Guidelines for TPC members

IEEE INFOCOM 2008

April 13 - 19, 2008, Phoenix, AZ, USA

Questions? Please email TPC Co-Chairs at @cse.unl.edu.
Disclaimer: This document and the process described are subject to change without notice!
Please read the following if you are a TPC member for INFOCOM 2008. If you have been assigned a paper to review by a TPC member for the INFOCOM 2008 conference, please read the Guidelines for Reviewers instead.

Summary of Action Items for TPC Members

  1. Accept or Decline the TPC Invitation (within 1 week of receipt).
  2. Plan to attend INFOCOM 2008 TPC Informational/Planning Meeting on May 9, 2007 - 5.30 - 7.00 PM at Space 2 in the Egan Convention Center, Anchorage, Alaska during INFOCOM 2007 (Highly Recommended).
  3. Select TPC topics of interest and update Conflicts of Interest by June 1, 2007 (Required)
  4. Claim papers by Sunday, July 8, 11:59PM PDT.
  5. Papers assigned for Lead TPC Summary/Review and TPC Regular Review by August 1, 2007.
  6. Decide on Early Rejects by August 15, 2007 (Highly Recommended)
  7. Complete TPC Regular Reviews for papers by September 8, 2007 (Required)
  8. Participate in online discussion on your assigned papers (September 9-22, 2007) (Required)
  9. Write Lead TPC Discussion Summary/Review by September 22, 2007 (Required)
  10. Attend TPC Meeting (Highly Recommended) October 27, 2007 in Washington, DC area (Confirmed!)
  11. Volunteer as Session Chair during Infocom 2008 (Optional)
As an IEEE INFOCOM 2008 TPC member, your reviews and TPC participation are crucial in determining the ultimate quality of the conference. Here are some guidelines to help clarify the TPC work. A simple way to think about the TPC duties is to think reciprocally about what you expect as an author of a paper from a peer in the community: a good, substantive review, a decision that is well-founded on the consensus of the reviews and good feedback. This is what we expect from TPC members. The element of randomness in the process cannot be eliminated, but we want to control it while biasing it towards merit and providing good feedback to authors.

Table of Contents

Updating your topics of interest and conflicts of interest information

 You are requested to update your topics of interest for INFOCOM 2008 and your conflicts of interest information on EDAS after accepting the invitation to serve on the TPC by following the instructions below. You can directly access the webpage to update your topics of interest for the INFOCOM 2008 conference by clicking on this link: http://edas.info/editInterest.php?c=5065. Alternately, you can update your topics of interest by logging into http://edas.info using your login email address and your EDAS password. Then click on "My TPCs" tab. You will see a list of conferences in which you serve as a TPC member. In the row for "INFOCOM 2008", please click on the cell in the "Interests (edit)" column. The link is usually set as "undefined", by default. In the subsequent screen, you will see that you are listed as "neutral" to all the topics for the conference. Please select at least eight (8) topics and click on the corresponding menu buttons in the "of interest" column. Similarly, please select as many topics which are not "of interest" to you. Please be sure to click on "Change topics of interest" button at the bottom of the page to update your topics of interest. In the list of topics for INFOCOM 2008, please note that the suffix SIM refers to both Simulation and Experimental work; MOD refers to Analytical modeling, Performance evaluation and Theory. It is critical that you update your topics of interest before the review assignment, in order to make sure that you have the best chance to receive papers which fall in your topics of interest.

You can update your conflicts of interest (COI) information by logging into http://edas.info using your login email address and your EDAS password. Then click on "My Profile" tab. On the first line, please click on the link listed as "conflicts of interest". In the subsequent screen, you will see a list of individuals with whom you have identified Conflicts-of-Interest. Please note that in EDAS, "Your initial list of conflicts-of-interest consists of individuals having the same email domain, the same name or those that have co-authored EDAS-registered papers with you. You can provide either the name of the organization, the name of an individual, or an email domain, or several of these." Please be sure to identify all individuals with whom you have conflicts of interest, paying particular attention to potential INFOCOM 2008 authors and TPC members. We greatly appreciate your efforts in updating this information in EDAS so that we may avoid unnecessary changes to review assignments later, a time-consuming process.

