EDAS

EDAS
Name	EDAS
Developer	Unspecified
Released	1990s
Latest release	Proprietary, updated periodically
Operating system	Cross-platform, web-based
Platform	Web
Genre	Conference management system
License	Proprietary

EDAS EDAS is a proprietary web-based conference management and paper submission system widely used by professional societies, academic conferences, and workshops. It provides centralized services for authors, reviewers, program chairs, and organizers to handle submissions, peer review, scheduling, registration, and proceedings. The platform has been adopted across fields represented by organizations such as Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Association for Computing Machinery, American Chemical Society, International Society for Optics and Photonics, and conferences like NeurIPS, ICML, SIGGRAPH, and ACL.

Overview

EDAS functions as an integrated workflow tool for scholarly events, offering submission intake, reviewer assignment, discussion threads, camera-ready handling, registration linkage, and program finalization. It sits alongside other event-management services used by groups including IEEE Computer Society, ACM SIGCOMM, SIAM, AAAI, and CHI organizers. The platform supports a range of event sizes from small workshops affiliated with University of California, Berkeley or Massachusetts Institute of Technology to large multi-track conferences hosted by entities like Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University.

History

EDAS emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s as conferences transitioned from paper-based to electronic submission systems, contemporaneous with other platforms used by Springer, Elsevier, and Wiley. Over time it was adopted by professional groups such as IEEE divisions, ACM Special Interest Groups, and disciplinary societies in physics and mathematics (e.g., organizers from American Mathematical Society). Its development paralleled adoption of digital library initiatives at arXiv, the expansion of digital proceedings at IEEE Xplore and ACM Digital Library, and the rise of large-scale conferences like CVPR and ICLR.

Features and Functionality

EDAS offers modules for submission intake, reviewer bidding, conflict-of-interest management, score aggregation, meta-review composition, and automated notifications. It integrates with payment and registration systems used by bodies like Eventbrite and university payment gateways at institutions including University of Oxford and University of Cambridge. Other capabilities include PDF checking, plagiarism screening interfaces similar to services used by Turnitin and Crossref Similarity Check, scheduling tools to build programs comparable to those produced for IEEE ICC and ACM SIGGRAPH, and export of metadata to repositories akin to DBLP and Google Scholar.

Use in Academic Conference Management

Organizers at societies such as IEEE Communications Society, ACM SIGPLAN, American Physical Society, Optical Society (OSA), and European Geosciences Union use EDAS to manage multi-track peer review, poster sessions, and workshop coherency. Program chairs coordinate reviewer pools drawn from rosters including members of SIAM, Royal Society, Max Planck Society, and national academies. EDAS workflows accommodate acceptance notification pipelines, visa letter issuance for attendees from countries represented by United Nations member states, and proceedings production aligned with indexing services like Scopus and Web of Science.

Criticisms and Controversies

EDAS has faced critiques regarding user interface complexity, opaque reviewer assignment, data portability, and vendor lock-in cited by organizers who prefer alternatives such as OpenReview, ConfTool, CMT (Conference Management Toolkit), and bespoke systems developed by universities like ETH Zurich or University of Toronto. Privacy advocates and institutional IT offices at organizations such as Harvard University and Yale University have raised concerns about data residency, single sign-on integration, and compliance with regulations exemplified by European Union data protection frameworks. High-profile disputes at events like NeurIPS and ICML have prompted discussions about transparency in review processes and reproducibility of review statistics.

Technical Implementation and Integration

EDAS is delivered as a cloud-hosted, multi-tenant web application with role-based access control for authors, reviewers, area chairs, and program chairs, mirroring access schemes used by platforms developed at Microsoft Research and Google Research. It provides APIs and import/export options for bibliography metadata compatible with BibTeX-based workflows used by authors affiliated with institutions such as Princeton University and Columbia University. Integrations exist for single sign-on via institutional identity providers like Shibboleth and ORCID linkage to researcher profiles, facilitating interoperability with services including ResearchGate, Mendeley, and Zotero.

Notable Conferences and Case Studies

EDAS has been employed by flagship meetings across disciplines: computing events including SIGMOD, DATABASE SIGMOD Conference, KDD, and PODS; engineering symposia like IEEE ICC, VLSI Symposium; and interdisciplinary gatherings such as ICLR-adjacent workshops and domain-specific conferences run by American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Case studies often highlight deployments for multi-track programs at institutions like University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and international societies like IEEE Standards Association, demonstrating scalability from small workshops to thousands-submission conferences such as CVPR and ICASSP.

Category:Conference management software