Thank you for reviewing for IEEE WCCI 2022! Your help is vital to our community: the technical content of the program is largely determined by the efforts and comments of the reviewers. Below are instructions and guidelines that will help you write reviews efficiently and effectively.
All reviews must be entered electronically into the CMT system.
Reviewers may visit this site multiple times and revise their reviews as often as necessary before the reviewing deadline. When you were invited to become a reviewer, you should have been sent an email with instructions on how to login to the system. Use your email address as the login id; you can change your password using the forgotten password feature.
During the review period, you will probably get many emails sent from CMT (e.g., those telling you about paper assignments). Please make sure emails from CMT are not snagged by your spam filter!
To help us in assigning you papers that fall within your area of expertise and interest, we need to gather your bids on the submissions.
The more bids you place the more likely you’ll get to review papers you’d like to read. The load is not affected by how many bids you place, just which papers are assigned to you. We suggest you bid on at least 20 papers. The number of bids does not influence the number of assigned papers, just the chances to get papers you find interesting. If you bid on very few papers (do not bid at all), you will be assigned reviews based solely on the subject areas you selected (that can be pretty generic).
The deadline to submit bids is Thursday February 10th, 2022.
You can find instructions on how to place bids at the following link:
https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/docs/help/reviewer/reviewer-bidding.html
Papers are ranked according to their match to your subject areas. We recommend filtering papers using specific keywords in the title or abstract fields.
By viewing the papers, you agree that the IEEE WCCI 2022 review process is confidential. Specifically, you agree not to use ideas and results from submitted papers in your work, research or grant proposals, unless and until that material appears in other publicly available formats, such as a technical report or as a published work. You also agree not to distribute submitted papers or the ideas in them to anyone unless approved by the Program Chairs.
This year, for the first time, we use double blind reviewing. The authors do not know the identity of the reviewers; this also holds for authors who are on the program committee. In addition, the reviewers do not know the identity of the authors. Note, however, that the Program Chairs do know the authors’ identities. This helps avoid accidental conflicts of interest or other forms of bias.
Of course, double blind reviewing is not perfect: by searching the Internet, a reviewer may discover (or think he/she may have discovered) the identity of an author. We encourage you not to actively attempt to discover the identities of the authors. If you have good reason to suspect that a paper has been published in the past, you can go and search on the Internet, but we ask that you first completely read the paper. Also, based on the experience of other double-blind conferences, we caution reviewers that the assumed authors may not be the actual authors; multiple independent inventions are common and different groups build on each others’ work.
If you believe that you have discovered the identity of the author, please let us know in the “Comments to Chairs (not visible to authors)” in your review. Please do not reject papers only because they were not properly anonymised.
We ask that you double-check that your papers have followed the submission guidelines with respect to length (i.e. they are usually 8 pages, at most 10 pages), format, and anonymity. Please let us know in the “Comments to Chairs (not visible to authors)” if you find serious formatting issues or anonymity problems with a submitted paper.
Where possible, reviewers should identify submissions that are very similar (or identical) to versions that have been previously published, or that have been submitted in parallel to other conferences. Program Chairs will also use a plagiarism check software.
Importantly, reviewer comments should be detailed, specific and polite, avoiding vague complaints and providing appropriate citations if authors are unaware of relevant work. As you write a review, think of the types of reviews that you like to get for your papers. Even negative reviews can be polite and constructive! Remember that you are assessing the paper’s quality as a scientific contribution to the field.
Reviewers should NOT assume that they have received an unbiased sample of papers, nor should they adjust their scores to achieve an artificial balance of high and low scores. Scores should reflect absolute judgments of the contributions made by each paper.
The high quality of IEEE WCCI 2022 depends on having a complete set of reviews for each paper. Reviewer scores and comments provide the primary input used by the Program Chairs to judge the quality of submitted papers. Far more than any other factor, reviewers determine the scientific content of the conference. However, we also stress that short superficial reviews that venture uninformed opinions about a paper are damaging. They may result in the rejection of a high quality paper that the reviewer simply failed to understand or acceptance of a substandard paper. Please take the time to fully assess the paper.
