Notes on ISIT’07



TPC Notes on ISIT’07

TPC Timeline: Began 1.5 years before ISIT’07 (held 6/24/-6/29)

(The general chairs began organization much earlier, their rough timeline is below. )

Jan. 20, 2006: First organizational meeting of the conference organizers to discuss the roadmap (timeline) towards the conference, strategize on forming the TPC, discuss the call for papers, and decide on the paper submission protocol and support (EDAS).

Jan. 30, 2006: Begin developing call for papers (with input from conference general chairs), in particular which areas to target.

March 2006: Finalize key dates (submission deadline, acceptance criteria, goal of 3 reviews per paper)

March 2006: ISIT’07 website goes live with call for papers. Emphasize that the page limit and hard paper deadline will be strictly enforced. Details of student paper award and how to indicate eligibility also posted.

March 15, 2006: Finalize list of potential TPC members and invite them TPC members, ask for response within 2 weeks.

July 2006: Set up and test TPC mailing list

Sept. 2006: Set up EDAS submission website. Test submissions. This included setting up the review criteria that would be entered by reviewers.

Nov. 11, 2006: Send invitations to plenary speakers, stating that speakers receive $1000 honorarium and complimentary registration (based on consultation with general chairs). Request preliminary title/abstract by Dec. 15 and final title/abstract by March 15.

Dec. 12, 2006: Complete area leader assignments

Dec 12, 2006: test EDAS (paper submissions and assignments to reviewers, area leaders, TPC members and chairs; confirm for a “dummy paper” that areas leaders could assign it and that each TPC member could access it, assign it to reviewers, and upload a review).

Dec. 15, 2006: Request plenary speakers to send plenary speaker titles and abstracts for posting on website.

Dec. 15, 2006: Make arrangements for TPC meeting in March at CISS

Dec. 15, 2006: Ask for detailed list of areas of expertise from area leaders and TPC members to aid in paper assignments.

Dec. 21, 2006: Send TPC members and area leaders detailed instructions, including information about review process, requirement for 3 reviews, and review deadlines.

Jan 3, 2007: Began assigning submitted papers to area leaders and TPC members (we had about 100 submissions at this time, 90% came in the last few days before the deadline, 65% (~650/1000) came in the last day).

Jan. 8, 2007: Paper submission deadline (we stated on the website that this was a hard deadline several weeks beforehand. We did not give extensions, although we left the site open for an extra day after the deadline, and told people asking for extensions that this would probably be the case, but they could not count on it).

Jan. 13, 2007: Deadline to have all papers assigned to area leaders

Jan. 20, 2007: Deadline to have all papers assigned to 3 or more reviewers

Jan. 27, 2007: Deadline to have (ideally) 3 confirmed reviewers for all papers

Feb. 23: Review deadline

Feb. 26: TPC review deadline

March 7, 2007: Hard review deadline

March 7-14, 2007: Paper pre-sorting, average scores for reject/accept, identify papers with big review spread, or with less than 2 reviews, ensure at least 2 reviews going into TPC meeting by asking a TPC member or chair to review a paper with less than 2.

March 14, 2007: all-day TPC meeting (timed to coincide with CISS): Paper acceptance/rejection mostly completed and sessions formed with tentative session chairs.

March 15: TPC chair meeting to finalize decisions, sessions, and session chairs

March 15, 2007: Paper acceptance/rejections sent. Authors of accepted papers informed that 1 author must register by April 20, which coincided with final submission deadline. Authors encouraged on submission website to upload paper to Arxiv.

March 15, 2007: Contact tentative session chairs to get their confirmation, and propose alternates when any decline. It took several weeks to assign most chairs. Some holes were filled as late as May, we received a few cancellations after chairs had accepted. TPC chairs were on standby during the conference to fill session chair no-shows.

March 20, 2007: Posted details on recent results poster session on the conference website, including submission details.

March 27, 2007: Preliminary program with all confirmed session chairs posted.

March 15-30, 2007: Handled complaints from authors of rejected papers, requests to move papers into another session or change the talk time (rarely accommodated).

April 5, 2007: Finalized order of plenary talks and posted to website

April 10, 2007: Deadline for final plenary speaker titles and abstracts for posting on website and inclusion in final program.

April 15, 2007: Student paper award finalists decided and informed.

April 20, 2007: Deadline for final paper submission and author registration

May 20, 2007: TPC chairs matched to plenary speakers for introductions – bios of plenary speakers requested.

June 24, 2007: BOG meeting prior to ISIT, where the TPC chairs to exclude papers with no-show authors or authors that contacted us shortly before the conference to back out, from IEEE Xplore (with the caveat of making exceptions to this policy when it seemed beyond the authors’ control). This policy was approved unanimously.

June 24-29 (ISIT): Session chairs monitored no-show authors, and the TPC chairs and session chairs judged the presentions of the student paper award finalists.

