Page 6 - Fall 2008

ACOUSTICS’08 PARIS ANATOMY OF A JOINT MEETING
Charles E. Schmid
Acoustical Society of America, Melville, New York 11747
Manell E. Zakharia
Ecole Navale, 29240 Brest Armees, France
in acoustics (Fig. 3). There were 252 oral sessions, and 167 poster sessions. The four plenary lectures presented at the meeting are listed in Table 3. All abstracts for the meeting are posted at www.acoustics08-paris.org/program. Also the abstracts, along with 1,100 full-length papers which include papers from euronoise and ecua, will soon be available
online at http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/. Organizing the meeting
2002–2007
The overall planning of the meeting was a joint ven- ture between the ASA, EAA, and SFA. Representatives from each of these organizations made visits to meet-
ings of the other two during the six years prior to 2008 to discuss arrangements for Acoustics’08 Paris and to gain a better understanding of how each organization conducted its meetings. The EAA holds meetings
every three years under the title Forum Acusticum, while the ASA has two meetings per year, and the SFA one meeting every second year. The titles of the tech- nical fields share similar names among the three groups with the main difference being that EAA has a field called “computational acoustics” while the ASA’s counterpart is “signal processing in acoustics.” The selection of special sessions (called structured sessions by the EAA) began with a flurry of emails in 2006 between rep- resentatives from the three primary organi- zations and euronoise and ecua. Final decisions on session titles were made in 2007 so they could be listed in the Call for Papers which was mailed and
When the Acoustical Society of America, the European Acoustics Association, and the French Acoustical Society decided to hold a joint meeting, they never thought that it would be the largest acoustics meeting ever held with over 5,000 par- ticipants from 75 different countries!
This second joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and the European Acoustics Association (EAA) was held from June 30 to July 4, 2008. The gather- ing of acousticians from around the world also included the bi-annual meetings of the European Conference on NOISE Control (euronoise) and the European Conference on Underwater Acoustics (ecua). The meet- ing was hosted by the French Acoustical Society (Société Français d’Acoustique, SFA) on the occasion of its 60th anniversary. Due to the fact that it brought so many groups together, the meeting was named Acoustics’08 Paris. And as the front cover of this issue
of Acoustics Today testifies, Paris is a beautiful city.
Some statistics
The breakdown of the 5,018 registrants into three categories is given in Table 1. An important goal set by the organizers was to draw a large num- ber of students from around the world to attend Acoustics’08 Paris. This was realized with 980 students in attendance, many of whom received funding support from various spon-
sors, including ASA, EAA and SFA. There
were twenty-five recipients of Best
Student Paper Awards1 and the architec-
tural acoustics student design compe-
2 tition attracted 17 submissions. The
Fig. 1. Attendance distribution by continent.
75 countries represented by attendees are listed in Table 2, and shown by continent in a pie chart in Fig. 1. Acoustics’08 Paris was held in the Palais des Congrès conference center (Fig. 2). The total number of abstracts was 3,547 which were organized into 419 sessions covering 13 different technical fields and education
Acoustics ’08 Paris 5