Authors & Reviewers

Authors should familiarise themselves with submission requirements, review process, and publication guidance.

The submission requirements include guidance on the format of paper, workshop, and poster submissions.
The review guidance outlines the process, declaring conflicts of interest and information regarding the proxy chair and panel.

If you have any questions do not hesitate to contact the conference programme chairs: hcaimep23@nulleasychair.org

Submitting a paper/short paper or a poster:

Please use the easy chair submission site to submit papers or posters: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=hcaimep23

Submission Format & Guidelines:

Full Paper:

The paper is limited to a maximum of six pages plus one page for references. Note that this is not the same as seven pages: if there is a seventh page, there must be nothing on it but references. If the paper includes figures and tables, the text in them must be readable at 100% magnification and in greyscale. Figures and tables must be readable in the printed version of the paper.

Short Paper

The paper is limited to four pages including the references. If the paper includes figures and tables, the text in them must be readable at 100% magnification and in greyscale. Figures and tables must be readable in the printed version of the paper.

In addition to the formatting outlined below, authors will be expected to (in LaTeX) use the \nonacm switch (or the same in Word) for their submission as the short papers will not be published in the ACM Digital Library, but published on this website.

Poster

A poster proposal is a single page, in PDF format, explaining what the poster is about (for format details please see Formatting requirements below). The proposal is used for the review process, and, if the proposal is accepted, for publication in the HCAI-ep ACM Digital Library proceedings. A poster is a single-page document, typically combining text and images, that embodies a succinct description of work that has been done. Presenting a poster is a good way to discuss and receive feedback on a work in progress that has not been fully developed into a paper. Posters should not re-present previously published work. Poster proposal review is not anonymous.

General submission details

Be sure that your submissions abide by the ACM Conflict of Interest Policy.

Be sure when making a submission that all authors are included. The ACM and HCAI-ep are not generally receptive to changes in the author list once a submission has been accepted. Documents submitted for review should be high-quality, unpublished, original work. The official language of the conference is English, and submissions for review should be written in good academic English. The entire proceedings will be available in the ACM Digital Library. Note that reviewers will assume they are reviewing completed works, as they will eventually appear in the conference proceedings. Do not submit incomplete drafts! Page limits and deadlines for submissions are dependent upon the category of submission. Electronic submission is required. All submissions must be PDF files. Where anonymous submissions are required, please check the settings of your converter so it does not inadvertently include your name and affiliation in the PDF file.

Formatting requirements

All submissions must adhere to the HCAI-ep 2023 formatting instructions. Templates for submissions can be found at the ACM SIG Proceedings website.

The proceedings page incorporates two different approaches: the existing templates and the new workflow model. Please note that the new workflow model is applies to HCAI-ep. A LaTeX template can also be found on Overleaf. If you find that the template is producing a single-column format, it is likely that you are not using the sigconf option. A command near the beginning of your file should read \documentclass[sigconf]{acmart}

The Word template is not generally considered easy to use, and it can be difficult to coerce it to produce a paper that conforms to the requirements. Authors who use Microsoft Word should be prepared for a significant challenge in getting an accepted paper to conform with the requirements ready for inclusion in the proceedings. Some authors have decided that it is easier to (re)learn LaTeX and use the LaTeX template on Overleaf than to fight with the Word template.

Anonymous version for review

The paper submitted for review must be a fully anonymous version so as to allow the authors an unbiased review. The anonymous version should have ALL identifying references to the authors removed: this includes authors’ names; authors’ affiliations; any information within the body of the paper that might identify the authors or their institutions, such as websites, related publications, or specific geographic locations; and acknowledgments, which often include material that might identify the authors. Self-citations need not be removed if they are worded so that the reviewer doesn’t know that the authors are citing themselves. For example, instead of “We reported on our first experiment in 2018 [13]”, the paper might say “An early experiment in this area was carried out in 2018 [13]”, or “Katchen and Satie [13] carried out an early experiment in this area in 2018”. If a paper is presenting software that is the work of the authors, the name of the software should be anonymized, so that it will not be found with a web search.

Papers are expected to stand alone, and not to require the reading of supplementary information. For this reason, they should not include links to additional material, such as a demonstration of software being introduced.