July 19, 2007: Student paper award winner(s) selected based on presentation reviews and original paper reviews.

General Chair Rough Timeline: Began 2.5 years before ISIT’07

Dec. 2004: Stilema srl. appointed as organizing company.

March 2005: Received 10,000$ aid from IEEE.

May 2005: Signed contract with Acropolis (conference center)

June 2005: Website ONLINE.

July 2005: printed 3000 copies of the invitation leaflet.

Sept. 2005 – July 2006: search for sponsors and organization work (hotels, service providers, social program).

July 2006: Call for papers in distribution at ISIT 2006 Seattle and on web.

April 20, 2007: deadline for final paper submission and author registration, based on deadline for printing final program.

June 24, 2007: ISIT 2007 begins

July 1-15, 2007: General chairs contact no-show authors and inform them possible exclusion of their paper from Xplore; Ask for no-show justification.

Sept. 23, 2007: Plenary speaker videos posted on conference website

Details behind the timeline

Organizational Decisions:

- The conference organizers (general and TPC chairs, publicity chair, finance chair, etc.) met at ITA in Jan. 2006 to start the planning process.

- We decided to use EDAS for paper submissions (although we knew it had many issues, it seemed the best solution of available alternatives, mainly because of its database of reviewers).

- We decided to have about 50 TPC members

- We decided to aim for a goal of 3 reviews per paper (which could include a review by the TPC paper handler), plus a TPC review (which summarized all reviews and made an overall recommendation). There was some controversy about asking TPC members to get 3 reviews, since most prior ISITs had a goal of 2 reviews and in some cases made decisions with 1 review. The TPC chairs felt strongly that paper decisions based on 3 reviews would be more fair and would result in better paper decisions and better revisions of accepted papers. In the end we got 3 reviews for about 70% of the submitted papers, and at least 2 reviews for all papers, as well as an additional TPC review.

TPC Formation

- The TPC chairs decided on a goal of about 50 TPC members, so developed a list of about 60 potential members with about 10 backup choices. We tried for balance on geographical area, technical coverage, not too correlated with prior year’s TPC, a mix of senior and junior people, and to ensure a reasonable number of women participating (this has been very low historically).

- We decided to have area leaders, mainly to help sort the incoming papers to assign to TPC members. Even with 4 TPC chairs, we felt more expertise was needed to determine which TPC member should handle papers in a given area. The area lesders job ended after the submitted papers were assigned to TPC members.

- We set up mailing lists for TPC members, area leaders and TPC chairs. Most correspondence was handled through these lists.

- We set up a website with research interests of area leaders to help us assign them papers to assign to TPC members.

- We should have set up a website with TPC member research interests, to help us and area leaders in assigning papers to TPC members

- We should have made the reviewing guidelines clear in the invitation to join the TPC. We got some pushback from people on our review guidelinesof 3 reviews per paper, and we should have stated that we would not process papers with only 1 review unless it identified a fatal flaw. That way, people would have known what they were signing up to from the beginning.

Area leaders

- We had 20 area leaders counting the TPC chairs, these leaders were assigned papers for a particular area, which they could then reassign to TPC members that had that expertise.

- We asked area leaders to send us their areas of interest, which we posted and send around so they had an idea of everyone’s area. We should have also done this for all TPC members to make assigning papers to TPC members easier.

- We found that having area leaders.made paper assignment for TPC much easier

- No mechanism for area leaders in EDAS – need to make them temporary TPC chairs, which gives them the ability to do lots of things in addition to being area leader (bad)

Preparation for paper submission deadline

- We were on a very tight schedule, papers submitted Jan. 8 and the TPC meeting March 13. We thus insisted on a hard deadline of Jan. 8, left submissions open an extra day unofficially, and only accepted a few papers after that for legitimate reasons of delay. This worked well and no authors complained about the hard deadline (although some politely requested to violate it, but were not upset at being turned down), as it had been announced as a hard deadline on the website.

- We did not accept manuscript changes after the paper submission deadline although many authors requested to upload a revised manuscript to fix typos, etc.

- We were very proactive about making sure TPC assignments were confirmed quickly and papers were sent out for review and reviews confirmed quickly. In other words, TPC members received frequent reminders, and we checked through EDAS which papers had not been assigned to reviewers by the deadline. Most TPC members were very responsive – a few had not even assigned reviewers by the week before the deadline.

Paper Decisions

- Paper decisions were sent on March 15, 2007, the day after our TPC meeting.

- We had targeted March 25 as the deadline for paper acceptance/rejection to give the TPC chairs one week after the TPC meeting to finalize decisions, and give authors 4 weeks before the final submission deadline. The all-day TPC meeting on the 14th and all-day TPC chair meeting on the 15th was sufficient to finalize decisions, mainly because we made sure through frequent pestering of TPC members to have at least 2 reviews per paper and 1 TPC review going into those meetings.

