the committee for the collegiality, diligence, responsiveness, and enthusiasm they exhibited throughout this grueling, but also extremely rewarding process. We also wish to thank the 223 external reviewers who provided additional input to the process.

This year, we introduced two innovations to the conference review process: review rebuttals and supplemental material. We expect both of these experiments to be repeated at least once more.

The rebuttal process proved popular with the authors, with 256 responses submitted during the designated two-day period. These helped clarify and guide the subsequent deliberation by the program committee, and we hope that they have further improved the quality of the feedback received by the authors.

In our experiment with supplemental material, authors were allowed to provide a 3-minute video (preferred) or a small number of slides with their submissions. Our goal was to improve understanding of the work by the reviewers by supplying them with an executive summary of the work in a different format. We received 27 submissions (8% of the total) with supplemental material, the large majority of which consisted of slides. The acceptance rate among these submissions was 15%, matching that of the overall conference. However, the acceptance rate for the few submissions that provided video demonstrations of their system was 42%.