Reviewers often do not completely agree on a submission, so a careful evaluation of the merits and deficiencies of a paper need to be summarized in the review. If you like the paper immensely, do not assume other reviewers will feel the same way. Describe in detail what you think is important about it and how it will contribute to theory or practice. If you are sure the paper should be rejected, you should explain why, politely , but in detail, because other reviewers may recommend acceptance. Even if the paper is not accepted, the work may be published elsewhere, and the authors will still benefit from your constructive suggestions.
The tone of your review is important. When you write an anonymous review, you are acting as a representative of our field. It is always possible to be constructive.
Papers submitted to Sensys 2006 are expected to be original, innovative works. Papers should be no longer than 14 pages, formatted in ready-to-publish format (single spacing, two column, 10 point type). Please see the call for paper for the topic areas we are looking for, and the author sumission guidelines for the particulars about submissions.
The review process consists of three steps.
You should read the paper and enter your review information. You can continue to return and edit your review information until the end of the review period, as long as you have not "finalized" it.
When you are done with your review "finalize" it using the first menu selection, labeled "Are you done with your review".
During program committee meeting, PC members will use all the review information and the information provided by the author to select papers for the conference.
When you review a paper, there are several things you need to tell us. This list follows the list of questions on the review form. When you change an entry on the form, you need to click the button labeled "Submit your paper review". If you leave the page without clicking that button, your review entry will not be stored.
Are you finished with this review?
Once you "finalize" this review, you can not modify it any further. Be
careful with this option.
Provide a short summary of the paper
You should briefly summarize the paper.
This summary helps the authors and PC understand what the high-order
information you took away from the paper was.
(If there's disagreement here, that's trouble :-)
Strength of Paper
Summarize in 1 to 3 sentences the strengths of the paper. You
should be able to find at least some strength (positive point) in every
paper.
Weakness of Paper
Summarize in 1 to 3 sentences the main weakness of the paper.
(Your overall rating will suggest whether strenghths or weaknesses are most important.)
Your qualifications to review this paper
Different reviewers have different backgrounds;
sometimes we all review papers that are further from our area.
Please indicate how familiar you are with the research area
so the program committee can understand where you're coming from.
Writing
Is the paper readable? If there are "show stopper" issues, you should
inform the program committee.
Relevance to Sensys
Do you think the paper would engender a lot of discussion? Do you think
the average attendee would attend the paper presentation?
Experimental Methodology
Was the experimental method reasonable? Good benchmarks? Good assumptions?
Novelty of paper
This conference focuses on novel work; it's acceptable that a novel idea
have slightly less stringent evaluation than an incremental improvement, so we
need to know how novel the work is. If you think the paper is not
novel, you should clearly state why and indicate related prior work in your
comments to the author or program committee.
Overall paper merit
This is the single most important decision concerning the paper - do you
think it should be accepted to the conference? If you think the paper should
be a short paper, you must indicate that it would be an
acceptable short paper and you should leave a comment to the program committee
to that effect.
For borderline and middle-of-the road papers, you may wish to indicate in your comments to the authors or PC if you consider the paper boringly correct or interesting but flawed.
Additional detailed comments to the author
This is the single most important response you can provide to the author.
One of the critical roles of a review process is to help authors understand
any problems with their work so they can improve it. Please spend the time to
indicate to the author and program committee why you've
rated the paper the way you did.
Sensys targets very high quality papers, and in return we expect to provide the authors with high quality reviews. All reviews merit feedback about what you found, particularly negative or middle-of-the road reviews. Please support comments with constructive suggestions about how the paper can be fixed for future conferences and that support your statements. For example, don't just say "you miss lots of related work", but "you miss lots of related work, such as the existing of the web (see Berners-Lee's August 1994 article in CACM)".
Additional comments to the program
committee
There may be reasons that influence your rating of the paper that would
reveal your identity, or that you would only like made available to the
program committee. Please elaborate if there are any such issues; these
comments will be held in confidence.
If you can, please give all comments to the authors--even serious things like missing related work, serious methodological problems, or extreme similarity to related work can often be mentioned there. However, any ethical concerns (for example, plagiarism) deserve a note to the PC, or very strong comments may best be said politely to the authors and more strongly to the PC.