Thank you for agreeing to review for ICCV 2015. To maintain a high-quality technical program, we rely very much on the time and expertise of our reviewers. This document explains what is expected of all members of the Reviewing Committee for ICCV 2015.

Please read the following submission instructions carefully, as some steps are new (e.g., you will be allowed to bid for the papers you wish to review) or have changed (e.g., authors will be allowed to submit a new pdf containing a minor revision of their paper at rebuttal time) for ICCV 2015. They are highlighted in red.

0. Update your reviewing information

   The following provides further details for reviewing papers using the ICCV 2015 submission and reviewer system. In addition, please see the FAQs.

   • The submission/review site is https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/ICCV2015/ (bookmark or save this URL!)
   • Please make sure that your browser has cookies and Javascript enabled.
   • Please add "cmt@microsoft.com" to your list of safe senders in your own email client to prevent important email announcements from being blocked by spam filters.

   CMT ACCOUNT LOGIN: Go to https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/ICCV2015/. In CMT, users are identified by their emails. Each time CMT is used for a new conference a new CMT account is created. To manage conflicts of interest during reviewer assignment, it is extremely important that each CMT user has one and only one CMT account for ICCV 2015, even if the user has multiple roles (e.g., author and area chair, author and reviewer). As a reviewer, you already have a CMT account for ICCV 2015. Your login is the email address where you received the reviewer invitation. To ensure that each user has only one account, please let your co-authors know your e-mail for CMT purposes.

   CMT ACCOUNT PASSWORD: Go to https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/ICCV2015/. To get your password, click "Reset here." Enter the code displayed in the email and your e-mail address for CMT purposes. Click submit. You will receive an email with your password.

   REVIEWER TYPE: Go to https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/ICCV2015/ and login. Please select "Researcher/Faculty", "Graduate Student", or "Postdoc".

   ENTER INSTITUTIONAL CONFLICT DOMAIN. Enter the primary domain of your current institution, not the secondary domain of your department (e.g., use "jhu.edu" instead of "cs.jhu.edu"). Please enter ONLY ONE institutional conflict domain, except if your institution has multiple domains (e.g. "uni-heidelberg.de; uni-hd.de" or "uiuc.edu; illinois.edu"), or if you were affiliated with more than one institution in the last 12 months (April 2014 - April, 2015). DO NOT enter the domain of email providers such as "gmail.com", "yahoo.com", "hotmail.com" and "163.com" as your institutional conflict.

   Example 1: mit.edu
   Example 2: mit.edu; inria.fr
   Example 3: google.com; ox.ac.uk
   Example 4: inria.fr; ens.fr; iiit.ac.in
   

   Note that your institutional conflict information is not automatically extracted from your email or from the name of your institution, thus you must enter it here.

   SUBJECT AREAS: Please select your primary subject area and up to 5 secondary subject areas. These will be used by authors to suggest ACs for their papers and also for assigning papers to you.

   URL: In order to mine your co-authorship conflicts, we will need to have your DBLP profile in CMT. Please follow these instructions to get your DBLP profile.

   • Go to dblp.org and enter your name (e.g. "Antonio Torralba") in the search box.
   • Find your name in "Refine by AUTHOR" in the right column. Click on your name
   • Export to XML format by clicking on "get these search results as XML".
   • Enter this XML export link URL into CMT by clicking on the "My URL" link in CMT (e.g. http://dblp.org/search/api/?q=ce:author:antonio_torralba*&h=1000&c=4&f=0&format=xml)

   CHANGING YOUR LOGIN, PASSWORD and INSTITUTION: In case you need to change your login (e.g., if the e-mail we used for you is no longer valid) or institution, first log in with your old login and password as instructed above. Then, go to the top right of the screen and click on your name. Click on "Change your Password" to change your password. Click on "Edit Personal Information" to change your email or institution.

   SELECT YOUR ROLE: You may have more than one role (author, reviewer, meta-reviewer). Select "Reviewer" to review papers.

   TPMS: Go to the Toronto paper matching system. If you already have a TPMS account, please login, click on "Update account info." and make sure that the e-mail address of your TPMS account matches that of your CMT account. Then, click on "Selected Papers" to see the papers that are currently in your profile. Please edit your profile to have about 10 papers that are representative examples of the kind of papers you wish to review. If you do not have a TPMS account, please create one, and follow the same instructions above.

