How international are international computing conferences? -- An exploration with systems research conferences
Abstract
In recent years, Asia's rapid growth in research output has been reshaping the computing research landscape. What was once a two-block system (America and Europe) is evolving into a multipolar world with three major hubs: America, Europe, and Asia. To study these pivotal changes and evaluate international diversity, we have analyzed the past 13 years of 13 international systems research conferences: ASPLOS, NSDI, OSDI, SIGCOMM, ATC, EuroSys, ICDCS, Middleware, SoCC, CCGRID, IC2E, IEEE Cloud and EuroPar. Our analysis focuses on accepted papers and participation in the Program Committee, grouping the results by region (America, Europe, and Asia). Surprisingly, we find a pronounced historical imbalance in international diversity among top-tier systems conferences (ASPLOS, OSDI, NSDI, SIGCOMM). While most other conferences have progressively reflected Asia's growing research presence over the past decades, this group has shown a noticeable adjustment only in the recent four years. We also identify persistent rigidities in how program committee (PC) diversity adapts to shifts in accepted paper origins, with a consistent under-representation of researchers from Asian organizations in many PCs.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.19245,
title = {How international are international computing conferences? -- An exploration with systems research conferences},
author = {Pedro Garcia Lopez and Marina López Alet and Usama Benabdelkrim Zakan and Anwitaman Datta},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.19245},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
This is the version used for peer-review and accepted for publication in IEEE Computer