Two phases
You may be asked to review papers in either of our two phases (see
Key Dates on the conference website). The
review criteria in the two phases are the same. We would
appreciate your suggestions for additional reviewers in both phases,
either specific reviewers or general areas of expertise. (Of course,
to suggest a specific reviewer, you should respect blind review, and
put the suggestion in the “private comments to program
committee” box.) The total number of papers you are asked to
review across both phases will respect the limit we communicated to
you during reviewer recruiting.
Review criteria
We are looking for creative, well-executed solutions to interesting
problems throughout AI and statistics. Both incremental contributions
and attempts at entirely new strategies for solving problems are
welcome. But, the review process is known to favor incremental
contributions over entirely new strategies, perhaps to an unfair
degree; so, we ask reviewers to be aware of this effect, and to
attempt to counter it in their own reviews.
In particular, we expect that there may be a tradeoff between
“creativity” and “thoroughness”: creativity is
the degree to which a paper represents a novel way of setting up a
problem or an unusual approach to solving it, while thoroughness is
the degree to which a paper supports its conclusions with extensive
experimental or theoretical results. We are asking reviewers to rate
both qualities separately, and to take into account this tradeoff when
synthesizing their reviews into overall scores.
Simultaneous submissions
See the
CFP for rules on
simultaneous submissions. Briefly, other archival conferences are
forbidden; tech reports and workshops without formal proceedings are
OK, and journals are OK as long as their publication date is 2011 or
later. If you suspect plagiarism or double submission, please let us
know; the senior program committee will investigate, since they are
allowed to know author names and can therefore evaluate the case
better. Do not assume something is wrong: the authors may have
notified the SPC of extenuating circumstances, and we have withheld
such notifications from reviewers to allow double-blind reviewing.
Double-blind reviewing
See the
submission page for the instructions
we gave to authors. Please don't try to unblind a submission; but if
you figure out the authors accidentally, or believe you may have
figured out the authors, please let us know in the confidential
program committee comments section of the review. If you believe that
an accidental unblinding affects your ability to give a fair and
unbiased review, please let us know as soon as possible, so that we
can reassign the paper.
Supplementary material
For text supplementary material such as additional proofs, we've
encouraged authors to include it at the end of the paper file. For
text or other supplementary material, authors may also have provided a
separate file. In either case you are not obliged to consult the
supplementary material, but may do so if you believe it will help your
review.
Expertise
All papers should be accessible to the general AISTATS audience. We
would like your review even if there are parts of the paper where you
feel you do not have the highest possible degree of expertise. Since
we will often assign additional reviewers, we would appreciate your
feedback about which areas of expertise would be helpful in reviewing
the paper.