PanelsSIGCSE TS 2023

Panel sessions provide an opportunity for expert panelists to present their views on a specific topic, and then to discuss these views among themselves and with the audience. Usually, a panel session starts with a brief introduction of the panel topic and the participants, followed by short presentations by the panelists giving their views. Panel sessions are scheduled for 75 minutes total, but keep in mind that successful panels must allow sufficient opportunity (about 30 minutes) for an interactive question-and-answer (Q&A) period involving both the panelists and the audience.

When assembling a panel, we encourage authors to carefully consider ACM’s guidance for Building Diverse Teams. A typical panel will consist of four participants, including the moderator. Limiting a panel to four participants allows sufficient time for audience questions. Proposals with more than four panelists must convincingly show that all panelists will be able to speak, and the audience able to respond, within the session time.

NEW IN 2023: A single author may appear on no more than four total panel and special session submissions combined. Should more than four submissions be received with a given author, only the first four will be reviewed and all others will be desk rejected. This interim policy is intended to promote greater diversity in authorship on these tracks and will be re-evaluated by the SIGCSE TS Steering Committee following 2023.

Authors submitting work to SIGCSE TS 2023 are responsible for complying with all applicable conference authorship policies and those articulated by ACM. If you have questions about any of these policies, please contact program@sigcse2023.org for clarification prior to submission.

Presentation Modality

All panels at SIGCSE TS 2023 will be available for hybrid presentation modality. A hybrid session is a live event where in-person and online attendees can interact. Presenters and attendees in hybrid sessions may be either in-person in Toronto or online. Panel proposals need not explicitly designate online and in-person panelists, but conference organizers will need this information shortly after notification of acceptance.

Accepted Panels

Deadlines and Submission

Panel submissions consist of a 2-page extended abstract about the work including a 250-word short abstract, additional content about the work, and references. Panel submissions to the SIGCSE TS 2023 must be made through EasyChair no later than Friday, August 19, 2022. The track chairs reserve the right to desk reject submissions that are incomplete after the deadline has passed.

Important Dates

Abstracts

All panel submissions must have a plain-text abstract of up to 250 words. Abstracts should not contain subheadings or citations. The abstract should be submitted in EasyChair along with the submission metadata, and it should be included in the PDF version of the submission at the appropriate location.

Submission Templates

SIGCSE TS 2023 is not participating in the new ACM workflow, template, and production system. All panel submissions must be in English and formatted using the 2-column ACM SIG Conference Proceedings format and US letter size pages (8.5x11 inch or 215.9 x 279.4mm).

Page Limits: Panel submissions are limited to a maximum of 2 pages of body content (including all titles, author information, abstract, main text, tables and illustrations, acknowledgements, and supplemental material).

MS Word Authors: Please use the interim Word template provided by ACM. NOTE: Each author should be defined separately for accurate metadata identification. Multiple authors may share one affiliation. Include space for authors’ e-mail addresses whenever possible on separate lines. Grouping authors’ names or e-mail addresses, or providing an ‘e-mail alias’ is not acceptable, e.g., {brian,lina,leenkiat}@university.edu or firstname.lastname@college.org

LaTeX Authors:

• Overleaf provides a suitable two-column sig conference proceedings template.
• Other LaTeX users may alternatively use the ACM Primary template, adding the “sigconf” format option in the documentclass to obtain the 2-column format.

At the time of submission all entries should include author information, an abstract, body content, references, and placeholders for the ACM Reference Format and copyright blocks. NOTE: Panel submissions may omit the following sections from the standard ACM template: keywords and CCS Concepts.

Submissions that do not adhere to page limits or formatting requirements will be desk rejected without review.

Accessibility: SIGCSE TS 2023 authors are strongly encouraged to prepare submissions using these templates in such a manner that the content is widely accessible to potential reviewers, track chairs, and readers. Please see these resources for preparing an accessible submission.

Additional Format Instructions

Authors submitting to the panel track should use the standardized section names and additional formatting information when preparing their proposals.

• When providing author information, indicate which of the panelists is the moderator by placing the word “Moderator” in parentheses after their name.
• Abstract: Should provide a brief summary (up to 250 words) of your panel.
• Summary: The first section should be titled Summary and should provide an expanded summary of the panel’s goals, intended audience, and relevance to the SIGCSE community.
• Panel Structure: The section following the summary should explain the panel structure and plan for audience participation, and provide sufficient time for audience interaction and questions. This section should include a clear statement about the preferred delivery mode for the panel: all panelists in-person, all panelists remote, or a mixture of in-person and remote panelists.
• Position Statements: The subsequent sections should contain the position statements of each panelist and a brief description of their expertise and background as it relates to the panel. Title each section by identifying the panelist.
• References: Citing relevant work where appropriate is encouraged, but not required. If references are included, they should be placed in a separate section titled References and should follow the ACM formatting guidelines.

Single Anonymized Review

Submissions to the panel track are reviewed with the single-anonymous review process. Submissions should include author names and affiliations. Thus, the author identities are known to reviewers, but reviewers are anonymous to each other and to the authors.

The reviewing process includes a discussion phase after initial reviews have been posted. During this time, the reviewers can examine all reviews and privately discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the work in an anonymous manner through EasyChair. This discussion information can be used by the track chairs in addition to the content of the review in making final acceptance decisions.

