Confessions of a researchaholic

Not having to observe Western holidays is your competitive advantage. Don’t squander it.

I think the basic points are the same as with any rebuttal. The main difference between CHI/UIST and most other venues (e.g. SIGGRAPH) is the addition of meta reviews which might provide helpful summaries for rebuttal.

More tips can be found via twitter, such as this and that.

While focusing on rushing a project it can be difficult to stop and think about the overall picture, but without that you could end up wasting a lot of time in the wrong stuff.

Spend a few minutes writing down the plan, rationale, and whatever thoughts you have at the beginning of each day before the crunch begins. This little initial investment can greatly enhance the eventual efficiency and happiness.

If you are my collaborator I can vet your sanity through your write ups. I am not looking for a PhD thesis; just a few sentences will be enough.

Schedule

My PhD adviser once told me that the most difficult part for graduation is scheduling the oral defense.

I thought he was joking, but realized he really meant it after doing it myself. It is basically a NP-hard, if not non-computable, problem.

I consider this as part of the ritual for graduation, so I will let the candidate schedule his/her own oral defense. People who cannot even get this done do not deserve to graduate.

Format

I never understand the rationale for hundreds-page thesis or hours-long oral defenses (PhD or other research degrees); it is probably residue from some ancient practices. But I think it is a big waste of time to write or read (or print, for heaven’s sake).

Here is my proposed thesis format:
Part 1: a concise summary of what the thesis is about, and why people should care about it.
Part 2: simply staple (via Latex, not physical papers) the relevant publications together to explain how it is done.

And here is the corresponding format for oral defense:
Part 1: a (sub) 5 minute elevator pitch telling people what the thesis is about and why they should care about it. There is a short break after this stage. The candidate fails if (s)he cannot convince the audience why they should continue to listen.
Part 2: a (sub) 25 minute presentation of more details, which can simply be a re-compilation of past conference talks. What follows is a usual break for committee discussion.

If the candidate does not have solid publications, (s)he should not be able to graduate.
If (s)he does, it should probably take at most a day to prepare the thesis and oral defense, on top of the existing materials.
The committee members can just spend as much time reading the published conference/journal papers instead of bloated mumbo jumbo in hundreds of pages.

If the candidate knows what (s)he has been doing, (s)he should be able to articulate a clear elevator pitch.
Otherwise, (s)he does not, and probably should come back to think and work more.
The committee members can quick see the quality of the research work instead of having to sit through hours-long slug about some technical details.

I plan to implement these for my internal students. And please, just send me the pdf file of your thesis. Spare the trees.

Most paper committees I have served have purely electronic review processes. These are relatively easy. Those with in-person meetings (e.g. SIGGRAPH) are more challenging as they involve live human interactions in real-time.
Below are some of my personal experiences to make the process more fun and effective.

Emotion

The most important and yet difficult task is to remain neutral, no matter what happens. It could be quite some experience to see your paper getting rejected and immediately you have to discuss a paper you reviewed.

I have a very simple strategy that works superbly well for me so far: I just assume all my papers are (or will be) rejected, even if they have very high ratings. (Anything could happen, and has happened before.) By assuming the worst case scenario, I can never be disappointed. I also do my best NOT to track my papers; I did not even look at the status on the spreadsheet when I am outside the room. Then it is easier for me to remain cool.

It also helps if you naturally care less.
One possibility is to not have any submission, but this is not common for people who are still productive.
Another possibility is to have enough prior papers so that you care less.
The paper chairs like to recruit more senior people not only for experiences but also for this “care less” factor.

Other things being equal, it is usually better to be positive than negative. My rule of thumb is to accept if unsure. This is better for humanity; a good paper wrongly rejected will not be read by anyone, while a bad paper wrongly accepted will likely be ignored by future research anyway. This is also better for myself; I do not want to leave a reputation for being a paper killer.

Workload

It is a lot of work to review 20-something papers. You will look bad if you do not seem to know what each paper is about, especially during the plenary sessions or breakout discussions. So make sure you put in enough efforts.

I also keep enough dark chocolate around to maintain my brain function at the end of the (long) day. (OK this is probably some lame excuses; I overdose cocoa no matter what.)

I am probably lucky (or maybe I am good at requesting papers; dunno yet) in that I usually get good assignments (high quality submission fitting my interests and expertise well), so I usually know each paper well. For those few that are outside my expertise, I just admit it to other committee members and reviewers. Nobody knows everything, so honesty is often the best policy.
Plus, I guess many of you have seen reviewers who clearly have no idea what the f*** they are talking about, so try not to be such jerks.

Participation

For those of you who think the committee members have some edges in getting their papers in, you might be disappointed; as far as I can tell, no such advantages exist, and the system has been well designed so that it is very difficult to game.

However, the committee members do have advantages in organizing the paper sessions, which is also the most fun part of the committee service in my opinion. You can influence where and when papers (including yours) go and which sessions you chair. People who do not show up might find papers (they authored or reviewed) going to a strangely titled session with a motley collection of seemingly unrelated papers, or find themselves chairing sessions that are too early for many people to wake up or too late in the last day for many people to remain behind.