1. Paper bidding

   After the submission deadline, once you receive an e-mail asking you to bid on papers, please do the following:

   • In the Reviewer Console, click on "Manage Bids -> View/Edit Bids by Relevance".
   • Click on "View Submission".
   • You will see now a table with papers assigned to you for bidding. To see the paper abstracts, click on the "+" sign under "Title" in the table header.

   Above the table next to "Set bids for selected submissions to", by clicking on the button "Not Entered", you see a small menu with the categories
   0 - Not Willing
   1 - In-a-Pinch
   2 - Willing
   3 - Eager
   

   Select a single category and then in the leftmost table column the corresponding papers. Then click "Set Bids" above the table. The result will be displayed in the rightmost table column for the selected papers.

   Please select at least 10 papers as "Eager" and at least 10 more papers as "Willing".

   In case you notice a paper you are conflicted with, you should definitely classify it as "Not Willing" (see conflict responsibilities detailed in the Author Guidelines).

2. Paper review and preliminary ratings

   After paper bidding, once you receive an e-mail asking you to review your assigned papers, please do the following:

   • As soon as you get your paper assignments, please go through all the papers to check for possible conflict or submission rule violations. Contact the Program Chairs immediately if
     1. You think you are in any way conflicted with the paper (e.g., a paper authored by a former student of yours, your former advisor, a colleague in your current institution, your recent collaborator from a different institution). Please see Ethics for Reviewing Papers below.
     2. You feel uncomfortable reviewing the paper assigned to you.
     3. You notice that there is a violation of the stated paper submission rules. Such a violation includes:
        • Over 8 pages (not including references) or over 9 pages (including references).
        • Constitutes a double submission.
        • Supplementary material includes a newer version of the paper.
        • Please specify the exact nature of the violation.
        • For your reference, the paper submission guidelines, which includes descriptions of ICCV 2015's dual submission policy, can be found in the Author Guidelines.
   • Before writing a review, please read the sections Writing Technical Reviews and Ethics for Reviewing Papers.
   • For a paper, under the review column, click "Add" (to the right of the "Review" line) to enter a review. The review form contains detailed instructions about writing the review and the meaning of the different ratings (Oral, Poster, etc.).
   • CMT does not allow users to type certain characters into a text box that could be interpreted as html tags (for example, "y<x") or a malicious script. As a workaround, introducing spaces between these characters (for example, "y < x") will allow you to submit the text since this can no longer be interpreted as an html tag.
   • If you save your review as a draft, it is visible only to you. You can access your draft review form by clicking on the same "Add" link. To make the review visible to the Area Chair, click on the "Submit" button in the review form. "Submit" won't work if any of the required items is not filled.

3. Paper discussion and final recommendations

   After the rebuttal deadline, once you've received an e-mail asking you to discuss a paper, read the authors' rebuttal or minor revision, and submit a final recommendation, please do the following:

   • After the rebuttal period, you will work with Area Chairs to clear up any confusions and attempt to reach consensus on papers. The CMT site has an electronic bulletin board feature that allows Area Chairs to contact reviewers anonymously. Once the Area Chair posts a note, you will be notified and asked to log in to see the post and respond. The identities of the reviewers will be hidden from each other.
   • Please familiarize yourself with the data under "Detailed Reviews and Discussions". "Paper Summary" label: next to it, you'll see the icons "+" and "-". Clicking on "+" shows you all the abstracts; clicking on "-" collapses all them back. At the end of each paper title, you'll see "+" as well. This has the same function of showing the abstract for that paper, toggling to "-" at the same time, which collapses it when selected. Please take the time to familiarize yourself with the table entries; clicking on any of the column heading (e.g., "Paper ID") sorts according to its description.
   • Note that authors may optionally upload a rebuttal and an updated version of the paper with minor revisions that addresses the reviewers' comments. Please check if authors obeyed the corresponding author guidelines: "Changes between the original submission and the revised version MUST be minimal (as they are meant to address only the reviewers' comments) and MUST be highlighted in red to facilitate checking the changes. The revised version must adhere to the same blind-submission review-formatted template as the original submission."
   • Please read the author's rebuttal and minor revision and enter your final recommendation in CMT. This may differ from your preliminary rating, and should reflect your judgment taking into account all the other reviews, the authors' rebuttal and minor revision, and the discussion about the paper (if any).