- We accepted 603 papers out of 993 total, about 60%. This was a bit low an acceptance ratio compared to prior ISITs, and we had hoped to accept more, but in the course of the TPC meeting everyone felt that the papers below the threshold associated with the 603 accepted papers had flaws and that we should therefore stop at 8 parallel sessions of high quality papers.

- We received about 25 author complaints about the paper decision. In general we told authors that there was no rebuttal (see sample email below). However, in all cases the reviews for the papers were revisited to give the authors a bit more details about the decision based on them. In one case, the author pointed out that the reviewer had completed missed a clearly stated assumption and rejected the paper on that basis – after discussion with the reviewer and TPC handler, the decision was reversed.

- About 10-15 papers were withdrawn after paper acceptance. This required a bit of shuffling in the sessions to avoid having sessions with too few papers. We had some sessions with 4 papers and some with 5, and this allowed us to shuffle things around more easily than if all sessions had the same number of papers.

- In our acceptance letter we told authors that the time and day of their talk was posted in the preliminary program, and that papers could generally not be moved to accommodate author constraints (except for medical or family emergencies). We received many requests to move papers, up until just before the conference.

Student Paper Award

- In Sept. 2006 the BOG approved a student paper award for ISIT’07 on a trial basis. The details were to be handled by the TPC chairs for the trial and, if successful, the award was to become permanent and be handled by the awards committee.

- In order for a paper to be considered eligible for a student paper award at ISIT'07, a student had to be the dominant contributor to the paper. Thus, the following two criteria were required: (1) The 1st author had to be a registered student at the time of paper submission (2) This student author must present the paper at ISIT'07.

- We made exceptions to (1) for papers where authors are listed alphabetically but a student was the main contributor to the paper. In this case we required the student's advisor to send an email to the TPC chairs stating that the student was the main contributor to the paper. Exceptions to (2) were made in cases of foreign students that were unable to attend ISIT'07 due to visa restrictions. In this case an alternate method to score the student’s presentation of the work was to be used. No exceptions for either of these cases were requested.

- Details of the award and eligibility were posted on the conference website about a month prior to the paper submission deadline. The student paper award was also announced on the ITSoc student mailing list and website.

- There was no easy mechanism in EDAS to identify papers eligible for the award, or to have authors indicate eligibility in the paper submission. Thus, we asked authors to state eligibility in the paper abstract.

- In requesting paper reviews, we asked reviewers to indicate if they thought an eligible papers should be considered for the student paper award.

- After the paper submission deadline, 8 finalist papers were chosen based on their review scores and reviewer comments. There was a significant gap in scores between these papers and the other eligible papers, which dictated the number of finalists.

- During the conference, the presentations by each of the finalists was scored by at least 2 TPC chairs and the session chair

- The award winners were chosen based on the paper review scores and presentation scores. Two winning papers were selected.

- Following the success of the award, at the Sept. 2007 BOG meeting the student paper award was made permanent, to be jointly handled by the awards committee and TPC chairs.

Recent Results Poster Session

- The TPC chairs decided early on not to have a recent results session where recent results were orally presented. We felt that doing this during the regular sessions would detract from those sessions or have very low attendance, and doing it outside of regular session times would also result in poor attendance

- We decided a poster session over Monday and/or Friday lunch would allow attendees requiring a presentation for conference reimbursement to attend, would encourage students and other authors to present work not fully completed, and would be of interest to attendees.

- We announced the recent results poster session shortly after paper acceptance/rejection decisions were made.

- 17 posters were submitted for the session, with the titles, abstracts, and authors posted on the conference website under the poster session tab.

Policy on Changing Talk Times

- In general we were fairly rigid about denying requests to move papers to different times due to author preferences. We felt this could compromise the coherence of the sessions and was unfair to authors that were available to present their talk on any day of the conference.

- A handful of authors requested that their talk be moved to a different session based on it being a poor fit for the assigned session. When this was the case, we tried to accommodate these requests.

- ICC 2007 was held the same week as ISIT 2007. The TPC chairs decided early on to accommodate any authors presenting at both conferences to move their talk to avoid the conflict. We had a handful of requests to do this.

- EDAS did not provide a mechanism to avoid talks in parallel sessions with common authors. Several such papers were scheduled, and we moved them to allow the authors to attend or present both talks.

- We also moved talks to accommodate authors with travel constraints associated with a wife’s pregnancy and with an author’s wedding. Most other requests to move talks were turned down.

- We had several requests, typically from senior people, to move their talk to a different day to accommodate vacation plans or not attending the last day of the conference. All such requests were turned down.

- At the conference we received one request to move a talk from Friday to Wednesday if there was a session hole. This request was turned down.

No Show Authors

- Accepted papers were required to have one registered author. Papers without one registered author were removed from the program prior to it being finalized. This practice has been in place for a while, and cuts down significantly on no shows.

