ISCA

It is my pleasure to introduce this collection of papers selected for ISCA 2007. We received a total of 204 submissions for the conference, of which 46 where selected for the final program. At the PC meeting we were able to discuss 75 papers out of the 204 submissions. Out of the 46 papers accepted, 16 of those were PC member papers. For making decisions on submissions, only PC members who had read the submission were allowed to decide the outcome of the paper, unless there was a split decision. In this case, the whole PC voted on the outcome of the paper.

The review process was double-blind, and we used the rebuttal process as in recent conferences. Once these reviews were in, we e-mailed the authors allowing them to enter an additional 600-word author response. We used PC grading as part of the review process this year. The Program Committee was requested to grade the submissions after the author response was submitted. The grade for each paper represented the PC member's opinion of the paper after (1) reading all of the reviews, (2) reading the authors' response, and (3) potentially discussing the submission via e-mail. I found the PC grading beneficial since it (1) required all PC members to read the rebuttals and reviews before the meeting, (2) put the papers in an appropriate discussion order aligned with the PC members' view of the paper after reading the rebuttals and the other reviews, and (3) it started the PC off on a positive note. Using the PC grade order for discussion, we accepted the first 11 papers in 30 minutes. We discussed 22 papers before rejecting the first paper, and out of the top 35 ranked papers by PC grade, only 1 paper was rejected.

I used shepherding heavily in the PC meeting. Out of the 46 papers accepted, 16 were conditionally accepted with shepherding. Before taking a vote on a paper, there were a bunch of papers that had a novel idea or a contribution the community would benefit from, but there were some issues with the paper that would prevent it from being accepted straight out. For every paper in this category, I checked to see if it could be saved with shepherding. This consisted of (1) verifying that there was a sold contribution to be had from the paper, (2) seeing if the problems could be fixed during shepherding, and (3) identifying exactly what a shepherd would have the authors fix in order for the paper to be finally accepted. I tried to make sure this option was given to every paper that at least one person on the PC wanted to accept.

The SIGARCH guidelines recommend that we should not allow PC members to submit more than 2 papers. I instead limited each PC member to at most 2 accepted papers, and PC members could submit as many papers as they wanted. In addition, at the PC meeting we only discussed the PC member papers above the same threshold applied to non-PC member papers, so there were a lot of PC member papers not discussed at the PC meeting. Applying these rules resulted in only 1 PC member with three papers discussed, 5 PC members with two papers discussed, 13 PC members with one paper discussed, and this is with several PC members submitting 3 or more papers.