Thank you for agreeing to review a paper for IEEE CVPR 2013. Your reviews have a direct and important impact on the quality of an important conference in computer vision. Your reviews also help the computer vision community as a whole to improve the quality of its research. Please read through the rest of this document that provides details on what is expected of you as a member of the Papers Reviewing Committee for CVPR 2013.
Based on the published schedule you will have almost a month and half to do your reviews; please do not leave them for the last few days near the deadline. The Area Chairs have a lot of work to do after the reviews are in. Adhering to this deadline is extremely important. As soon as you get your reviewing assignment, please go through all the papers to make sure that (a) there is NO obvious conflict with you (e.g., a paper authored by your recent collaborator from a different institution) and (b) you are qualified to review the paper assigned. If these issues arise, please respond right away using the system. Contact us also if you find a paper that violates any of the paper submission guidelines. We will once again be offering an author rebuttal process this year preceding the Area Chair Committee meeting. Area Chairs will also follow up with you to get clarifications on reviews and as needed, seek consensus on diverging reviews.
Look for what's good or stimulating in the paper. Minor flaws can be corrected and shouldn't be a reason to reject a paper. Each paper that is accepted should, however, be technically sound and make a substantial contribution to the field. Please familiarize yourself with the information in the Call for Submissions.
Blind reviewing is an essential part of CVPR reviewing. Authors were asked to take reasonable efforts to hide their identities, including not listing their names or affiliations and omitting acknowledgments. This information will of course be included in the published version. Reviewers should also make all efforts to keep their identity invisible to the authors. Don't say, "you should have cited my paper from 2006!"
Note that posting a paper online or giving a public talk does not violate the double-blind policy. Reviewers must not seek the identity of the authors; authors must not bias the review process by suggesting their identities.
Please be specific and detailed in your reviews. In the discussion of related work and references, simply saying "this is well known" or "this has been common practice in the industry for years" is not sufficient: cite specific publications or public disclosures of techniques. The Explanation section is the most important of the review. Your discussion, sometimes more than your score, will help the Area Chairs decide which papers to accept, so please be thorough. Your reviews will be returned to the authors, so you should include any specific feedback on ways the authors can improve their papers. For more suggestions on writing your reviews, read the section below on Writing Technical Reviews.
When you have finished with your review, you should destroy any paper manuscript and/or supporting material you received. See the Ethics guidelines below.
Here are some recommendations that may help you as you do this very valuable task. In many professions, people give back to their community by doing volunteer work. In technical fields, we volunteer our time by reviewing papers that are written by other researchers in our field. We recommend that you approach your reviews in this spirit of volunteerism. Sure, your reviews make you a gatekeeper in helping decide which papers are ready for publication. Just as important, however, is to provide feedback to the authors so that they may improve their work. Try to write your review in a way that the authors can benefit from your review. We suggest reading a paper and then thinking about it over the course of several days before you write your review. "Living" with a paper for a few days gives you time to make thoughtful decisions about it. This is the best way to come up with helpful suggestions for improving the paper. To do this, you need to carve out some time in your day to think about the paper that you are reviewing. The tone of your review is important. A harshly written review will be disregarded by the authors, regardless of whether your criticisms are true. If you take care, it is always possible to word your review diplomatically while staying true to your thoughts about the paper. Put yourself in the mindset of writing to someone you wish to help, such as a respected colleague who wants your opinion on a concept or a project. Here are some specific issues to keep in mind as you write your reviews:
- Short reviews are unhelpful to the authors and to other reviewers. If you have agreed to review a paper, you should take enough time to write a thoughtful and detailed review.
- Be specific when you suggest that the writing needs to be improved. If there is a particular section that is unclear, point it out and give suggestions for how it can be clarified.
- Don't give away your identity by asking the authors to cite several of your own papers.
- If you don't think the paper is right for the CVPR program, suggest other publication possibilities (journals, conferences, workshops) that would be a better match for the paper.
- Avoid referring to the authors by using the phrase "you" or "the authors." These phrases should be replaced by "the paper." Directly talking about the authors can be perceived as being confrontational, even though you do not mean it this way.
