Confessions of a researchaholic

Some random thoughts after just finished the SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 paper committee meetings:

I am thrilled to see several of my previous students (or “shadow advisees” to be precise) in the committee.
I hope this has been a good experience for them, even though probably not as good as in-person meetings where they can socialize with other committee members.
(Not as an excuse for shirking review duties, but I also wonder if this is a sign that I can fade away from these committee services soon.)

The meeting time is not ideal for people in Asia, and several of them were not able to present their papers.
I wonder if PC members’ time zones can be an additional variable to optimize for the HepCat paper queues for future virtual PC meetings.

Like hybrid work, I wonder if we can have hybrid PC meetings in the future, where some PC members can meet in person while others can join remotely depending on their preferences and budget supports from ACM/grants/institutions.

Given the increasingly large number of submissions, I wonder if at some point everyone in the graphics community will serve in the PC.

From a podcast I bumped into this paper about the economics job market rumors (EJMR) forum, which is a place for anonymous discussions about the job market for economists.
I was initially interested in the methodology (in particular reverse hashing) and results in the paper, but then I found the EJMR site itself to be even more fascinating as it sheds more light on human nature than economics (which is already a relatively “well to do” branch of social/political science).

After serving as an associate editor (AE) for a few journals (e.g., ToG, CGF, TVCG) and paper committee members for a few conferences/journals (e.g., SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, Eurographics), here is my personal take on the similarities and differences between the two roles.

Similarities: a main (and probably the most important) task for both is to recruit and manage reviewers.

Differences: an AE does not have to read the papers (even though I read every single one so far just to make sure my final recommendation is sound) and can decide the final recommendation without consulting other AEs, while a paper committee member has to read all the papers and present the recommendations in a committee meeting before the final decisions can be made.

It turns out that I only need to review one paper as a committee member for a top venue thanks to “the large number of IPC members”. (Cannot go any lower unless we want to list someone who does not review any paper as a PC member.)

Expanding the committee to include more members can lighten the individual workloads, but also reduce the visibility of each PC member for calibration purposes.
I wonder what the sweet spot would be as a function of the number of submissions and the number of PC members.
1 is definitely slow while 20 is high (based on my recent SIGGRAPH/SIGGRAPH-Asia PC experiences), while 4 to 8 feels about right to me.