I do not think that there should be reservations for women in TPCs and
editorial boards. Such reservations, I expect, will not alter the
quality of reviews, and, on the other hand, will project a sexist
image of our research community.
Best
Saswati
--
Saswati Sarkar
Associate Professor
Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering
University of Pennsylvania
Email: swati@seas.upenn.edu
Phone: 2155739071
Fax: 2155732068
Webpage: http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~swati
Mail: 354 Moore,
200 S. 33rd street
Philadelphia, PA 19107
USA
Quoting "Manoj B. S." <bsmanoj@gmail.com>:
> Joe:
>
> Good summary, Joe. I just want to put a couple more points to the TCCC
> discussion table:
>
> 1. Improving the quality of papers.
> 2. GOLD and WOMEN reservations to the TPCs and Editorial boards.
> 3. Division of ComSoc to handle the growth of the networking area.
> (For example, ComSoc-Wireless, ComSoc-Optical, etc)
>
> Let us hear from members to see if these are relevant. We can discard
> them if they don't improve the current state.
>
> See the detailed discussion below.
>
> The very issue of quality of papers and the contribution of IEEE
> conferences in the degradation of quality came under discussion in
> 2007 in TCCC mailing list. It is good to see that again, thanks to
> Tony, because that issue is very challenging and complex to find an
> easy solution. Ideally, there is no single answer to the quality
> issue. Many factors contribute to the poor quality that we observe
> today. Some of which I think of importance are below:
>
> 1. Large volume of submissions: This issue is beyond anyone's control.
> Internet has grown, so are the number of people doing research on
> networking. Naturally, the number of submissions will be huge. Many of
> the traditionally non-research universities around the world are now
> doing wonderful research in this area. That is not under IEEE's
> control. Actually IEEE encourages and works hard for that! In fact, in
> 2007 discussions, Nitin used the term "Democratization of Research" to
> describe this effect. Since we cannot control that, we have to learn
> to live with it. We could, however, try to scale up IEEE or ComSoc to
> handle such huge growth. IEEE conferences and strategies need radical
> solutions to take the fast growing opportunities. Any potential
> solutions are welcome on this topic. Point (3) down this email will
> discuss about scaling ComSoc towards this.
>
> 2. Review process: This is where IEEE can contribute better for
> improving the quality of publications. The current review process need
> more scrutiny. Again, this topic came up in 2007 and subsequent
> changes in the organization of Infocom resulted in the formation of
> Infocom Miniconferences. However, the complexity and scalability of
> review process, in general, are still relevant in both conferences as
> well as journals as rightly pointed to by Tony. That means, we need
> more reviewers and better (faster) process to ensure quality. Unlike
> in the past, quality and punctuality of reviewers have degraded as
> well. We are collectively responsible for that. In the past, there
> were only 100 nodes in the Internet, half a dozen networking
> conferences, and a few dozen researchers in the networking area. So,
> maintaining quality was easy and straight forward. Today, Internet
> became the lifeline of the world with millions of nodes and and
> unknown number of researchers work for improving it. I think we are
> mistaken if we think or even compare today's research with networking
> research in the 90s. And more importantly, many of us drop jaws when
> we come to know new areas of research emerging in networking.
>
> My point is that we need radical changes in the review process. Some
> ideas are the following:
>
> (i) Group reviews: This can be considered where a collection of
> papers will be reviewed by a collection of people and discuss among
> them before recommending a set of papers. That is a paper assigned to
> a group led by a Professor/Engineer will be read collectively by a
> group of junior researchers/students and discuss among themselves
> before suggesting a decision.
>
> (ii) Assigning a Spectrum of reviewers: Every paper must be reviewed
> by a spectrum, interms of experience, of people that includes a senior
> professor level individual, an associate/assistant professor level
> individual, a Post doc/Recent graduate level individual, and probably
> a current student. Each individual will review it based on his/her
> level or expertise and such a wide spectrum of feedback can enrich the
> resulting reviews. Such a spectrum (experience-wise) can give a
> collection of different feedback which will eventually help improve
> the quality of published papers. A young researcher may not catch a
> research idea that appeared thirty years ago that a senior professor
> may easily recognize. On the other hand, a senior professor with lot
> of administrative load may not know (no offense intended) certain
> recent papers published where the younger researchers can better help
> with. To be more clear, the paper assignment must have a set of
> reviewers spanning the experience-spectrum. Tools such as EDAS can
> help lessen the burden of TPC chairs/Editorial boards to assign the
> papers to such a wide spectrum of reviewers in an automated and
> resource efficient manner.
