Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!iris.cis.ohio-state.edu!byland From: byland@iris.cis.ohio-state.edu (Tom Bylander) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: AAAI Reviews Message-ID: <82157@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Date: 16 Jul 90 15:15:23 GMT References: Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: Tom Bylander Organization: Ohio State University Computer and Information Science Lines: 30 >Was your paper rejected by AAAI this year? Were the reviews, in your >opinion, incompetent and irresponsible? Is there an AI conference with competent reviewers? Anecdotally, I have found AAAI to much more of a closed conference than other AI conferences. My impression is that the AAAI programming committee wields more power than those of other conferences and is very partial to "mainstream" research. (What counts as "mainstream" depends on the powers-that-be in each individual subarea.) In contrast, I have not found IJCAI reviewers (a category to which I belong) to be any more or less incompetent than AAAI reviewers. However, my impression is that IJCAI reviewers are more methodologically mixed than AAAI reviewers, giving non-mainstream work a better chance to be accepted. In general, many reviewers (including myself) have a narrow concept of what an AI result should be. However, when I review a paper, I try to judge the paper within the framework of its methodology, rather than my own. I accept the paper if I think it is reasonably rigorous and will be interesting to the methodological subgroup. Oh, to answer your questions---yes, my paper was rejected and IMHO one of the two reviewers was incompetent and irresponsible. Apparently, I will have to use a lot more precious space to explain why my problem is interesting and to explain my methodology. I hoped to do much of this work by referring to previous papers (in arcane proceedings like IJCAI and AAAI) that already explain these issues in detail. Unfortunately, the reviewer had not read them and consequently misunderstood what I was doing. Tom