If the paper is accepted for the conference and for publication, authors will be asked to complete a camera-ready copy that will include all appropriate author names, affiliations, citations, acknowledgments, and references, and that may, if appropriate, include links to supplementary information.

When writing the review version of the paper, space should be left for the authors’ names, affiliations, and other material that might need to be added, such as the ACM reference format. This can be implemented either by the use of placeholders or simply by ensuring that the paper is sufficiently short of the page limit. Submissions that fully use the page limit, without leaving space for these items, will be rejected on the grounds of exceeding the page limit.

In the past, some authors have published their submissions in places such as arXiv, with full author details. This is a clear breach of anonymity, which can easily be found by a reviewer looking for background on the subject matter. Anonymous submissions that are found to have corresponding non-anonymous versions will be rejected. Once a paper has been accepted, anonymity is no longer required, so such publication is then acceptable.

Ethical status of data collection

Any submission that makes use of data from human participants (including student surveys, class results, educator interviews, published data sets, etc) must clearly indicate whether approval has been granted for the use of that data, by what authority (respecting anonymity in the version submitted for review), and what the approval covers. If the work includes any data from human participants that has not been granted approval, that should be clearly explained.

Review Guidance:

The review process is broadly similar for all contributions to the HCAIM-ep conference that are published in the conference proceedings.

Process for Papers and Posters

Review process

HCAI-ep papers are reviewed using a dual-anonymous process managed through EasyChair. The reviewing process has three phases: bidding, reviewing, and discussion.

Reviewers are expected to provide high-quality reviews to provide authors with feedback that will help to improve the work for publication or for future submission. Program chairs (PCs) lead the discussion among reviewers.

Each paper submission is expected to receive three or four reviews, but this number is subject to change depending on the number of submissions and the number of reviewers.

All reviews are submitted through EasyChair. In EasyChair, reviewers are called ‘PC members’.

All paper submissions are anonymous. Reviewers are and should remain anonymous to one another and to the authors of the submissions they review. When writing comments on a review during a discussion, please refer to yourself and other reviewers by the number of their review (R1, R2, etc).

Reviewer timeline

The following dates describe the timeline for the reviewer’s work on HCAI-ep. Note that the review period is just 3 weeks.

All reviewers are expected to engage with the process throughout the timeline as described below. Please consider your workload and other commitments around these dates before offering your services as a reviewer. Those who cannot commit to engagement throughout this period should not volunteer to be reviewers for HCAI-ep 2023.

Activity	Start date	End date (Anywhere on Earth, UTC-12)
Bidding	8th October	15th October
Reviewing	16th October	26th October
Discussion	26th October	29th October

Expected workload

Reviewers: 1-2 full papers (each up to 6 pages + references) and 1 short paper

Bidding

Reviewers will bid for papers that they are interested in reviewing during the week between abstract submission and full paper submission. If reviewers take the bidding process seriously, this reduces the chance of weak reviews arising from a lack of familiarity with the content of a submission. As part of the bidding process, reviewers will be required to note papers with which they have a conflict of interest (papers that they recognise are from colleagues or project partners). Separately from the bidding, reviewers will be shown a list of authors and asked to indicate which of those they have a conflict of interest with.

It is important to understand that bidding does not mean choosing the papers you will review. That choice will be made by EasyChair, using an algorithm that tries to allocate the papers reasonably fairly. Ideally, bidding is a process of identifying all of the papers that you would like to review or are willing to review. The more papers you bid for, the more likely you are to be allocated papers from your list.

Bidding on just a small number of papers influences the algorithm unfairly in your favor. To counter this, anyone who bids on too few papers will have their bids supplemented with an arbitrary selection of papers. If you do not wish this to happen to you, please ensure that you bid ‘yes’ for at least 6 papers and ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’ for at least 6 more.

Once you are notified that bidding is open, you should log in to your EasyChair account and access the HCAI-ep conference with the appropriate role (‘PC member’).

You are likely to find yourself on a page listing the Submissions to the conference, but this is not the page you want. Instead, click on the Paper Bidding menu. Again you will see a list of the submissions, but for each one, you can now click links to indicate the level of your interest in reviewing them. To see the abstracts as well as the titles, click either Show Full Abstracts or Show abstract summaries at the upper right of the screen.

