Confessions of a researchaholic

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.

I have already served on the SIGGRAPH 2023 technical papers program committee and just got asked to do that for SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 as well.
I have not yet decided (at this moment of writing) whether to turn down the latter or do both at the same year, but either will be the first time in my career, and I will feel bad about potentially disappointing the paper chairs or spending another month’s worth of evenings of reviewing papers.

So ACM is updating their authorship policy in response to generative AI tools.
You can find more about that in this survey.

I do wonder, though, what if a paper is written entirely by AI without any humans involved?

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

The shorter papers in the conference track submissions took me less time to read, but not as much as the page numbers would suggest; many papers were either harder to read due to condensed texts or would require extra time to go over the supplementary materials.

The virtual meetings (started during the covid pandemic) are more efficient in terms of travels and moving people in and out of the conflict and break-out rooms, while the physical meetings are more fun (e.g., the snacks and food) and sociable (reading people’s facial expressions and body languages while discussing papers, and chatting about research and life in general).

After serving on the SIGGRAPH/SIGGRAPH-Asia PC a few times, I felt that it is more suitable for either beginning folks who have a lot of energy (e.g., can read 3 papers in one night without getting tired) or retired folks who have a lot of time (e.g., have time to read 3 papers in one afternoon without many work/family duties) than folks in the middle (like me) who are not as energic as they used to be and yet have more work/family commitments.

Both of my managers also happened to be on the committee, so they will understand why I haven’t spent as much time on products as I am supposed to.

As (half) joked in this FB comment today, I can totally imagine someone (like Victor Ostromoukhov or Abdalla G. M. Ahmed) building a sample set upon this recently discovered aperiodic monotile for an upcoming SIGGRAPH paper.
(I know how to do that already, and thus not planning to do it myself.)