Be generous about giving the authors new ideas for how they can improve their work. Your suggestions may be very specific (for example, "this numerical solver would be better for your application") or may be more general in nature. You might suggest a new dataset that could be tried, or a new application area that might benefit from their tool. You may tell them how their idea can be generalized beyond what they have already considered. A thoughtful review not only benefits the authors, but may well benefit you, too. Remember that your reviews are read by other reviewers and especially the Area Chairs, in addition to the authors. Being a helpful reviewer will generate good will toward you in the research community.
As a reviewer for CVPR, you have the responsibility to protect the confidentiality of the ideas represented in the papers you review. CVPR submissions are not published documents. The work is considered new or proprietary by the authors; otherwise they would not have submitted it. Of course, their intent is to ultimately publish to the world, but most of the submitted papers will not appear in the CVPR proceedings. Thus, it is likely that the paper you have in your hands will be refined further and submitted to some other journal or conference, or even to CVPR next year. Sometimes the work is still considered confidential by the author's employers. These organizations do not consider sending a paper to CVPR for review to constitute a public disclosure. Protection of the ideas in the papers you receive means:
- Do not show the paper to anyone else, including colleagues or students, unless you have asked them to write a review, or to help with your review.
- Do not show any results or videos/images or any of the supplementary material to non-reviewers.
- Do not use ideas from papers you review to develop new ones.
- After the review process, destroy all copies of papers and videos that are not returned to the senior reviewer and erase any implementations you have written to evaluate the ideas in the papers, as well as any results of those implementations.
As a reviewer of a CVPR paper, you have a certain power over the reviewing process. It is important for you to avoid any conflict of interest. Even though you would, of course, act impartially on any paper, there should be absolutely no question about the impartiality of review. Thus, if you are assigned a paper where your review would create a possible conflict of interest, you should return the paper and not submit a review. Conflicts of interest include (but are not limited to) situations in which:
- You work at the same institution as one of the authors.
- You have been directly involved in the work and will be receiving credit in some way. If you're a member of the author's thesis committee, and the paper is about his or her thesis work, then you were involved.
- You suspect that others might see a conflict of interest in your involvement. For example, even though Microsoft Research in Seattle and Beijing are in some ways more distant than Berkeley and MIT, there is likely to be a perception that they are "both Microsoft," so folks from one should not review papers from the other.
- You have collaborated with one of the authors in the past three years (more or less). Collaboration is usually defined as having written a paper or grant proposal together, although you should use your judgment.
- You were the MS/PhD advisor of one of the authors or the MS/PhD advisee of one of the authors. Funding agencies typically consider advisees to represent a lifetime conflict of interest. CVPR has traditionally been more flexible than this, but you should think carefully before reviewing a paper you know to be written by a former advisee.
The blind reviewing process will help hide the authorship of many papers, and senior reviewers will try hard to avoid conflicts. But if you recognize the work or the author and feel it could present a conflict of interest, send the paper back to the Area Chair as soon as possible so he or she can find someone else to review it.
Belittling or sarcastic comments have no place in the reviewing process. The most valuable comments in a review are those that help the authors understand the shortcomings of their work and how they might improve it. Write a courteous, informative, incisive, and helpful review that you would be proud to add your name to (were it not anonymous).
Based on Specific Documents Created for SIGGRAPH 2008 by Greg Turk (used here with permission). UPDATED and Modified by Irfan Essa.
A few other sources of reviewer guidelines from ACM and IEEE were also considered.
We would like to thank you for agreeing to review for CVPR2013. Please read the following instructions about how to review papers using the CVPR2013 submission and reviewer system. In addition, please see the Reviewer Guidelines above and the FAQs below.
- The submission/review site is https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/CVPR2013/ (bookmark or save this URL!)
- Please make sure that your browser has cookies and Javascript enabled.
- Please add "cmt@microsoft.com" to your list of safe senders to prevent important email announcements from being blocked by spam filters.
- Do not create a new account! You will have the opportunity to change your contact email/account name after you log in using the email address we used to contact you.