- We had a few cases where an author registered for the conference, but did not plan to attend, and asked an inappropriate substitute speaker to present their paper. Such papers were considered to have no-show authors.

- Session chairs were asked to inform TPC chairs of no-show authors.

- Based on the unanimous recommendation of the BOG, papers by no-show authors were removed from IEEE Xplore. The general conference chairs contacted all such authors to inform them of this exclusion, and give them an opportunity to provide a legitimate reason for not attending the conference. Legitimacy was decided by the general chairs on a case-by-case basis.

EDAS issues

- We set up a default email for authors to email if they had submission problems, which went to all the chairs. This worked well.Surprisingly, we had very few submission problems in EDAS

- We sent TPC members and area leaders an information sheet on how to use EDAS. This was useful for those that received it, but it was sent to the SPAM filter for many since it was sent to the ISIT TPC chair mailing list

- Split personalities in EDAS were a major headache. We would assign papers to TPC members or reviewers who could not access them because it was an old EDAS identity. It would have been very useful to ask all TPC members to merge their EDAS identities or tell us which one to use long before we started paper processing.

- We had a test run on EDAS by assigning papers to people and having them accept or decline. This worked well and made assignment when the actual papers came in much easier.

- EDAS determines conflicts automatically. To change this automatic assignment, when you log onto EDAS, click on the far left "Home" tab, and then click on the pencil in the "Conflicts of interest" line (should be just after a number indicating how many conflicts you have). EDAS automatically assigns conflicts according to the following rule: "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." A person can delete all of these automatically assigned conflicts or just some of them, or add more.

- It’s not obvious how review reminders are generated, since they are sent out at different times. EDAS help queries state that there is a checker that sends out the reminders at 5am after they are do, but it wasn’t clear this happened and there was no way to check. Also, if the TPC deadline differs from the regular review deadline, the reminder emails will list the later deadline. If automated reminders are used, someone should do a few random checks of review logs to ensure they went out. Note also then when going to the tab “reviews”->”reminders”, the date under “last reminder” is the last date that any TPC member sent a review, it is not when reminders to all reviews (via automated or manual command) went out.

- Make sure TPC members enter decline emails they receive into EDAS or ask reviewers to do so. When reminders were sent (we included notified people in this), there were several complaints that the review had been declined by email.

- In EDAS, whichever TPC member sends the decisions will have that person’s email in the decision email, so should be prepared to get any author responses.

Appendix: Documents and Forms

Information Document for TPC Members (Sent Dec. 21, 2006)

General Information

The paper deadline for ISIT’07 is January 8, although paper assignment will begin before that date. The TPC has been structured as follows. There are 4 TPC chairs, 19 area leaders, and 60 TPC members. Papers will be assigned by the TPC chairs to the area leaders according to their focus area. The area leaders will assign papers to TPC members to handle based on their areas of expertise. TPC members are responsible for obtaining 3 reviews for each paper they are assigned to handle. A TPC member may elect to review the paper himself/herself, in which case only 2 additional reviews are needed. The TPC member is responsible for ensuring 3 reviews are uploaded into EDAS for each paper they are handling by the review deadline of Feb. 23. The TPC member is also responsible for filling out a short TPC review, which basically summarizes his/her recommendation for the paper based on the 3 reviews, by Feb. 26.

The TPC chairs will process and sort the reviews and come up with preliminary recommendations (accept, reject, borderline) prior to the TPC meeting being held March 13 8:30am-5:30pm at Johns Hopkins University (meeting co-located with CISS, , please reserve you room as part of the conference room block). The TPC meeting is where the majority of paper decisions will be finalized and sessions formed: TPC members should plan to attend if at all possible. Additional reviews or input may be required of TPC members after the TPC meeting to make final decisions papers not categorized at the TPC. After the final selection of papers for the technical program is complete, the responsibilities of both area leaders and TPC members will end.

The following information summarizes how papers will be handled by area editors, TPC members, and reviewers. If you have further questions please contact the ISIT’07 TPC chairs Andrea Goldsmith, Muriel Medard, Amin Shokrollahi, and Ram Zamir at isit07tpc-chairs@mit.edu.

