An integrative approach to online conference review management : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Information System in Massey University

Academic conferences play an important role in modern science and technology development. They provide venues for people involved in particular research areas to communicate with each other, share research achievement, and understand the current leading edge of development in that area. They also provide opportunity to periodically summarise the past work and find new directions for future research. The peer reviewed conference papers become reference for other researchers. There are thousands of conferences organised all over the world every year. For each conference there are hundreds of paper submissions. The management of submission, review and selection process is a hard and tedious task for conference committees. This thesis discusses the design and implementation of a web-based application to facilitate an efficient and effective management of paper submission, review and selection process in academic conferences.[FROM INTRODUCTION

On canonically derived families of surfaces of general type over curves

Suppose X is a smooth projective 3-fold of general type and |mK_X| is composed of a pencil of surfaces with m>1. This pencil naturally induces a fibration f:X->C onto a smooth curve C after the Stein-factorization, which is the main objects of this article. Based on Koll'ar's earlier works, we improve on it and try to understand the family in terms of discrete birational invariants of the total space as well as those of the general fiber and the base curve. The aim of this note is to build a little bit basic facts.Comment: 19 pages, Amstex, Accepted for publication in Communications in Algebr