4. (Optional) Review papers offline

   • You have two options to access the "Offline Reviewing" page: (1) In the "Paper Reviews and Discussions" page, click on "Review papers offline" link near the top of the page, or (2) In the "View/Edit Review" page, click on "offline reviewing" link.
   • In the "Offline Reviewing" page, you can download one review template file for a single paper, several papers, or all the papers. We suggest that you download a review template file for each paper to avoid confusion.
   • Please read instructions on how to modify the file to incorporate your responses. Note that you must not add certain characters in your responses that could be interpreted as html tags or a malicious script. See item 3 above.
   • You can upload the completed file using the "Upload" interface at the bottom of the page. The new uploaded version will (destructively) overwrite the current review.
   • We suggest that you try downloading a review template file for one paper, enter test responses, and upload to get a sense of how it works.
   • You should always verify the review after uploading (by inspecting it online).
   • We suggest that you use an XML editor to edit the file, for example: EditiX (Windows, Unix/Linux, Mac OS X) or XML Notepad 2007 (Windows only). (Remember to edit only fields currently filled with the phrase "REPLACE THIS WITH YOUR ANSWER".)

Writing Technical Reviews


Here are some recommendations that may help you as you do this very valuable task.

Spirit of Volunteerism

We volunteer our time by reviewing papers that are written by other researchers in our field. We recommend that you approach your reviews in this spirit of volunteerism. Your reviews make you a gatekeeper in helping decide which papers are ready for publication. Just as important, however, is to provide feedback to the authors so that they may improve their work. Try to write your review in a way that the authors can benefit from. We suggest reading a paper and then thinking about it over the course of several days before you write your review.

What to Look For

Look for what's good or stimulating in the paper. Minor flaws can be corrected and shouldn't be a reason to reject a paper. ICCV as a conference is looking for new ideas. We recommend that you embrace novel, brave concepts, even if they have not been tested on many datasets. For example, the fact that a proposed method does not exceed the state of the art accuracy on an existing benchmark dataset is not grounds for rejection by itself. Acceptance and rejection decisions should not be determined solely by the method's raw performance. Rather, it is important to weigh both the novelty and potential impact of the work alongside the reported performance. Each paper that is accepted should be technically sound and make a contribution to the field.

Be Polite

The tone of your review is extremely important. Belittling or sarcastic comments have no place in the reviewing process. A harshly written review will be disregarded by the authors, regardless of whether your criticisms are true. If you take care, it is always possible to word your review diplomatically while staying true to your thoughts about the paper. Put yourself in the mindset of writing to someone you wish to help, such as a respected colleague who wants your opinion on a concept or a project. The most valuable comments in a review are those that help the authors understand the shortcomings of their work and how they might improve it. Write a courteous, informative, incisive, and helpful review that you would be proud to add your name to (were it not anonymous).

Be Specific

Please be specific and detailed in your reviews. In the discussion of related work and references, simply saying "this is well known" or "this has been common practice in the industry for years" is not sufficient: cite specific publications, including books, or public disclosures of techniques.

Your main critique of the paper should be written in terms of a list of strengths and weaknesses of the paper. Use bullet points here, and explain your arguments. Your discussion, sometimes more important than your score, will help the authors, fellow reviewers, and Area Chairs understand the basis of your opinions, so please be thorough. Your reviews will be returned to the authors, so you should include specific feedback on ways the authors can improve their papers.

Here are some specific issues to keep in mind as you write your reviews:

• Short reviews are unhelpful to authors, other reviewers, and Area Chairs. If you have agreed to review a paper, you should take enough time to write a thoughtful and detailed review.
• Be specific when you suggest that the writing needs to be improved. If there is a particular section that is unclear, point it out and give suggestions for how it can be clarified.
• Don't give away your identity by asking the authors to cite several of your own papers.
• Be specific about novelty. Claims in a review that the submitted work "has been done before" MUST be backed up with specific references and an explanation of how closely they are related. At the same time, for a positive review, be sure to summarize what novel aspects are most interesting in the strengths.
• If you think the paper is out of scope for ICCV's subject areas, clearly explain why in the review. You may find the Call for Papers here. Then suggest other publication possibilities (journals, conferences, workshops) that would be a better match for the paper.
• Avoid referring to the authors by using the phrase "you". These phrases should be replaced by "the authors" or "the paper." Referring to the authors as "you" can be perceived as being confrontational, even though you do not mean it this way.