Information for Area Leaders

Paper assignment

Papers for you to handle as area leader will be assigned to you by the TPC chairs based on your areas of expertise. Please send a list of these areas to medard@mit.edu if you have not yet done so to assist in this paper assignment. When an assignment is made you will be notified by EDAS that you have been assigned a paper as a TPC member. You can handle the paper yourself as a TPC member or assign a different TPC member to handle it. To assign a TPC member other than yourself to a given paper you should go to the paper information and click on the “Add TPC” link under TPC reviews for the paper, then add the name of the TPC member you wish to handle the paper. You should also delete yourself as the TPC member handling the paper by clicking on the trash can at the far right where your name appears as a TPC member handling the paper. Note: you should only assign one TPC member (yourself inclusive) to a given paper, that TPC member will be responsible for obtaining all reviewers for the paper. If you do not feel that you know the subject matter well enough for a paper assigned to you to either handle the paper as a TPC member or assign it to another TPC member, then please contact the TPC chairs at isit07tpc-chairs@mit.edu . You should try to maintain a roughly equal load for all TPC members in handling papers. You can find how many TPC reviews (and how many reviews) a given TPC member is handling by clicking on the tab “Reviews” in EDAS and then clicking on “TPC status”

You are a TPC chair in EDAS

In order to allow area leaders to assign papers to other TPC members, we needed to enter all area leader as TPC chairs in EDAS. Do not be alarmed – you are not responsible for any chairing functions, this was the only way to allow area leaders to delegate other TPC members to handle papers. Please only use your chairing capability in EDAS to assign/unassign TPC members to papers.

Deadline for Paper Assignment to TPC Chairs

We have about 6 weeks between the paper submission deadline and the deadline for reviews. Thus it is essential to assign papers to TPC members as soon as possible so they can find appropriate reviewers. The TPC chairs plan to assign papers to area leaders starting in late December and complete these assignments by Jan. 13. Please try to assign these papers to the TPC chairs no later than Jan. 20 with a request that they assign papers to reviewers within about a week (by Jan. 27, this gives reviewers about 4 weeks to complete the reviews).

Confirmations, Reminders, and EDAS color coding

After you have assigned a paper to a TPC member, their name will be listed as a TPC reviewer under the paper with the following color coding: review assigned, reviewer notified, review confirmed by reviewer, review declined, review delegated to somebody else, review completed, reviewer reminded. review late.

In particular, if the TPC member has not responded to the email to handle the paper, it will show up highlighted in light blue. Ideally you should have all TPC assignments highlighted in yellow around Jan. 20. Note that sending a review reminder will result in an email to TPC members that have either confirmed but not yet uploaded a review or not responded to the invitation about handling a paper. In particular, this is not a reminder to accept or decline the invitation to handle the paper. Moreover, people that have confirmed to handle the paper but not uploaded a review will be highlighted in pink once a reminder has been sent, not in yellow. So if you send reminders to TPC members you will not be able to distinguish from the highlighting whether the TPC member has confirmed to handle the paper but not yet uploaded a review or not responded yet to the invitation.

Duties after Completion of Your Paper Assignments to TPC Members

After all papers assigned to you as area leader are assigned by you to TPC members, you have no further responsibility as an area leader. Your duties as a TPC member for the papers assigned to you in that role (by yourself or others) are the same as for all other TPC members.

Information for TPC Members

Paper assignment and accepting/declining to handle the paper:

Papers are assigned to you to handle as a TPC member by TPC chairs or area leaders. Upon paper assignment you will receive email notification from EDAS that you have been assigned a paper to handle as a TPC member. This notification will include information about accessing the paper via EDAS. Once you have accessed the paper on EDAS, you can view the manuscript, and accept or decline to handle the paper as a TPC member. The majority of papers will be assigned to TPC members after Jan. 8, although some will be assigned before that. Note for these early assignments that manuscript changes of assigned papers may be made up until Jan. 8.

Assigning Reviewers to Papers

To assign a reviewer to a paper you are handling as a TPC member, go to the paper information and click on the “Add review” link under Reviews for a given paper, then add the name of the reviewer you wish to handle the paper (they need not be registered in EDAS). Note that as a TPC member handling a paper you are not automatically assigned as a reviewer. You can assign yourself as a reviewer by following the procedure just described to add a reviewer, and putting your name in as the assigned reviewer. Please try to not overload any particular reviewer with review assignments. You can find how many reviews have been assigned to a given reviewer by clicking on the tab “Reviews” in EDAS, then clicking on “TPC status”, and then scrolling to the bottom of the page.

Review Reminders

You can send a review reminder to reviewers at any time by clicking on the clock icon towards the far right where their name is listed under reviews. The reminder will be sent without a confirmation from you, so make sure you want to sent the reminder before clicking on the icon. You can also send review reminders to all reviewers using the batch command which will send a reminder to all reviewers that you have assigned papers to that have either not responded to your invitation or confirmed as reviewers but not yet uploaded their reviews. Please send reminders to all reviewers that have not uploaded their reviews no later than Feb. 25 (2 days after the review deadline).

Confirmations and EDAS color coding

After you have assigned a paper to a reviewer, their name will be listed as a reviewer under the paper with the following color coding: review assigned, reviewer notified, review confirmed by reviewer, review declined, review delegated to somebody else, review completed, reviewer reminded. review late.

