ICAST
ICAST is an international conference organized annually by the University of Mumbai to provide a platform for scientists and engineers.
I was part of a team tasked with building a system to create, manage and host these academic conferences.
My job was to create a database schema to define and efficiently store all the required data, and to create a backend that facilitates the fetching of this data.
For this, I decided to use Django simply because the other developers on the team were familiar with Python and it would be easier for them to extend.
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Overall Schema development.
- Overview
- Management using Chairs and Reviewers
- Users
Naturally I ended up using Django's ORM to define the schema. Upon multiple iterations and changes in requirements, I landed on roughly what is descibed above.
There's a bunch more moving parts to the system, but it boils down to Users (Authors, Chairs, and Reviewers), and their relationships with Conferences, and the Papers submitted to them.
Institutes can organize conferences, add tracks, assign program chairs, and invite reviewers. Users will then be allowed to submit their papers for review. Reviewers, once accepted, can assign a score or reject papers, and write comments for feedback or changes. Authors can resubmit their paper within the review period based on feeback recieved.
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The API.
- Conferences
- Users
- Papers
The whole system would be hosted on the university's servers, and persistent media storage was set up to store the papers.
The purpose of this system was mostly internal tooling to replace Microsoft's Conference Management Toolkit, which was being used to manage these conferences before the making of our system.
The International Conference on Advances in Science and Technology aims to bring together researchers, developers, and engineers working in Computer Sciences, Signal Processing, Wireless Communications & Networking, Applied Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies, to a common forum.
I'm thankful for the opportunity to work on this. I got to work with some pretty cool people, and learnt quite a bit along the way.
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JANK RENDERER