In our invitation, we mentioned that we expect reviewers to work with area chairs to clear up confusions and reach consensus on papers. This new site has an electronic bulletin board feature that allows area chairs to contact reviewers anonymously. Once the area chair posts a note, reviewers will be notified and asked to log in to see the post and respond. The identities of the reviewers will be hidden from each other.
Once you've been notified that the papers have been assigned to you, please log in to the site and follow these steps:
- Click on "Paper Reviews and Discussions".
- In the "Paper Reviews and Discussions" page, click on "Download Assigned Papers". This allows you to download a zip file containing all the papers plus supplementary files (if available).
- Contact the Program Chairs immediately (cvpr...@gmail.com) if:
- You think you are in any way conflicted with the paper.
- There is a violation of the stated paper submission rules.
- Such a violation includes:
- Not anonymous (names listed on front page),
- Over 8 pages,
- Is double submission,
- Supplementary material includes newer version of the paper.
- Please specify the exact nature of the violation.
- For your reference, the paper submission guidelines can be found here.
- "Paper Summary" label: next to it, you'll see the icons "+" and "-". Clicking on "+" shows you all the abstracts; clicking on "-" collapses all them back.
- At the end of each paper title, you'll see "+" as well. This has the same function of showing the abstract for that paper, toggling to "-" at the same time, which collapses it when selected.
- Please take the time to familiarize yourself with the table entries; clicking on any of the column heading (e.g., "Paper ID" or "Rank") sorts according to its description.
- For a paper, under the review column, click "Add" (to the right of the "Review" line) to review. Please read instructions carefully. Please see the Reviewer Guidelines AND take each review seriously. Authors are counting on you for a fair and thorough review.
- Currently, CMT does not allow users to type certain characters into a text box that could be interpreted as html tags (for example, "y<x") or a malicious script. As a workaround, introducing spaces between these characters (for example, "y < x") will allow you to submit the text since this can no longer be interpreted as an html tag.
- If you save your review as a draft, it is visible only to you. You can access your draft review form by clicking on the same "Add" link. To make the review visible to the area chair, click on the "Submit" button in the review form. "Submit" won't work if any of the required items is not filled.
- You have two options to access the "Offline Reviewing" page: (1) In the "Paper Reviews and Discussions" page, click on "Review papers offline" link near the top of the page, or (2) In the "View/Edit Review" page, click on "offline reviewing" link.
- In the "Offline Reviewing" page, you can download one review template file for a single paper, several papers, or all the papers. We suggest that you download a review template file for each paper to avoid confusion.
- Please read instructions on how to modify the file to incorporate your responses. Note that you must not add certain characters in your responses that could be interpreted as html tags or a malicious script. See item 3 above.
- You can upload the completed file using the "Upload" interface at the bottom of the page. The new uploaded version will (destructively) overwrite the current review.
- We suggest that you try downloading a review template file for one paper, enter test responses, and upload to get a sense of how it works.
- You should always verify the review after uploading (by inspecting it online).
- We suggest that you use an XML editor to edit the file, for example: EditiX (Windows, Unix/Linux, Mac OS X) or XML Notepad 2007 (Windows only). (Remember to edit only fields currently filled with the phrase "REPLACE THIS WITH YOUR ANSWER".)
- Once you've reviewed the papers, you should rank them (the first being the best in your batch). In the "Detailed Reviews and Discussions" page, for each paper select "Edit Rank" (second column of the table). This will place all of the papers in the "Edit Ranks" section above.
- Now, use the "Move Up" and "Move Down" to adjust the ranks.
- Remember to click on the "Save Changes" button.
If you encounter any problems, please email the Program Chairs (cvpr...@gmail.com).
- What is the first thing I should do after the papers are assigned to me?
Go through the assigned papers quickly to check on two things. (1) Confirm that there is NO obvious CONFLICT of INTEREST with this paper, and (2) check if this paper is REALLY OUTSIDE your range of expertise (remember, we are matching to subject areas you told us about). In either case, please contact the Program Chairs (cvpr...@gmail.com) for reassignment.
- Is there another review form format available for easier editing?
No. The review format was designed to make parsing unambiguous. We recommend saving one file for each paper being reviewed. In the file, simply replace with "Response to comment question."
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