In particular, if a reviewer has not responded to the email to handle the paper, it will show up highlighted in light blue. Ideally you should have all reviewer assignments highlighted in yellow around Jan. 27 to allow about 4 weeks for reviews to be completed by the review deadline. Note that sending a review reminder will result in an email to reviewers that have either confirmed but not yet uploaded a review or not responded to the invitation about reviewing a paper. In particular, this is not a reminder to accept or decline the invitation to review the paper. Moreover, people that have confirmed to review the paper but not uploaded a review will be highlighted in pink once a reminder has been sent, not in yellow. So if you send reminders to reviewers you will not be able to distinguish from the highlighting whether the reviewer has confirmed to review the paper but not yet uploaded a review or not responded yet to the invitation.

Status Check

You can view all papers assigned to you as a TPC member and that you have assigned to others to review by clicking on the “My Reviews” tab in EDAS. Papers you are handling as a TPC member or reviewer will be shown under the “Reviews for ISIT’07” header, this will show your reviews as both a TPC member and a reviewer, the “Type” category indicates if you are a TPC member or a reviewer for that particular paper – you can be both if you have been assigned the paper as a TPC member and assigned it to yourself as a reviewer as well. Review assignments you have made will be shown on this page under the “Reviews Requested” header.

TPC Reviews

TPC members are responsible for filling out a TPC review for each paper they are handling. There is only a single question in this review asking you to provide a recommendation for the paper based on the 3 reviews you have obtained. Please upload your TPC review for each paper you are handling by the review deadline of Feb. 23 or as soon as all 3 reviews are available.

Changing your TPC review

You can change your TPC review at any time before the review due date. Simply click on the 'My Reviews' or 'My TPCs' tab once you log in to EDAS. You can also follow the link in the TPC confirmation email.

Reviewer Questions

You can send reviewers the “Information for Reviewers” below to help those unfamiliar with EDAS. EDAS also has a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) – this is accessed by clicking on the Help tab towards the far right of any EDAS page and then clicking on “Frequently asked questions”. Questions can also be emailed to the TPC chairs at isit07tpc-chairs@mit.edu.

Information for Reviewers

Paper assignment and accepting/declining reviews:

Papers are assigned to you by TPC members. Upon paper assignment you will receive email notification from EDAS that you have been assigned a paper to review. This notification will include information about accessing the paper via EDAS. Once you have accessed the paper on EDAS, you can view the manuscript, and accept or decline the review. You can also view all papers you have been assigned to review by logging into EDAS and clicking the tab “My Reviews”, and you can accept/decline all reviews assigned to you from this page by clicking on the link to accept/decline reviews in a batch. The majority of papers will be assigned to reviewers after Jan. 8, although some will be assigned before that. Note for these early assignments that manuscript changes of assigned papers may be made up until Jan. 8.

Review delegation

You can delegate your review assignment to someone else. To do so, on the page where you accept/decline the review, enter the name of the person you are delegating the review to. Then that person will be emailed a review request by EDAS and you will no longer be responsible for the review.

Status Check

You can view all papers assigned to you to review by clicking on the “My Reviews” tab in EDAS. Papers you are handling as a reviewer will be shown under the “Reviews for ISIT’07” header

Uploading your review

When you accept to review a paper, you will receive an email from EDAS acknowledging this acceptance and giving instructions for how to upload your review. You can also find all your completed and pending reviews by logging onto EDAS with your EDAS ID number. All review questions must be filled out.

Review deadline

Please upload your review by the review deadline of Feb 23.

Changing your review

You can change your review at any time before the review due date. Simply click on the 'My Reviews' or 'My TPCs' tab once you log in to EDAS. You can also follow the link in the review confirmation email.

TPC and Regular Review Requests

TPC Review Request

Dear X,

The following ISIT'07 paper has been assigned to you as a TPC member:

"Paper Title". It has the following abstract:

“Paper Abstract”

You can access the paper at

using the EDAS user name han@hn.is.uec.ac.jp.

Please indicate at whether you are able to serve as the TPC handler for this paper (i.e. obtain 3 paper reviews, one of which may be by you, and complete a short TPC review with your overall recommendation). We would greatly appreciate if you could make this indication WITHIN 3 DAYS OF RECEIVING THIS INVITATION if possible so that we can accurately track paper assignments.

Please note that the deadline for the paper reviews to be uploaded is Feb. 23, 2007 at 11:59 PM EST, and the deadline for your own TPC review to be uploaded is Feb 26, 2007 at 11:59 PM EST.

Thanks again for your help.

Andrea Goldsmith

Regular Review Request

Dear X,

The paper "Paper Title" has been submitted to IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory 2007. It has the following abstract:

“Paper Abstract”

We believe that this paper falls within your area of expertise and would appreciate if you could review the paper. If you agree to review the paper by the deadline Feb 23, 2007, please click on the URL below:



You will receive detailed review instructions by email. The paper review is requested by TPC Member X. It is very important that the review that you are handling on this paper be turned in before the Feb. 23 deadline.

