You have a strong influence on a decision on a paper. Take it seriously and be fair.

DO NOT talk to any other AC about papers assigned to you until you are told about who is on your panel and who is your buddy. There may be several other ACs conflicted with the paper for which you are the Area Chair. We will provide details on how to do this as we get closer to the AC meeting.   

The Program Co-Chairs did not submit any papers, so they are not in direct conflict with any papers and they know all authors of all papers and also all reviewers/ACs. They will NOT be involved with any decisions of papers from institutions with which they are in conflict. You can send them a question about any paper and if one of them is conflicted, another one will respond to you without including the conflicted PC Chair.

DO NOT talk to any other AC about your own paper (the paper you are an author on) or a paper you have some conflict with, during this whole process, unless that AC and you are already collaborators and both of you have an already defined conflict. Do not lobby for your paper, hand out copies to other ACs and/or show results or discuss your paper during the review process.

Be professional and willing to listen to other reviewers and ACs. Do not give in to undue influence from anyone.

Do remember, it is not fair to dismiss any review without looking at other reviews and reading the paper yourself to make an evaluation. Outright rejecting a review is not acceptable without a clearly articulated supporting argument. Area chairs who wish to make a decision that is not clearly supported by the reviews will have to present the paper to their panel at the area chairs meeting for discussion and confirmation of the decision; any such decisions that do not have the consensus support of the panel will be later reviewed by the program chairs who will make the final decision.

Senior members of the committee should guide and advise the younger and first-time members. First-time members, please feel free to ask for help as needed.

You have been chosen as an Area Chair because of your specific expertise in certain areas of Vision and also your general expertise in Computer Vision. When you look at a paper, you may just come up with a name or three of ideal reviewers. Consider these people as the reviewers for this, but do also consider things like, (a) are they current in the field and (b) will they do a good job in a timely manner.

Look at the paper, especially the Introduction, Related Work, and Citations at the end. See who they refer to and whose work they are building on. Often the cited people would be ideal reviewers.

Do remember that the system will give you some recommendations, based on simple heuristics by matching subject areas. This will provide a good starting point, but will not be perfect as some folks are not that good at choosing keywords (authors and reviewers).

Usually, we suggest that you choose a reviewer you know and trust. But the vision community is large (how else would we get 1450+ submissions). If the system recommends someone you do not know, look for their webpage or look for their papers on on ACM or IEEE digital libraries or Google Scholar and the like.

Again, spend good time doing this.

In "Area Chair" console, select "Consolidation Reports".

You should be able to see all the reviewers' names and the review status right next to each. For this incarnation of CMT, we just highlight cases where reviews have not been submitted (in red).

For each paper, you can:

* View all the reviews ("View All").

* Grade the reviews ("Rate Reviewers").

* Email the reviewers anonymously via CMT ("Email Reviewers"). You can select all the assigned reviewers for that paper (default), or just those not done with reviewing, or specific reviewer(s). For the last item, you will be able to edit the recipient list. Remember: Don't identify yourself or the other reviewers in the email!

You can also choose to bulk email all reviewers or all reviewers who have not completed their reviews (for all the papers in your stack). See below the title "Consolidation Reports" ("Email Reviewer"). Mouse over the "Email Reviewer" box and you will see the two options (mentioned earlier) from which to choose.

You can view all reviews for all papers in a single webpage. Just select "View All Reviews" in the line right below the title "Consolidation Reports".

Important note on emailing via CMT: Since any email sent on your behalf is anonymously sent through CMT, the communication is one way only. Please tell your email recipients to not respond to the email, because there is no automatic routing of email to you; responses go directly to the CMT admin people. The CMT folks are handling a number of conferences at any given time and will not have the resources to forward such emails. So, be very specific about what you would like the reviewer(s) to do.

It is the area chair's responsibility to contact and urge the reviewers to finish in a timely manner.

You must do the following steps to enable the reviewers to participate in the discussion. Emailing the reviewers via CMT is NOT the right step to initiate the discussion.

To initiate a discussion for a specific paper, first enable the discussion and then select "View/Post Message" under the "Discussion" column for that paper.

In the "Paper Discussion" page, click on "Start A New Topic" to initiate the discussion (unless a reviewer took the initiative of starting one, in which case you reply; see next bullet item). We suggest that your first post starts with a very brief summary of the reviews, a request for them to look at the other reviews for details, followed by specific things you want the reviewers to address.

Once a discussion has been initiated, click on "Reply" on the far right to continue posting on the same discussion thread.

Please sign your posts as "Area Chair", and identify the reviewers by the review number.Never identify yourself or other reviewers by name.

Anytime a post is made (either by the area chair or a reviewer), the area chair and reviewers will receive an email notification from CMT with the subject that looks like "CVPR2012: New reviewer discussion posted for Paper ID XXX". There is a link in the email you can use to join the discussion (after logging in, you will be routed directly to the discussion page). Alternatively, you can just log in to CMT as usual.

After you've posted, DO NOT REFRESH PAGE (e.g., by hitting F5)! This will generate another post with the exact same message!

In the discussion, you (as AC) can see the identities of the posters. However, each reviewer will NOT know the identities of the other posters.