There is no need to click No for papers you do not wish to review; No is the default option. You should click Conflict for a paper if you believe you know who wrote it, and thus cannot be sure of reviewing it impartially.

The papers are presented in a random order for each bidder, to help ensure a good spread of bids. However, this order is preserved for each bidder, so if you spread your bidding over several sessions, the papers will appear in the same order each time you access them.

The bids are color-coded, but the selected yes/maybe/no/conflict link is also indicated in boldface, which will help those who have trouble distinguishing the colors.

Reviewing

A few days after the close of bidding, reviewers will be notified which papers they have been assigned, and paper reviewing will begin.

Reviewers are urged to download their assigned papers immediately and take a first look at them. If, for example, you discover that you cannot review a paper because you have discovered a conflict of interest, we would far rather be informed in the first few days of reviewing than on the last day.

When you log in to the appropriate role on EasyChair you will see a Reviews menu. On this page, you can download the papers assigned to you. You should also click Add Review for one of the papers, to get a first look at the review form – but don’t submit the review until you’ve written it!

Please aim to complete your reviews before the deadline; it is a deadline, not a target submission time. When reviewers leave the task till the last minute, things can go wrong (illness, work emergency, family emergency, reviewing taking longer than you anticipated), and then the reviews are not done by the deadline – which means that we are left asking for volunteers to review extra papers at very short notice.

There will be periodic reminders during the review period. If at any time during this period, you become aware that you will not have your reviews written by the deadline, please contact us immediately so that we can decide how to deal with it.

Once you have submitted your review for a paper, you will be able to see the other reviews already submitted for that paper, and EasyChair will notify you by email when further reviews are submitted. Please consider these other reviews, in preparation for the discussion period.

Here are some points that you should consider when reviewing.

Is the paper within the scope of HCAI-ep? Is it about the education of students who are studying computing? Is it pertinent to the category for which it has been submitted? Is it HCAI in practice? It needs to have an HCAI focus.
Your review should be written by you; please do not farm your reviews out to other people. If you believe that other people should be reviewing for HCAI-ep, please encourage them to do so in their own right. If you do not have the time or the inclination to do your own reviewing for HCAI-ep, please do not volunteer to do so.
Your review should indicate whether the paper as submitted is acceptable for HCAI-ep. There is no review-revise-review cycle, so papers should be marked as accept if they are currently acceptable, not if they have the potential to become acceptable after substantial revision. In particular, HCAI-ep does not have a conditional acceptance. If a paper cannot be made acceptable with grammatical corrections and/or minor revisions of content, you should recommend that it be rejected.
Whether or not a paper is accepted, the authors will want to know why. Please ensure that your review gives reasons, explanations, and examples of the points you make. Reviews just a few lines long are generally not helpful to the authors or the program chairs. Authors should be able to see the text parts of the reviews as a constructive critique of their submission.
Be sure that your overall recommendation tallies with your impression of the paper. If you do not believe that the paper should be accepted, please do not give it a 4 just to be nice, or to err on the side of generosity. It is more helpful to the program chairs and the authors if your review is honest and transparent and your overall recommendation reflects your impression.
HCAI-ep reviewing is dual-anonymous. You should not know who wrote the papers that you review, and the authors should not know who reviewed it. Please, therefore, take care not to divulge your identity in your review, for example by saying ‘This paper that I wrote might be helpful to you’ or by recommending the addition of references to a number of papers all of which you have (co-)authored.
Please appreciate that authors sometimes have to omit or disguise references to their own work in order for their paper to be anonymous. As a reviewer, you may give the authors the benefit of the doubt. Use the ‘Confidential comments to the committee’ box to indicate this to the program chairs; for example “This paper should reference Kim Lee’s work, unless those references were removed for anonymity”.
If you find that a paper you are reviewing is not completely anonymous, you may point this out to the authors. However, please do not divulge the authors’ identity to the other reviewers, and please continue to review the paper as though it were anonymous. If you feel that you cannot review it objectively, please notify the program chairs immediately.
Most papers have some flaws in their writing. The reviewers are not required to be editors, pointing out every flaw that requires correction. However, some reviewers choose to do this, and many authors appear to appreciate the additional service. The review form has a specific field for such suggestions, keeping them distinct from the strengths and weaknesses and the overall evaluation of the paper.
It is a good idea for reviews to be grammatically correct – especially if they criticise the grammar of the paper. Just as a poorly written paper gives the reader a poor first impression, a poorly written review can make the authors less inclined to accept its content. Please read your own reviews carefully, and, if necessary, submit revised versions with the spelling and grammar errors corrected. If you choose to draw attention to spelling issues in a paper, please be aware that many words have different spellings in different parts of the English-speaking world. Neither ‘analyze’ nor ‘analyse’ is wrong: they are different acceptable spellings; likewise ‘program’ and ‘programme’, ‘behavior’ and ‘behaviour’, and many more such pairs.
When reviewing a paper, please be aware of the category in which it was submitted. There are two categories: research papers and short papers. Different guidelines apply to each category, and it would be unreasonable, for example, to review a short paper as though it were a research paper.
The limit of six pages (with references possibly extending onto a seventh page) and four pages with references included depending on the track is a maximum, not a minimum. There is nothing wrong with shorter papers if they are good and pertinent; they do not need to be padded out to six pages. At the same time, if a shorter paper clearly lacks something that would have strengthened it, feel free to point that out to the authors.
Authors are not permitted to provide links to supplementary materials in a review submission. Author guidelines make it clear that the paper should still stand on its own merits. If authors overlook this guideline and provide links to supplementary material, reviewers are not expected to access those links and examine the material.
It is acceptable to point out formatting issues, but not to make them the deciding factor in a recommendation to reject. Some authors are still struggling to come to grips with the ACM templates. One version of the template even results in a single-column pdf. If in doubt, leave it to the proceedings chair to decide on a paper’s compatibility with the template.
Please be aware that different versions of the ACM template have different placeholders for the title and the authors’ names. There is nothing insidious about a paper that says it is being submitted to WOODSTOCK’18, June, 2018, El Paso, Texas USA, or that its authors are F. Surname et al. or G. Gubbiotti et al.; these are all defaults in different versions of the template. As with other aspects of the formatting, assume that it will be fixed if and when the paper is accepted for publication and revised.

