iChair is a powerful submission/review server software designed to help the program chair of a conference with:

• submission collection
• assignment of articles to reviewers
• review collection
• discussions
• mailing to authors and reviewers
• plenty of other things!

iChair was developed with a view to being as easy to install as possible. As a result, installation on a Linux box should be possible by anyone (even with only basic knowledge of server administration) in about one or two hours. It might even be possible to run it on a windows based server (but this was never tested). It was developed in PHP5 and intended to run on an apache web server.

iChair was developed in the third quarter of 2005 by Thomas Baignères and Matthieu Finiasz at EPFL, LASEC. The first release of this software was intended for the Eurocrypt 2006 submission/review server. Serge Vaudenay (program chair of this conference) wanted some new features to be added to some existing software: it appeared that re-programming everything from scratch was easier and much more fun!