SIGBOVIK (Special Interest Group on Harry Qatar Bovik) is an annual multidisciplinary conference specializing in lesser-known areas of academic research such as Sticky-Finger Manipulation, Natural Intelligence, and Retroactive Data.

SIGBOVIK 2020 is the fourteenth edition of this esteemed conference series, which was formed in 2007 to celebrate the inestimable and variegated work of Harry Queen-o'-the-prairie Bovik. We especially welcome the three neglected quadrants of research: joke realizations of joke ideas, joke realizations of serious ideas, and serious realizations of joke ideas. (In other words: SIGBOVIK is an evening of tongue-in-cheek academic presentations, a venue for silly ideas and/or executions.)

• The Lineup

• What If SIGBOVIK Is the Friends We Made Along the Way?
  Keynote speaker: Akiva Leffert
• Image-to-image neural network for addition and subtraction of a pair of not very large numbers
  Vladimir Ivashkin, Yandex
• Integrating popular block storage into Linux
  Charles Eckman and Stephen Longfield
• Freiscale Semicomposer
  Jim McCann, TCHOW llc
• Dr Wires, wicked problems, and conversation
  Dr Wires, ABC Institute (Always Be Connected), Giana Pilar González, Hacking Couture, and Paul Pangaro, CMU HCII
• Erdös-Bacon-Sabbath Numbers: Reductio ad Absurdum
  Daniel V. Klein, Google
• INTERMISSION
• Determining the laziest way to force other people to generate random numbers for us using IoT vulnerabilities
  Mathmasterzach and StarChar, Villanova University
• “Users are losers! They’ll like whatever we make” and other fallacies
  Carol Smith, CMU
• State-of-the-art reviewing: A radical proposal to improve scientific publication
  Samual Albanie, SOAR laboratory
• PPTCC: Compile code into powerpoint
  Thomas Wildenhain
• The SIGBOVIK 2020 audio guide to plants
  Jim McCann, CMU

The proceedings are available online (PDF) and on Lulu (paperback). They will not also be available for purchase at the conference, unless one considers a link to lulu on the streaming site to be "at the conferece". We might do a bulk order of physical proceedings for local purchase if it becomes safe to do so in the near future. Or we might not. That does sound like work.

Due to social distancing recommendations in the face of COVID-19, SIGBOVIK will not be held in Rashid Auditorium this year. Instead, we be relocating to the most socially distant place of all: the internet. That's right, on April 1 at 5pm EST, you will be able to enjoy SIGBOVIK 2020 from the comfort of your [insert isolated location here].

The conference was hosted on zoom and re-streamed on youtube. You may download the audio recording (mp3) (ogg).

SIGBOVIK accepts papers, presentations, and reviews. (Feel free to submit a paper without a presentation, a review without a papaer, or any combination you like!) Take a look at past proceedings, available at sigbovik.org, to get an idea of what is typically submitted.

Papers: Due to very exenuating circumstainces, SIGBOVIK 2020 paper submissions have been extended to March 27, 2020 on EasyChair. To simplify the proceedings-ification process, we ask that submissions not contain page numbers. (If you use LaTeX, try \usepackage{nopageno}) If you experience any difficulties submitting, please contact us.

Presentations: In the spirit of taking unbiased blindness to new and exciting heights, this year all presentations will be pre-recorded audio talks. Presenters are also required to submit audio responses to questions from the audience, from which the hosts will blindly select one to play. Our very well supported findings show five to be a good number for unbiased answers, and two to be the bare minimum.

Presentations should be no more than five minutes in length; any presentations that try to skirt above this limit with be agressively forced into five minute format. More detailed submission instructions can be found in The Highly Sophisticated Amazingly Serious Blind Talk Submission Form. As always, please contact us if you have any difficulties or questions related to the submission process.

Reviews: To submit your triple blind review, download The Official Incredibly Secure Extra Blind SIGBOVIK Review Template (in LaTeX). After filling out review-template.tex, send just your edited review-template.tex to sigbovik-reviews@lists.andrew.cmu.edu (the included .cls file is just so you can see the compiled result). If you are displeased by the lack of templates for alternate document preparation systems, you may send your own Incredibly Secure Extra Blind SIGBOVIK Review Template (in Something Else) to the organizers.

Stay up to date by subscribing to our very-low-volume mailing list. If you have any questions, you can contact the organizers at sigbovik@gmail.com.