Please read the INFOCOM 2008 Definition of Conflict of Interest for determining the set of individuals you need to list on EDAS provided below. People/institutions that you are in "conflict of interest" consist of the following:

Claiming papers

Update: EDAS staff have resolved the problem with selecting papers for the claims process. Please go ahead with the claims process following the instructions below - July 5, 2007, 8:00 CDT. If you still have problems claiming papers, please let us know.

You can claim (request) the papers that you would like to review for INFOCOM 2008 by logging into EDAS (http://edas.info) using your login email address and your EDAS password. Then click on "My TPCs" tab. You will see a list of conferences in which you serve as a TPC member. In the row for "INFOCOM 2008", please click on the cell in the "Requested (claim)" column. In the subsequent screen, you will see a list of papers marked as one of the following: Want to review,Can review, Review if needed and Cannot review. Please select at least 25 papers and at most 40 papers and click on the corresponding menu buttons in the "Want to review" column. Similarly, please select as many papers which you feel you "Cannot review." Please be sure to click on "Change" button at the bottom of the page to update your list of claimed (requested) papers for INFOCOM 2008. Please be sure to list at least 25 papers in the Want to review, Can review and Review if needed columns to provide us with enough flexibility to assign three independent reviewers to each paper.

Frequently asked questions

Regular Review vs. Lead TPC Review/Summary

Accepting and Delegating Reviews - HOWTO

 If you are a TPC member with primary review responsibilities and not backup, you will receive by July 15, your review assignments with upto 6 papers for which you are the TPC lead reviewer and upto 15 papers for which you are the regular reviewer. Please note that you will be assigned a regular review for each of the papers for which you are a TPC lead reviewer. So the actual number of papers that you will deal with is only around 10.
  1. How do I accept all of my review assignments?

    When you log in to your EDAS page (http://edas.info) for INFOCOM 2008 (and click on My Reviews tab), you will be shown a list of all the papers you are handling for this conference. Please click on the link at the top of the table which states "You can also accept and decline reviews in a batch." You will be presented with a list of all your review assignments with the status Accepted column marked for each paper. If you have ensured that you do not have a conflict of interest with any of the authors for the papers in this list, please go ahead and click on the "Change" button at the bottom of the page.

  2. How do I accept my review assignments one by one?

    When you log in to your EDAS page (http://edas.info) for INFOCOM 2008 (and click on My Reviews tab), you will be shown a list of all the papers you are handling for this conference.

    To accept your TPC review assignments: In the second column (marked Type of review), please click on the link marked "tpc" and then click on the "Accept review" button. Please do this for each of the papers for which you are the TPC reviewer. Please note that you may not delegate your TPC reviews and you may not decline your TPC review assignments unless you have a conflict of interest with the authors.

    To accept your regular review assignments: In the second column (marked Type of review), please click on the link marked "review" and then click on the "Accept review" button. Please do this for each of the papers for which you are the regular reviewer. Please note that you may not delegate your regular reviews to graduate students and you may only delegate up to 5 regular reviews to qualified colleagues and you may not decline your regular review assignments unless you have a conflict of interest with the authors.

    We request that you ACCEPT all of your review assignments within a week after receiving the notification emails.

  3. How do I decline my review assignments?

    Please follow the instructions above to view the review assignments and instead\ of clicking on "Accept review" button, please click on the "Decline review" button. Please decline reviews only when there is a conflict of interest with the authors of the paper.

  4. How do I delegate my regular review to a qualified colleague?

    First, please read the INFOCOM Delegation guidelines below. From your INFOCOM 2008 TPC member page, please do the following:

    1. Click on the paper number
    2. Click on the pencil icon for editing your Review
    3. Click on Delegate the review
    4. Please enter the last name or EDAS ID of the reviewer. There may be many IDs for an individual and so please select the active one in consulation with the potential reviewer.
    5. You will then be able to edit the Review invitation email sent out by EDAS. Please add content at the top to let the potential reviewer know that the invitation is coming from you and not the INFOCOM 2008 TPC Co-chairs (default).
    6. You will receive a copy of the completed review by email when your delegate has submitted it.
    7. Delegation must be done within 2 weeks of papers (before JULY 31) assigned to the TPC member.
    8. The TPC member must also followup with their delegates to finish their reviews, and oversee the quality. Please inform the delegate that they are also co-responsible with you for actively participating in the online discussion phase.