>
> (iii) Increasing the number of reviews per paper: To help quality of
> papers, we can increase the number of reviewers per paper instead of
> the current average that stands between 2 and 3 reviews per paper. One
> popular counterargument against this strategy is the limited pool of
> available reviewers. That is where we significantly lack ideas. My
> estimate is that the large set of potential reviewers out there are
> never invited to review any papers, either as part of TPCs or as part
> of editorial boards. That is mainly because the TPC selection model is
> very OLD and is typically based on personal familiarity of the TPC
> chair or TPC chair's friends. This strategy worked well in the 80s and
> 90s where there were only a hundred researchers in the entire
> networking area. However, this strategy is failing the entire
> networking research area. It has the main disadvantage of "Rich (in
> terms of invitations) gets richer and poor becomes poorer." To be
> precise, an existing TPC member gets several more invitations and
> thereby being super busy (and sometimes inefficient) for providing a
> quality review besides taking significant amount of effort from
> his/her time for creative research. On the other hand, the vast
> majority of Graduates of the Last Decade (GOLD) is never invited to be
> in any of the TPCs or Editorial boards. Much worse is the case of
> Women representation. I had spoken to many women professors (mostly
> GOLD) in the Public University System in the US and many complained
> that they have never been invited to be on any TPC or Editorial board.
> Further, in the past, the three reviewers per paper had plenty of time
> to give a scrutiny of the paper under review. Today, the three
> reviewers are too tightly scheduled to read through the paper a second
> time.
>
>
> We clearly need a larger review force for the next decade of
> networking research. In order to solve this problem, let me suggest a
> 20:20 solution. We MUST have atleast 20% of GOLD or Half-GOLD
> (Graduates of the Last Half Decade) members in every ComSoc TPC and
> every Journal editorial board and collectively there should be atleast
> 20% (or if not possible even 10%) women representation. Sometimes we
> will have difficulty in getting absolute numbers in the next few
> years, however, we MUST make an serious effort in developing future
> review force. I am not sure where the current percentages stand. Let
> every one of us know if any one of us have information on these.
>
> That is where EDAS can help. If, as a TPC member/chair, one decides to
> suggest say 20% Women, GOLD, or Half-GOLD members, then EDAS could
> suggest potential members matching that class. Ten years down the
> line, we will have enough people so that we can have close to SIX
> REVIEWS PER PAPER which I believe can help SIGNIFICANTLY improve the
> quality of presentations of future research literature.
>
> 3) Scaling up ComSoc: Given the huge volume of submissions in
> networking research, we have to look for ways that can scale up
> ComSoc. Computer communication has grown significantly in many
> directions and therefore, we need to make ComSoc fit for handling the
> growth. The main question now is DO WE NEED DIVISION OF COMSOC to
> multiple smaller focus groups to meet the scalability challenge. For
> example should we need ComSoc-Wireless, ComSoc-Optical, ComSoc-P2P, or
> similar focus groups to handle the large growth of each of the areas
> within the communication society. This way, we can keep the costs down
> for ComSoc and better reorganize along the side of ACM SIGs. It might
> help as well.
>
>
> Comments are welcome.
>
> Thanks
>
> Sincerely
>
> bsmanoj
>
> On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Joe Touch <touch@isi.edu> wrote:
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>> Hash: SHA1
>>
>> Hi, all,
>>
>> The following is an attempt to distill the recent threads on conference
>> concerns down to short list of focus points. Please respond either
>> on-list or to me directly if I have missed anything or if you feel this
>> summary should be revised:
>>
>> 1- reducing non-author presenters
>> ACTION: it seems like the most direct solution would be to
>> change the Comsoc requirements for a "full-time registration per
>> paper" to state that this must be a named author, and to
>> allow the existing rules for exceptions (at the
>> discretion of the chairs) to address unusual cases.
>>
>> 2- support for resource-challenged authors
>> ACTION: TCCC should identify resources for such authors
>> to be able to attend meetings in person, or to present
>> at meetings where attendance isn't possible.
>>
>> 3- meeting costs
>> - cost trends
>> - costs associated with executive committee members
>> - costs associated with other free registrations
>> - other ways to reduce costs
>> - university locations
>> - LEAN meetings (bag lunches, etc.)
>> - pointers to conference planning information where
>> available
>>
>> ACTION: TCCC will collect the relevant information and
>> report back.
>>
>> I'd like to deal with these three issues separately. All information
>> will be posted on the TCCC website for future reference and
>> augmentation, in addition to being posted to the list.
>>
>> Other issues raised:
>>
>> - - ways to increase meeting attendance on the last day
>>
>> - - ways to reward good presenters
>>
>> These are useful to discuss on the list, but in most cases they fall
>> under the discretion of the program chair. Discussing them as a
>> community is useful, but I didn't see a need for a TCCC position on
>> these (nor did I see a particular consensus forming).
>>
>> Joe
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> B. S. Manoj, Ph.D
> Electrical and Computer Engineering
> University of California San Diego,
> CA 92093-0436, USA
> Ph:+1-858-822-2564 (office)
> +1-858-429-8804 (mobile)
> Fax:+1-858-822-4633
>
> http://calsysnet.calit2.net/
>
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