RESPONSIBILITIES of PROGRAM COMMITTEE MEMBERS and PAPER REVIEW POLICY:

Solicit high-quality technical papers from colleagues, and distribute paper and electronic conference announcements at your local site. Program committee members are encouraged to submit papers; submissions from PC members will be evaluated according to the same high standards used to evaluate all other submissions. The Program Chairs will not submit papers.

Read abstracts of technical papers submitted to the workshop, and bid on the abstracts, indicating papers you would like to review and papers on which you have a conflict of interest (see below for definition of COI). Carry out this COI declaration and bidding process until the submission deadline (June 3, 2006). Afterwards you'll get the leftover papers.

Review the technical papers that are assigned to you by the reviewing deadline, using a Web-based system. The program committee contains 36 members, and assuming an upper limit of 150 paper submissions (this corresponds to the anticipated number of abstracts, not all might end up sending a paper), you would be asked to review no more than 10 to 13 papers. The firm deadline for submitting reviews to the Web-based reviewing system is June 30, 2006, we have then just one week to do the decision process, so please consider this deadline really as firm and ask subreviews for an earlier date. Note that you are responsible for being familiar with the papers assigned to you and represent them at the electronic discussions even if you delegate reviewing to students or colleagues.

Attend the electronic program committee discussions to be held from June 30 to July 7, 2006 and discuss papers that you have reviewed. Since committee members are in different time zones, it is not practical to have all committee members online at the same time. However, it is important that you respond to discussion on the papers you have reviewed promptly.

Strictly abide by the rules on conflicts of interest. You are considered to have a conflict of interest on a paper that has an author or co-author in any of the following categories:

  • yourself,
  • your past and current graduate students (for at least 10 years after that, it's up to you to decide conflict of interest or not),
  • your graduate advisors,
  • members of your research group within the last 5 years,
  • a co-author of a paper submitted for publication within the last 5 years,
  • an employee of your immediate organization (academic department, research lab unit, etc.) within the last 5 years,
  • someone with whom you have had a significant funding or financial relationship, such as common projects, within the last 5 years, or
  • a member of your family or anyone you consider a close personal friend.

    You will not be allowed to see the reviews of papers on which you have conflicts, and at the program committee meeting you will not be given access to discussion of such papers. The Program Chairs will be able to view all reviews for all papers, but they will assign an alternate chair for any papers on which they have a conflict; for those papers, the alternate chair will select the reviewers and will chair the discussion at the program committee meeting.