ACM CCS 2011: Under the hood of the reviewing process

ACM CCS 2011 just took place this week, so I decided to give a bit more insight into a few processes the program chairs used behind the scenes to manage what is the largest security conference to date. Vitaly Shmatikov (CCS11 Program co-chair) has already given a short introduction this year’s process: we received 429 full papers that we had to review with 54 PC members. While no hard target was set at the start of the process we expected to accept around the 60 papers that are now forming the program of CCS 2011. These are my views and opinions on the process, and they are not automatically shared by anyone else, including Vitaly.

Note: This post describes automated statistics we used to interpret scores of reviews to guide us in assigning more reviews or guiding discussion. All final acceptance decision were taken the old fashioned way through qualitative assesment of the reviews and discussion in the PC.