ICML survey and comments

Just about nothing could keep me from attending ICML, except for Dora who arrived on Monday. Consequently, I have only secondhand reports that the conference is going well.

For those who are remote (like me) or after the conference (like everyone), Mark Reid has setup the ICML discussion site where you can comment on any paper or subscribe to papers. Authors are automatically subscribed to their own papers, so it should be possible to have a discussion significantly after the fact, as people desire.

We also conducted a survey before the conference and have the survey results now. This can be compared with the ICML 2010 survey results. Looking at the comparable questions, we can sometimes order the answers to have scores ranging from 0 to 3 or 0 to 4 with 3 or 4 being best and 0 worst, then compute the average difference between 2012 and 2010.

Glancing through them, I see:

  1. Most people found the papers they reviewed a good fit for their expertise (-.037 w.r.t 2010). Achieving this was one of our subgoals in the pursuit of high quality decisions.
  2. Most people had sufficient time for doing reviews. This was something that we worried about significantly in shifting the paper deadline and otherwise massaging the schedule. Most people also thought the review period was sufficiently long and most reviews were high quality (+.023 w.r.t. 2010)
  3. About 1/4 of reviewers say that author response changed their mind on a paper and 2/3 of reviewers say discussion changed their mind on a paper. The expectation of decision impact from author response is reduced from 2010 (-.135). The existence of author response is overwhelmingly preferred.
  4. People generally found ICML reviewing the same or better than previous ICMLs (+.35 w.r.t. 2010) and other similar conferences (+.198 w.r.t. 2010) at the cost of being somewhat more work. A substantial bump in reviewing quality was a primary goal.
  5. The ACs spent substantially more time (43 hours on average) than PC members (28 hours on average). This agrees with our expectation—the set of ACs didn’t change even after we had a 50% increase in submissions. The AC load we had this year was probably too high and will need to be reduced somewhat for next year.
  6. 2/3 of authors prefer the option to revise a paper during author response.
  7. The choice of how to deal with increased submissions is deeply undecided, with a slight preference for short talk+poster as we did.
  8. Most people like having two workshop days or don’t care.
  9. There is a strong preference for COLT and UAI colocation with the next tier of preference for IJCAI, KDD, AAAI, and CVPR.

14 Replies to “ICML survey and comments”

  1. John, many congratulations to you and Alina, and thank you for all you’ve done for us over the past year!

  2. Any idea when & where the videos of the presentations will be available?

      1. Will videos be available for the workshops or only the main conference?
        Thanks

  3. Hi, John, could you tell me who had accepted this year’s best paper awards? I do not find the information on the ICML 2012 website. And I’m very eager to see your comments about the paper which interests you most in this year ICML. Thank you very much.

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