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Co-organizing ACM IMC Shadow TPC

To provide an educational experience by exposing students to a review process and to subsequently train the next generation of program committee (PC) members, we co-organize the ACM IMC Shadow TPC.

News from May 30, 2018

The Shadow PC will consist of PhD students, postdocs, early-career academics, and junior researchers and will provide reviews on a subset of submissions to the conference. Paper authors can choose to opt-in for shadow reviews.

The IMC Shadow PC will function much like an independent version of the “Senior” PC. It will therefore involve deciding the papers it would have selected (note that only authors will learn the “shadow” fate of their own papers; it will have no impact on the actual IMC PC process). Shadow PC members will be expected to review a full load of 5-10 papers (depending on the number of submissions selected for the Shadow PC process) on time and participate in online discussion, as well as follow the ethical standards of peer review. Shadow PC members will also be required to do a small amount of reading about the PC process. Shadow PC members must respect the anonymity of the review process and not share which papers they have reviewed or solicit sub-reviews. Shadow PC members who do not adhere to the review deadlines will be excluded from the process. Shadow PC reviews will be made available (anonymized) to the authors.

What differs from common Shadow TPCs?

We also plan to use the Shadow PC as a means to experiment with new approaches to managing the TPC decision process. We will implement an A/B experiment to compare the experience of in-person vs. remote meetings. As part of this, the IMC Shadow PC will be split in two groups. (i) Those who will attend an in-person Shadow PC meeting, held at the end of July in Berlin; (ii) Those who will attend an online meeting via professional video conferencing distributed among two or more remote sites, also held at the end of July. Every participant needs to decide up front which group he or she would like to join. We assume that members based in Europe can travel easier and expect from them to attend the one-day in-person meeting.

The outcomes of these two meetings will be recorded and compared, then used to support SIGCOMM’s policy formulation for future PC meetings. If asked to participate in the in-person meeting, Shadow PC members should strive to attend (some travel grants will be available to support attendance). Shadow PC members will not attend the Senior PC meeting, and the Shadow PC program acceptance decisions will not be made available publicly. However, some PC members might attend the shadow PC meeting to help with the discussions.

Important Dates

Deadline to apply for Shadow PC June 8, 2018 (Midnight Pacific time)
Notification of acceptance June 12, 2018
Shadow review deadline (1st round reviews) July 3, 2018
Shadow review deadline (2nd round reviews) July 15, 2018
Shadow online discussion period July 15-July 19, 2018
Shadow PC meeting (online) July 20, 2018
Shadow PC meeting (in-person) July 23, 2018

Shadow PC Chairs (contact: imc18shadowtpcchairs@lists.fu-berlin.de)