Once the author rebuttal period is over, you and the reviewers will be able to see the author rebuttal (but not before). We will be enabling discussions for a week past the rebuttal deadline, just in case reviewers have any reactions to the author rebuttals.

Because of the frank nature of the discussions, the authors will not see them at any time. The consolidation reports will be visible to authors only after the AC meeting, when decisions are made known.

Reviewer instructions for the discussion feature are given here. Note that reviewers can revise their reviews until the review deadline.

"Highly Relevant": Reviewer is on the ball on practically everything. The score is well justified, references are given to support claims that references are deficient and/or work is not original, and the reviewer appears very knowledgeable on the topic. You feel you can totally rely on this assessment.

"Sufficient": The review quality is mixed, but overall reliable. There are parts of the review that appear perfectly reasonable, but there are other parts that seem a bit deficient in some ways. You feel you are satisfied with the review and the reviewer has given you an evaluation you can use to make judgement on the paper.

"Below Average": Reviewer does not justify scores well, makes overly general unhelpful statements, states incorrect or misleading claims, provides very terse or irrelevant remarks, or appears to be overly biased. Basically, you feel you can ignore most of this review.

I recognize a piece of work (ie I know the authors) should I recuse myself from the paper? They are not collaborators and I have no financial ties or other connections with them. My feeling is that I can be impartial and handle the review but it is your call.

If you think you can do the review impartially and fairly, and there is no direct conflict, we think you should review this paper, as we feel you are best qualified for it. Thanks for letting us know.

I have been assigned a paper that might be pretty close to things I am working on at present (I don't know for sure since I didn't want to look at the full paper). I would like to decline handling that paper, if possible, on grounds of potential conflict of interest.

Thanks for letting us know. Yes, this does qualify as a conflict of interest so we will assign to some other Area Chair.

I see a paper that I know is authored by a recent collaborator of mine (collaborated in last 3 years). I am reasonably confident I can still render a fair and an impartial review. But wanted to let you know.

This appears to be a conflict. While we do trust you to be fair and impartial, it is best to have someone else take over this paper. Thanks for letting us know. We will swap it.

I have a paper assigned to me that appears to be very similar to one that I have just co-authored for CVPR 2010. I can be still objective in review of this paper, irrespective of my submission.

Thanks for telling us. We feel you are the expert in the area and trust you will do a good job. If you feel you cannot, then we will re-assign to another area chair.

What should I do with a paper with the names of the authors explicitly mentioned?

Papers with authors names explicitly violate the anonymity requirement of CVPR and will be rejected. Let the Program Chairs know the paper id. Thanks.

What should I do with a paper that did not exactly follow the required format?

If the paper is still 2 column style CVPR format (missing the line numbers, paper id on every page, etc.) and not longer then 8 pages (font not too small, margins ok, etc.), then it is fine to assign reviewers to (We don't want to be too rigid).

What about papers that over 8 pages long?

Overall, our hard-line policy is (as the authors were warned!) that the paper will be rejected. If you see a paper with just a citation or 1-2 lines on page 9, then we are letting it go. But if the paper is grossly over onto page 9, then it is a "administrative" reject.

Is there a race to assign reviewers? If I do not assign reviewers by Dec 4, will I lose all the good reviewers for papers assigned to me?

No, there is NO race. You are choosing (recommending) 5+ reviewers for each paper and on Dec 14, we will optimize the assignments based on (a) reviewer load, (b) your choice/rank of a reviewer, and (c) subject area match to reviewer. We hope this way, good reviewers per your choice will be assigned the paper for which you are an AC. However, we do not want to see all of you waiting until Dec 8 and after to assign papers.

I have scanned a paper and it seems very weak and will be rejected, what should I do?

Unfortunately, if the paper has been submitted and does not meet a direct criteria for an administrative reject (non-anonymous, too long, dual-submission, etc.) then the paper has to be reviewed. Give the paper a fair chance and have it reviewed. We agree that sometimes this is a waste of reviewing resources, but we feel the authors deserve the best from us.

When should I decide to assign a new reviewer that is not in the database of reviewers?

After you scan a paper to see what is the content, some obvious names of reviewers will come to your mind. Look for them in the reviewer lists. All reviewers should be visible to you (there are over 700 of them, so it is a bit slow). They are sorted by "subject area relevance" (matching their chosen subject areas to authors' subject areas for their paper). If you do not see the person you wish to review the paper, then consider adding them as an additional reviewer. Consider however that (a) this person may already have been asked to review for CVPR12 and may have declined and (b) this person may not have the time to review this time. So DO NOT assume that the new reviewer will agree to do this review. Add an extra reviewer as a back-up for this one.

When and where is the Area Chairs' Meeting?

AC Meeting will be held on Feb 25-26. All AC are expected to arrive on Feb 24 (Fri), 2012, and be there until the session ends on the evening of Feb 26 (Sun), which will then be followed by a dinner.  All ACs are invited to stay an extra day, Feb 27 (Mon), 2012 to participate in an informal workshop on computer vision and related topics.

When should we make reservations for the AC meeting?

Soon you will be getting instructions from us about how to plan for your travel and how you will be reimbursed.