If you cannot handle the paper, please click on the URL below:



In this case, we would appreciate if you can use the web form above to

provide the name and email address of a colleague (or graduate student

of yours) who might be able to review the paper.

In fairness to the authors and in order not to delay the review

process, please indicate your choice as soon as possible, but

no later than TWO days after receiving this message.

You can find all your review assignments at

Thanks again for your help.

TPC Member X

TPCMemberemail@

Regular Review Form

| | | |

|Strengths |What are the key strengths of this paper? |  |

|Weaknesses |What are the major weaknesses of this paper? |  |

|Comments and Recommendation |Please give the reasoning for your overall recommendation and any additional |  |

| |comments you wish to add. | |

|For TPC eyes only |Write here if you have comments you don't wish the author to see. |  |

|Student Paper Award |If the paper abstract states that this paper is eligible for a student paper award, |  |

| |please state whether you believe the paper should be considered for this award. | |

|Importance |How important / interesting is the topic addressed in this paper? |5: Extremely Important |

| | |4: Very Important |

| | |3: Average Importance |

| | |2: Some Importance |

| | |1: Little Importance |

|Technical Level |Do the results seem correct (as far as you can tell)? Are they deep? |5: Extremely high technical level |

| | |4: Good technical level |

| | |3: Technically sound |

| | |2: Not very convincing |

| | |1: Not correct |

|Novelty |How novel is the paper? |5: Extremely Novel |

| | |4: Very Novel |

| | |3: Average Novelty |

| | |2: Some Novelty |

| | |1: Little Novelty |

|Presentation |How clear is the presentation and writing of the paper? |5: Excellent |

| | |4: Good |

| | |3: Average |

| | |2: Room for improvement |

| | |1: Poor |

|Recommendation |Given your assessment of the paper's overall value and assuming an expected |5: Strongly Recommend |

| |acceptance rate around 65%, please give your recommendation for including this paper|4: Recommend |

| |in the ISIT'07 technical program. |3: Borderline |

| | |2: Weak Reject |

| | |1: Reject |

TPC Review Form

|TPC Recommendation Justification |Please give a justification for your recommendation, especially if the review |  |

| |scores vary widely or your recommendation differs significantly from those of | |

| |the reviewers. | |

|TPC recommendation |Given the reviews, what is your recommendation for this paper. |5: Strong accept|

| | |4: Accept |

| | |3: Borderline |

| | |2: Weak reject |

| | |1: Reject |

Acceptance and Rejection Emails

Acceptance:

Dear X:

We are happy to inform you that your paper #1569012822 ('Paper Title’), submitted to the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory 2007, has been accepted for presentation at the symposium, and publication in the proceedings. We received an unusually high number of paper submissions which were subjected to a very rigorous review process. Your paper was selected for inclusion based on its high quality and contribution.

We encourage you to incorporate comments of the reviewers in modifying your paper before its final submission.

A LaTex style file is provided on the ISIT 2007 Web-site, . For inclusion in the proceedings it is essential that the camera-ready manuscript should have the same format as specified in this style file. Authors are encouraged to use LaTeX and the style file to format their camera-ready papers for the final upload.

Please note that the use of EDAS () is required to upload your camera-ready manuscript. The deadline for the receipt of the camera-ready manuscripts is April 20, 2007 at 11:59pm Eastern Time (New York, USA).

*****************************************************************

IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS:

* Authors' registration:

In order to be included in the final program, at least one author must register to ISIT'07 for each accepted paper (with a maximum of two papers registered by the same author). The deadline for early registration is also April 20, 2007, and the registration form is available on the ISIT'07 Web-site, . **Accepted papers with no registered authors will not be included in the final program**. In order to link your registration form to a paper, please use the following five-digit PAPER IDENTIFIER NUMBER: 12822. You have to report this number in the registration form.

* IEEE Copyright form:

A signed IEEE copyright form must be provided for each accepted paper. Papers without copyright form **will not be included** in the final program. A pdf version of the IEEE copyright form can be downloaded from EDAS (). The copyright form must be signed and sent by FAX to: +39-0115184666.

*****************************************************************

The reviews are attached below or can be found at .

We look forward to seeing in Nice.

Our Best Regards,

Andrea Goldsmith

Muriel Medard

Amin Shokrollahi

Ram Zamir

The ISIT 2007 TPC Chairs

********************* Reviews *****************************************

*** Importance: How important / interesting is the topic addressed in this paper?

Little Importance (1)

*** Technical Level: Do the results seem correct (as far as you can tell)?

Are they deep?

Little Depth (1)

*** Novelty: How novel is the paper?

Little Novelty (1)

*** Presentation: How clear is the presentation and writing of the paper?

Poor (1)

*** Recommendation: Given your assessment of the paper's overall value and assuming an expected acceptance rate around 65%, please give

your recommendation for including this paper in the ISIT'07 technical program.