Reviewer comments have two purposes: to provide feedback to authors and to provide input to the Program Chairs. Reviewer comments to authors whose papers are rejected will help them understand how IEEE WCCI 2022 papers are rated and how they might improve their submissions in the future. Reviewers’ comments to authors whose papers are accepted will help them improve the paper for the final conference proceedings. Reviewers’ comments to the Program Chairs are also considered when accept/reject decisions are made. Your comments are seen by the Program Chairs and the other reviewers.
The goal of the review process is to give the community a better sense of the quality of the paper as a whole. You should discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each paper and address all the explicit criteria provided in the review form. Please read the review criteria and use those to guide your decisions. It is tempting to include only weaknesses in your review. However, it is important to also mention and consider the strengths, as an informed decision needs to take both into account. It is particularly useful to include a list of arguments for and against acceptance.
All IEEE WCCI 2022 papers should be good scientific papers, regardless of their specific area. We judge whether a paper is good using specific criteria; a reviewer should comment on all of these. We give specific instructions for how to fill out each section in the review form. This year, the review form contains the following sections:
1- Global Rating
Reviewers choose an overall rating between six ranks for each paper.
2- Reviewer's confidence
Reviewers also choose a confidence rating between three classes for each paper.
3- Suggested Type of Presentation
Whether you think the paper is best suited for oral or poster presentation.
4- Level of interest for IJCNN/FUZZ-IEEE/IEEE CEC community
In this section you should assess the importance (potential impact) of this submission for conference attendees and its relation to existing work. Are other people (practitioners or researchers) likely to use these ideas or build on them? Is it clear how this work differs from previous contributions and is related work adequately referenced?
5- Technical Quality
Is the approach understandable and detailed enough? Is the results section or are the proofs clear enough so that expert readers will understand them and can reproduce the results (if applicable)? Does the paper address a difficult problem in a better way than previous research?
6- Novelty
Does the paper contribute a major breakthrough or an incremental advance? Is it clear how this work differs from previous contributions and is related work adequately referenced?
7- Writing Style
In this section you should assess the clarity of the presentation. Is the paper clearly written? Is it well-organized?
8- List at least 2 strong points of the paper
You should discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the paper. It is tempting to include only weaknesses in your review. However, it is important to also mention and consider the strengths, as an informed decision needs to take both into account. It is particularly useful to include a list of arguments for acceptance.
9- List at least 2 weak points of the paper
You should discuss the weaknesses of the paper. It is particularly useful to include a list of arguments against acceptance.
10- Comments to Authors
Your written review should begin by summarizing the main ideas of each paper and relating these ideas to previous work at IEEE WCCI 2022 and elsewhere. While this part of the review may not provide much new information to authors, it is invaluable to the Program Chairs, and it demonstrates to the authors that you have understood their paper.
Please write your summary in your own words and avoid using phrases from the abstract or the paper itself. In this section you should address the soundness of the paper. Are claims well-supported by theoretical analysis or experimental results? Is this a complete piece of work, or merely a position paper? Are the authors careful (and honest) about evaluating both the strengths and weaknesses of the work?
Please also provide any additional comments to the authors and explain the basis for your ratings while providing constructive feedback.
In this section you should also provide motivations for your evaluations in the previous points. assess the clarity of the presentation and reproducibility of the results. Feel free to make suggestions to improve the manuscript.
Finally, please provide a short summary (1-2 sentences) of your review.
11- Comments to Chairs (not visible to authors)
This section should include information that you wish only the program committee to see. The confidential comments to the program committee have many uses. Reviewers can use this section to make explicit comparisons of the paper under review to other submitted papers, and to disclose conflicts of interest that may have emerged in the days before the reviewing deadline (see next item). You can also use this section to provide criticisms that are more bluntly stated.
In reviewing, you may accidentally discover the identity of the authors. If this happens, please state it in the “Comments to Chairs (not visible to authors) ” section.
Again, we thank you for your help so far and in the future. Your carefully considered input is crucial to the success of the conference.
Alessandro Sperduti and Marco Gori, IEEE WCCI 2022 General Co-chairs
