My (not) accepted paper.

Since me and Dale wrote our CSL paper last year, Incorporating tables into proofs, I've been trying to extend its results and search for more interesting applications that could be, in the future, included in a journal version of this paper. More specifically, I've explored one of the sections of the paper which proposes to represent a proof as a partially ordered set of atoms, called table, that could be used as a proof object in the Proof Carrying Code framework. I developed an algorithm to extract from an existing proof a tree of tables, showed that one could easily reconstruct a proof where atomic formulas are not proved twice, and also showed that the algorithm's complexity is a bit more than linear (to be more precise: n s log n, where s is the upper bound in the size of program's clauses).

I submitted, to CiE 2008, a paper titled Using tables to obtain non-redundant proofs, containing this algorithm and these results. Finally, last week I received an e-mail from the program chair saying that the paper is accepted to be presented in the conference, but not to be published in the conference's pre-proceedings. The reviews were very curious; the first reviewer seemed to know focusing and proof theory very well and recommended my paper to be published; the second reviewer wrote a very small paragraph criticizing the paper's presentation, giving the impression to not have put much effort in reading the paper, and gave me a borderline grade; the third reviewer appreciated the proof theoretical results but got me in the point that I didn't have more deeper experiments that would give a higher cogency to the applicability of my algorithm in PCC, but nevertheless, suggested my paper to be presented in the conference.

I am not sure what to think about this result. I am of course disappointed that it wasn't accepted for publication, but on the other hand, I wrote the article by myself (Dale was not very excited on this idea) and the comments were not too bad. As a consolation, I got a free trip to Athens in June, when I will have to present my results :).