Strongly Recommend (5)

*** Strengths: What are the key strengths of this paper?

Text1

*** Weaknesses: What are the major weaknesses of this paper?

Text 2

*** Comments and Recommendation: Please give the reasoning for your overall recommendation and

any additional comments you wish to add.

text3

Rejection:

Dear X:

We regret to inform you that your paper #1569012822 ('Paper title’) submitted to the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory 2007 was not selected for inclusion in the symposium.

We received an unusually large number of high quality submissions and we were able to accommodate only a limited number of papers. We strove to maintain a very rigorous and fair review process. The reviews are attached below or can be found at . We hope you find the reviews helpful.

We thank you for considering the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory 2007 for presentation of your work.

Sincerely,

ISIT 2007 TPC

********************* Reviews *****************************************

*** Importance: How important / interesting is the topic addressed in this paper?

Little Importance (1)

*** Technical Level: Do the results seem correct (as far as you can tell)?

Are they deep?

Not correct (1)

*** Novelty: How novel is the paper?

Little Novelty (1)

*** Presentation: How clear is the presentation and writing of the paper?

Poor (1)

*** Recommendation: Given your assessment of the paper's overall value and assuming an expected acceptance rate around 65%, please give your recommendation for including this paper in the ISIT'07 technical program.

Reject (1)

*** Strengths: What are the key strengths of this paper?

text1

*** Weaknesses: What are the major weaknesses of this paper?

text2

*** Comments and Recommendation: Please give the reasoning for your overall recommendation and any additional comments you wish to add.

text3

Plenary Speaker Invitation

Dear X,

The TPC chairs of the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT'07) are pleased to invite you to be a plenary speaker at the conference. ISIT is the premier conference of the Information Theory Society with approximately 800 attendees, and we believe your work would be of great interest to the participants. The conference will be held Monday through Friday, June 24-29 2007, in Nice, France. More details for the conference can be found on the conference website:

.

We are planning one plenary talk to start the conference each day except Thursday. Should you accept this invitation, you will receive an honorarium of $1000 as well as complimentary registration for the conference. We will also need a preliminary title by Dec. 15, and a final title and short abstract by March 15.

Please let us know if you have any questions or would like more information. We do hope you will accept this invitation and look forward to your positive response.

Sincerely,

Andrea Goldsmith

Muriel Medard

Amin Shokrollahi

Ram Zamir

ISIT'07 Technical Program Committee Chairs

Example Response to Author Questioning Paper Rejection Basis

Dear X,

Unfortunately, we have no mechanism for review rebuttals, paper revisions, or additional review rounds based on revisions. As stated in the decision email, we received an unusually large number of high quality submissions and we were able to accommodate only a limited number of papers. Every paper received 2 or more reviews and TPC review by a TPC member in the area of the paper, and all papers and their reviews were carefully scrutinized by the TPC and chairs before final decisions were made.

In your case, the three reviewers were all experts in the field, as was the TPC handler. You can view the TPC review on EDAS, which took all the reviews into account and put your paper in the borderline category. The final paper decision was made based on the TPC recommendation as we were unable to accommodate many good papers in this borderline category, including yours. Sorry that the outcome of your paper decision was not more favorable.

Best regards,

Andrea Goldsmith (on behalf of the TPC chairs)

Example Email for Request to Move Paper

Dec X,

Unfortunately I am not able to accommodate this request. We spent a huge amount of time forming and scheduling sessions to ensure coherence of papers within a session and coherence of the overall program. We also tried to schedule papers of interest to ICC attendees on Thursday and

Friday so as not to conflict with that conference. We are generally only rescheduling papers based on conflicts with an ICC paper by the same author or conflicts with a paper by the same author being presented in another session (we also moved one due to a pregnancy travel restriction and another one due to an author getting married on Saturday in South America and requesting the talk not be on Monday). We have not granted any

other requests regarding moving papers. As you might imagine, trying to accommodate individual author scheduling requests would make it impossible to finalize the program and would lead to severe constraints in forming coherent sessions. If none of the authors can present the paper at its scheduled time please let me know, since I believe papers will not be included in the program if an author is not available to present it.

Hope to see you in Nice.

Best regards,

Andrea Goldsmith (on behalf of the TPC chairs)

Student Paper Award Finalist Presentation Review

Please rate areas 1-6 as 1=Excellent, 2=Very Good, 3=Good, 4=Fair, 5=Poor. Feel free to add comments and suggestions for each area if you wish, but only the last question requires commentary.

1. Explanation of concepts, results, and insights:

2. Ability to convey the importance of the work:

3. Overall speaking ability:

4. Quality of the slides:

5. Overall rating for the presentation:

In addition to the ratings on the above areas, please comment on the main strengths and weaknesses of the presentation:

Backup documents: ISIT07Information (to TPC members and area leaders; TPC member invitation email, TPC area leader invitation email

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