Be generous about giving the authors new ideas for how they can improve their work. Your suggestions may be very specific (for example, "this numerical solver would be better for your application") or may be more general in nature. You might suggest a new dataset that could be tried, or a new application area that might benefit from their tool. You may tell them how their idea can be generalized beyond what they have already considered. A thoughtful review not only benefits the authors, but may benefit you as well. Remember that your reviews are read by other reviewers and especially the Area Chairs, in addition to the authors. Being a helpful reviewer will generate good will towards you in the research community.

Blind Reviews

Authors were asked to take reasonable efforts to hide their identities, including not listing their names or affiliations and omitting acknowledgments. This information will of course be included in the published version. Reviewers should also make all efforts to keep their identity invisible to the authors. Please see the Author Guidelines for details on how authors have been instructed to preserve anonymity, including guidelines for referencing one's own prior work.


Ethics for Reviewing Papers

Protect Ideas

As a reviewer for ICCV, you have the responsibility to protect the confidentiality of the ideas represented in the papers you review. ICCV submissions are not published documents. The work is considered new or proprietary by the authors; otherwise they would not have submitted it. Of course, their intent is to ultimately publish it to the world, but most of the submitted papers will not appear in the ICCV proceedings. Thus, it is likely that the paper you have in your hands will be refined further and submitted to some other journal or conference, or even to ICCV next year. Sometimes the work is still considered confidential by the authors' employers. These organizations do not consider sending a paper to ICCV for review to constitute a public disclosure. Protection of the ideas in the papers you receive means:

• You should not show the paper to anyone else, including colleagues or students, unless you have asked them to write a review, or to help with your review.
• You should not show any results or videos/images or any of the supplementary material to non-reviewers.
• You should not use ideas from papers you review to develop new ones.
• After the review process, you should destroy all copies of papers and videos and erase any implementations you have written to evaluate the ideas in the papers, as well as any results of those implementations.
Avoid Conflict of Interest

As a reviewer, it is important for you to avoid any conflict of interest. There should be absolutely no question about the impartiality of any review. Thus, if you are assigned a paper where your review would create a possible conflict of interest, you should return the paper as soon as it is assigned to you and not submit a review. Conflicts of interest include (but are not limited to) situations in which:

• You work at the same institution as one of the authors.
• You have been directly involved in the work and will be receiving credit in some way. If you're a member of the author's thesis committee, and the paper is about his or her thesis work, then you were involved.
• You suspect that others might see a conflict of interest in your involvement.
• You have collaborated with one of the authors in the past three years (more or less). Collaboration is usually defined as having written a paper or grant proposal together, although you should use your judgment.
• You were the MS/PhD advisor of one of the authors or the MS/PhD advisee of one of the authors. Most funding agencies and publications typically consider advisees to represent a lifetime conflict of interest.

While the organizers make every effort to avoid such conflicts in the review assignments, they may nonetheless occasionally arise. If you recognize the work or the author and feel it could present a conflict of interest, email the Program Chairs immediately after the paper is assigned to you so that they can find someone else to review it.


Reviewer FAQs

• Can I change my e-mail?
  YES, please follow the instructions at the beginning of this page.
• Can I change my areas and conflict information before the submission deadline?
  YES, please follow the instructions at the beginning of this page.
• "Can I change my areas and conflict information after the submission deadline?
  NO, subject areas and conflict information are used for paper matching and cannot be changed after the papers have been submitted.
• Is the ICCV 2015 Review Process CONFIDENTIAL?
  YES, ICCV 2015 Reviewing is considered confidential. All reviewers are required to keep every manuscript they review as confidential documents and not to share or distribute materials for any reason except to facilitate the reviewing of the submitted work.
• Are ICCV 2015 Reviews Double BLIND or Single BLIND?
  ICCV reviewing is Double BLIND, in that authors do not know the names of the area chair/reviewers of their papers, and area chairs/reviewers do not know the names of the authors. Please read Section 1.6 of the example paper egpaper_for_review.pdf for detailed instructions on how to preserve anonymity. Avoid providing information that may identify the authors in the acknowledgments (e.g., co-workers and grant IDs) and in the supplemental material (e.g., titles in the movies, or attached papers). Avoid providing links to websites that identify the authors. Violation of any of these guidelines will lead to rejection without review.
• Is there a minimum number of papers I should accept or reject?
  NO. Each paper should be evaluated in its own right. If you feel that most of the papers assigned to you have value, you should accept them. It is unlikely that most papers are bad enough to justify rejecting them all. However, if that is the case, provide clear and very specific comments in each review. Do NOT assume that your stack of papers necessarily should have the same acceptance rate as the entire conference ultimately will.