What is a PC and a shadow PC
When a scientific conference is organized, the organizers invite a group of researchers into a Program Committee (PC), whose main responsibility is to select a program, i.e., a list of articles selected among the ones submitted. The main activity of PC members is to review the submitted papers. As any other conference, AlgoTel and CoRes have their own PCs.
This year, we created a shadow PC, which is a group of young researchers which will work in parallel to the official PCs. The main activity of the members of the shadow PC is to review papers, as for the official PC. However, only the official PCs will determine the acceptance/rejection of articles. The goal of the reviewing activity of the shadow PC is for young researcher to experience how peer reviewing and conference organization work.
Principle
Being on a shadow PC is an excellent opportunity for young systems researchers (PhD students, postdocs) to get experience in community service, i.e., programme committee practices. Shadow PC members commit themselves to writing their own detailed and rigorous reviews for their assigned papers by the allotted deadlines. This commitment is essential to the good functioning of the Shadow PC.
We plan to have the shadow PC meeting in-person after the official notification for Algotel / Cores (foreseen June).
Being a member of a shadow PC is a lot of work. But besides the recognition of being selected, it is also very rewarding and worthwhile for a number of reasons, including:
- Getting to know how a PC is run and how it operates;
- Submitting high quality reviews;
- Seeing how other reviewers judge the same papers that you review;
- Participating to the scientific discussions for the selection, learning how to defend or criticize scientifically a paper;
- Getting to see both strong and weak papers at the submission stage;
- Getting to know other active young researchers in the community also selected in the PC.
Involvement
The students who want to apply to the shadow PC accept the following tasks:
- Participate in bidding (i.e., declare the topics and conflicts of interest,
to help reviewer-paper assignments); - handling 5 papers to review (4-page Algotel/Cores format)
- participation to the online discussions
- participation to the face-to-face PC meeting in France
NB: members will be responsible for their own travel and accommodation for the PC meeting.
Audience
The shadow PC targets both French and non French speaking researchers. Discussions during the PC meeting will be hold in English to be inclusive. However, the English proficiency should not be an obstacle. We expect applications only from students working currently in France.
The students should have already written scientific papers, and may have done reviews (even unofficially, under the umbrella of their PhD advisor(s)).
Rules
We expect to set-up a friendly and tolerant environments for discussions. The emphasis will be put on avoiding conflicts of interests, as in usual PC.
Participants must not engage in harassment while at meetings, virtual meetings, social events, or on mailing lists. Harassment is unwelcome hostile or intimidating behavior — in particular, speech or behavior that is sexually aggressive or intimidates based on attributes such as race, gender, religion, age, color, national origin, ancestry, disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Harassment of this sort will not be tolerated.
