CMT homepage: https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/RSS2011/
Please check this schedule frequently, as the dates will change.
Every area chair recruits eight or more highly qualified PC members (called reviewers by CMT, so we'll stick with that term; in your emails to people, however, you should invite them to be PC members). Please select people you trust will do a good job and will submit reviews on time. Given the reviewer discussion period and the author rebuttal process of RSS (see below), it is very important that all reviews are submitted on time by February 21. Please explain to reviewers what is expected of them and how important high-quality reviews are. You can point them to http://rss-board.org/doku.php?id=reviewer_instructions for a detailed schedule.
After recruiting the reviewers, area chairs can focus on finishing your own RSS submissions.
Area chairs find four (4) qualified reviewers from the entire pool of reviewers for each of the papers assigned to them. Please ensure that the load is balanced equally across reviewers. The expected review load for a reviewer is about five papers.
During the next three weeks, the area chairs check periodically on the status of their papers and, if necessary, send reminders to reviewers. They also ensure that the quality of the reviews is adequate, in particular for poor papers. Area chairs may refer reviewers to the review guidelines, if necessary.
Due to the response process, it is very important that all reviews are submitted on time. The area chairs ensure that all reviews are submitted by this deadline and, if necessary, find replacements for reviewers. Many times reviewers will have divergent opinions about a paper. In that case, the area chair attempts to resolve some of the divergence, but the primary discussion period is after the responses.
The area chairs ensure that reviews are appropriate and reasonable.
The authors have one week to respond to the reviews by pointing out oversights, inaccuracies, or misunderstandings. The authors will be informed of this opportunity by email. Area chairs don't have to do anything. This process starts one week after making the reviews available to authors to ensure that responses are not too emotional.
At this point, the authors have submitted their responses. The reviewers update their reviews to reflect the comments made by the authors, and begin a discussion towards making a recommendation. It is not necessary to reach consensus, but an animated discussion generally improves the quality of the reviews. The area chair monitrs the discussion and ensures that reviews are updated in accordance with the outcome. The area chairs ensures that reviewers respond to the author responses after sufficient discussion and that the scores and reviews get updated accordingly.
Area chairs ensure that all reviews have been updated in response to the comments provided by the authors and the discussion among the reviewers that followed.
This is probably the most important part of the review process. The area chair meeting is a very intense and fun meeting in which the final acceptance decisions will be made. We will have to discuss a lot of papers, so please come prepared. For every paper you will be asked to give a 30 second summary. If a paper is a borderline paper, you should prepare a more extensive summary, including quotes from the reviews. A good familiarity with the papers themselves, the reviews, the rebuttals, and the responses to the rebuttals is essential for this process to work. Please also think about which of your papers would be well suited for an oral presentation, and which would best be presented as a poster.
Some of the papers will be conditionally accepted. For those papers, an area chair works with the authors to do a revision that includes all of the points that were discussed during the area chair meeting. The area chairs work with the authors to complete the shepherding process by this date.
The area chair mailing list is rss11-ac@csail.mit.edu.