Emergency reviewing (optional)

Despite the best of intentions, some reviewers find that they are not able to review the papers assigned to them and others simply drop out of contact for various reasons. The program chairs often discover this only at the end of the reviewing period. They then need to find reviewers who have completed their assigned reviews and are able to review one or two more papers within a day or two.

The call for emergency reviewers generally goes to all reviewers, but there is no expectation that all reviewers will respond. We understand that most reviewers now have other calls on their time, and we are appreciative and grateful that a few are able to step in and take on this additional load.

Proxy chair and expert panel

Submissions that represent a conflict of interest for all conference chairs are passed to the proxy chair. The proxy chair assembles an expert panel of two or more members, the members are not required to be part of the programme committee. The members of the expert panel are not known to the chairs. The proxy chair and expert panel consider the conflicted papers, reviews and any discussion amongst reviewers. The expert panel makes the final decision on the conflicted papers and this is communicated to the conference chairs.

Discussion

The discussion period facilitates communication among the reviewers and PCs to ensure that the submission is given full consideration in the review process.

Reviewer responsibilities during discussion and metareview

As a reviewer, you are expected to engage in the discussion on each of your papers during the discussion period. Read the reviews from the other reviewers and take part in the discussion using the Comments feature in EasyChair (beneath all the reviews). Your comments will not be sent to the paper’s authors, but the final version of your review will. If, after reading the other reviews and taking part in the discussion, you are inclined to revise your review, please do so. There is no obligation to revise your reviews, but your review should reflect your final impression of the paper, and compatible reviews from all reviewers make matters easier for the PCs and the authors of the submission.

If you do revise your review, please do not refer explicitly to other reviews. It is not appropriate to write, for example, “I agree with Reviewer 3 about the paper’s shortcomings”. It should be possible to read each review independently of the others. If you do wish to explain why you have revised your review, please say it in the Confidential comments part, where it will be seen by the other reviewers and the program chairs, but not by the paper’s authors.