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Joachim Neu

Contact: user jneu at domain stanford.edu

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blockchain-deadlines.github.io

by Joachim Neu on September 9, 2023

I have put together deadline countdowns for academic venues relevant to blockchain research: https://blockchain-deadlines.github.io

If you find missing or outdated information, or fix a bug, please send a pull request on Github. The information for the venues/deadlines is maintained in a simple YAML file.

The site’s code is a fork of aideadlin.es, originally developed by Abhishek Das. Thank you! Similar forks that might be of interest to a blockchain researcher, are sec-deadlines.github.io (for security and privacy) and ds-deadlines.github.io (for distributed systems).

At first I dreaded creating the site because of the mind-numbing labor that would be required to curate the data. So I decided to give ChatGPT a shot, and it did great! After providing it with two examples, I could already copy/paste the entire call-for-papers (CFP) of a venue, and it would automatically extract the relevant information and generate the YAML entries, with a (to me) surprising accuracy. I then switched to ChatGPT Plus, where one can use plugins to enable ChatGPT to retrieve websites. I then only had to drop the venue’s website’s URL into ChatGPT, and it would retrieve the main page, and if needed also the CFP (albeit, automatically retrieving the CFP often did not work and I had to drop the URL manually), and auto-generate the YAML entries. Check out the prompt I used. Occasionally, ChatGPT started deviating from the desired output format a bit (e.g., change the order of the fields of an entry, or include the year in the venue’s title), but that was quick and easy to correct with appropriate instructions. Overall, this experience makes me optimistic that maintaining the data up-to-date can soon be done by ChatGPT almost autonomously.

Update on 2023-12-06: I just updated the deadlines according to the latest edition of each venue, which was again mostly automated with ChatGPT Plus and this prompt. Let’s see if in a few months I can perhaps feed it the entire YAML file and get it updated all at once, rather than interactively venue-by-venue.

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