The SIGCSE TS 2023 review process does not have a rebuttal period for authors to respond to comments, and all acceptance decisions are final.

ACM Policies

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects (https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/research-involving-human-participants-and-subjects). Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID (https://orcid.org/register), so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors (https://authors.acm.org/author-resources/orcid-faqs). The collection process has started and will roll out as a requirement throughout 2022. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

What Gets Published?

The 2-page panel proposal for each accepted submission will be published in the SIGCSE TS 2023 proceedings.

Presentation Details

All named panelists for accepted panels must register for and attend the SIGCSE TS 2023 either in person or online. Panels will be facilitated through a hybrid participation format.

Further details about post-acceptance processes and presentation logistics will be provided by the time acceptance decisions are sent out.

Sample panel proposals can be found here:

• Sample proposal (Word)

Language Editing Assistance

ACM has partnered with International Science Editing (ISE) to provide language editing services to ACM authors. ISE offers a comprehensive range of services for authors including standard and premium English language editing, as well as illustration and translation services. Editing services are at author expense and do not guarantee publication of a manuscript.

Review Timeline

Overview

Panel sessions provide an opportunity for expert panel members to present their views on a specific topic and then to discuss these views among themselves and with the audience. Usually a panel session starts with a brief introduction of the panel topic and the participants, followed by short presentations by the panelists giving their views. They are scheduled in standard conference spaces. The session must allow sufficient opportunity (about 30 minutes) for an interactive question and answer period involving both the panelists and the audience.

A typical panel will consist of four participants, including the moderator. Limiting a panel to four participants allows sufficient time for audience questions. Proposals with more than four panelists must convincingly show that all panelists will be able to speak, and the audience able to respond, within the session time.

Criteria used in reviewing the proposals include the likely level of interest of the topic, the presence of panel members with multiple perspectives on the topic, and the likelihood that the panel will leave sufficient time for audience participation.

If the proposal is accepted, all presenters listed in the panel description will be required to register for the conference and to participate in the session.

Single-Anonymous Review Process

Submissions to the Panel track are reviewed with the single-anonymous review process. Submissions should include author names and affiliations. Thus, the author identities are known to reviewers, but reviewers are anonymous to each other and to the authors.

The reviewing process includes a discussion phase after initial reviews have been posted. During this time, the reviewers can examine all reviews and privately discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the work in an anonymous manner through EasyChair. Reviewers can refer to each other by their reviewer number on that submission’s review. This discussion information can be used by the track chairs in addition to the content of the review in making final acceptance decisions.

The SIGCSE TS 2023 review process does not have a rebuttal period for authors to respond to comments, and all acceptance decisions are final.

EasyChair Reviewer Profile

When you receive your invitation to review for SIGCSE TS 2023, please take a few moments to update your profile and select 3-5 topics that you are most qualified for reviewing. To do so, select SIGCSE TS 2023 > My topics from the menu.

Please check at most 5 topics! More topics will make it harder for the EasyChair system to make a good set of matches.

Getting Started Reviewing

Before starting your review, you may be asked by the Track Chairs to declare conflicts with any submitting authors. Please do so in a timely manner so we can avoid conflicts during assignment.

After the submission deadline and before reviewing can begin, Reviewers will bid on submissions they are interested in reviewing. Please bid for submissions where the title and abstract are in your area of expertise. Bidding will help with assigning submissions for review that you’re qualified and interested in reviewing! If you do not bid within the allotted time window, we will use topics to assign submissions for review.

As a Reviewer, we ask that you carefully read each submission assigned to you and write a constructive review that concisely summarizes what you believe the submission to be about. When reviewing a submission, consider:

• the strengths and weaknesses,
• the contribution to an outstanding SIGCSE TS 2023 program and experience for attendees, and
• how it brings new ideas or extends current ideas through replication to the field and to practitioners and researchers of computing education.

Panel Review Guidelines

SIGCSE Technical Symposium panel proposals are reviewed using EasyChair. Each proposal is assigned to at least three reviewers.

Please provide constructive feedback and clearly justify your choice of rating to help the authors. A review that gives a low score with no written comments is not helpful to the authors since it simply tells the authors that they have been unsuccessful, with no indication of how or why.

The review form for panels will ask you to comment specifically on three aspects of the proposal, described below. Please refer to the prompts below as you write your review.

1. Relevance and Interest
   • Is the panel topic clearly stated?
   • Are the benefits to the SIGCSE audience clearly indicated?
   • Is the panel topic of interest to the SIGCSE community?
2. Structure & Plan for Audience Participation
   • Is there an overview of the panel structure?
   • Does the proposed structure include time for a brief introduction of the topic and the panelists?
   • Does the proposed structure include time for panelists to present their views?
   • Does the proposed structure allow sufficient time (at least 30 mins) for an interactive question and answer period between the audience and panelists?
   • Could the panel still be effective if given a shorter session?
   • Do the panelists have a viable plan for a hybrid format?
3. Panelist considerations
   • Does the proposal clearly identify the panelists (i.e., name and affiliation) and describe their expertise related to the topic?
   • Will the panel be well positioned to present multiple views on the topic, representing the diversity of perspectives within the SIGCSE community? Note: Please refer to “ACM’s definitions of diversity and inclusion”. Please also refer to “ACM’s recommended considerations when forming diverse teams” (or diverse panels in this case).
   • Does the proposal clearly identify no more than four panelists, including the moderator? