I volunteered as a scribe for a TPC Meeting for a top tier research conference. While I can not elaborate many details as I do not want to breach confidentiality, I do want to share my high level takeaways from this experience.
The Rundown:
What’s a TPC? For those of you who do not know what a TPC Meeting is — TPC stands for technical program committee. According to IEEE, “The Technical Program Committee oversees the submission and review of papers, and organizes the presentations delivered at the conference. Each Technical Program Committee also has a Technical Program Chair who is responsible for delivering a well-balanced and high-quality technical program at the conference.” In everyday terms, a technical program committee is usually a large group of TPC members who argue whether to accept or reject a paper into the designated research conference.
Who’s involved? Usually the group of TPC members range from freshly minted junior faculty to long-standing hotshots in the respective fields and even some industry veterans. As well as couple volunteers who are chosen to sit in and help the meeting run smoothly.
How long does it take? From my experience, the TPC needed to whittle down roughly 60 papers down to roughly 35. Each paper is supposed to get a maximum of 12 minutes of discussion time; this limit is sometimes ignored. Discussing all these papers literally takes all day. Sometimes the TPC members get into very heated debate and run way over time. Some papers get discussed twice. Attending this meeting is a huge stretch of endurance to say the least.
Takeaways
- No one cares about your hard work.
I’m serious. Literally no one cares how hard you work. I witnessed a paper whose authors spent literally months conducting a real time deployment of their system in the wild — get rejected. This was heart breaking to see. For my readers, please understand that it is an incredibly large undertaking to deploy systems in the wild and monitor/gather/analyze months and months of data.
2. Positive reviews don’t matter (take positive reviews with a grain of salt)
When you submit a research paper you will receive some initial reviews about the work. Sometimes these initial reviews may be positive, but in the TPC meeting these positive reviews don’t matter too much. I witnessed a paper with mostly positive reviews where many TPC members wanted to accept the paper; however it literally just took a single TPC member who did not like the paper to completely tank everything. The paper ended up getting rejected.
3. Every aspect will be scrutinized
Don’t think you are able to get away with suspicious activities or unsound research methodologies. There are multiple experts in the field who are intensely scrutinizing your work. Any small or slight red flags is enough to get the entire paper rejected.
4. Cute Paper
This was probably the most patronizing comment I’ve heard. Cute idea, cute paper, reject. Cute idea, great implementation and evaluation, reject. What makes it cute? It’s not something that can be built upon and open up future fields.
For Authors
5. Don’t be lazy
There was a paper that only did evaluation on a small number of conditions. While TPC members liked the idea of the paper, the lack of thorough evaluation was what ultimately got this paper rejected. When evaluating your work, do not be lazy. Take the time to measure everything and I mean everything.
6. Novelty is king
Throughout the TPC meeting, I’ve heard so many times “we appreciate the methodology and the engineering efforts, there is nothing technically novel about this work.” Novelty is king. New methods, new techniques, new applications, innovation is what motivates and drives the field. Remixing techniques can be helpful if it provides some sort of new knowledge or insight — but don’t be lazy about it.
7. Defense, Defense, Defense
You can not provide any holes, weaknesses or open any opportunities for attack. If there is a chance for attack, it will be taken. Everything that you do needs to be intentional, methodological, and thorough. Without having this mentality, you don’t stand a chance.
8. Picture Perfect
Framing matters. How the motivation is written plays a huge role. There was a paper that many TPC member didn’t see the value of, but one TPC member suddenly thought of a way this paper could be useful and then convinced the rest of them the value of the work. Things like this are important!
9. Not about making your advisor happy
Your advisor is there to help you become a researcher. Your loyalty should be to good research. Your focus should be doing good research. Your advisor’s goal is to help your work survive the wrath of the TPC. Your advisor wants you to flourish as a researcher.
Research is hard. You will get attacked everywhere left and right. Your work will be rejected. Some days will feel incredibly unfair.
So why do it? You learn to overcome. You learn to think deeply and carefully. You gain new skills and build incredible systems (dependent on field). Working on these research problems, in actuality you are actually working on yourself. Flaws, and shortcomings really get brought to light. What a blessing that these present themselves so clearly that you can correct.