Participating in Online Discussions - HOWTO

 To post an online discussion message for a paper that you are reviewing, please do the following (after the Regular Review deadline).
  1. Click on the Paper number (after clicking on My reviews tab upon EDAS login).
  2. You should be able to view the reviews and at the bottom of the page, there will be a Discussion section.
  3. Click on the Discuss bubble icon . You will see a text box in the subsequent screen. Please type in your comments about the paper. The discussion messages will be emailed to all the reviewers and Lead TPC member for that paper. You will also be able to view the discussion messages online.
  4. For guidelines on the online discussion phase, please see below.
As lead TPC member of a paper, you will need to take an active role in the discussion regarding that paper. You may ask reviewers to clarify their remarks, provide additional justification for their comments etc. Once you have completed the discussion phase, you (as Lead TPC member) will need to summarize the discussion in your Lead TPC Review/Summary.

Early Reject Phase

TPC Members are strongly encouraged to take a high-level look at their assigned Papers under TPC Lead category (around 8 papers per TPC member). Please identify papers, (between 0 to 2 papers from papers assigned to you as TPC Lead) that you feel are clearly not qualified for INFOCOM consideration and can be rejected earlier. Issues to consider are:

By August 15th, 2007: Enter a detailed review for the early reject paper(s) (if any identified) justifying the reject decision AND Enter a TPC Summary and email the TPC Co-Chairs with the paper numbers.

The TPC Co-Chairs will then decide if the paper will be rejected at an early stage and notify the authors and other assigned reviewers for the paper.

High Review Quality

High quality reviews is by far the most important contribution of a TPC member.

Coherence between numerical scores and review content

 In INFOCOM 2008, the TPC lead assigned to a given paper will have to check if the numerical scores are well justified by the written reviews (and also catch short/low quality reviews), and followup with reviewers using EDAS. Since every TPC member is a lead for some papers, kindly use this opportunity to check the coherence of the scores/reviews you give to papers.

For example, if there is a score of 5, there has to be clear enumeration of reasons why this paper deserves that rating. (Remember that the scores are logarithmic!) After you have reviewed all papers, and see the distribution of scores you have given, please see if there is any bias in your scoring and if it is indeed justified by the quality of the papers in your set.

Similarly, a rating of 2 or 1 may lead to a paper not making it to the TPC meeting: so it is the reviewer's responsibility to give more feedback for authors. Please note that irrespective of your scores, if a paper has reviews that are not strong, the scores may not matter.

Delegation guidelines

The following guidelines apply to delegation of reviews. In principle, we strongly discourage delegation unless there is a compelling need such as a very qualified reviewer for a given paper.

TPC On-line discussion phase: Guidelines

Role of Area TPC Chairs

For INFOCOM 2008, Area TPC Chairs will play a critical role in the review process after the online discussion phase is completed and the Lead TPC review/summary has been submitted. The role of the Area TPC Chairs is to categorize the paper as Accept, Discuss at TPC meeting or Reject. The Area TPC chairs may seek or provide additional reviews. The Area TPC chairs will also lead the discussion groups at the INFOCOM 2008 TPC meeting described below. Additional information about the role of the Area TPC Chairs can be found here.

TPC Meeting

The INFOCOM 2008 TPC Meeting is scheduled for October 27, 2007 at the George Washington University campus in Washington, D.C.

Please let us know if you will attend the meeting and the dinner by filling out the TPC meeting page on EDAS. All TPC members are invited to the TPC meeting. In order to put together a high quality program, it is important to have you participate in this meeting. This is an invaluable experience to see how papers are actually accepted/rejected and which reviews matter and which reviews do not. It is a way to tap into the decision mindset of your peers in the community (especially for newer TPC members) so that you can write more competitive papers to INFOCOM and other conferences.

We expect to have a more focused set of papers at the TPC meeting with a higher acceptance probability (almost 40-50%) compared to the overall conference acceptance rate of 17-18%. This will hopefully bias the discussions to be positive and discuss papers which have good feedback from the TPC review, TPC discussion and Area TPC processes.

We expect to have groups discussing about 30-35 papers each, which will give an average of 15 min per paper (Note: these numbers are tentative at this stage and we will know better by October 2007). This is why the on-line TPC discussion should not "punt" the hard work to the TPC meeting and instead should give good feedback. Also, reviews having high ratings with short reviews may be discounted. Area TPC chairs may choose to bring in papers with lower numerical scores, but have substantive feedback (possibly through an extra review).

Registering for TPC Meeting - HOWTO

TENTATIVE SCHEDULE for IEEE INFOCOM Paper Review process

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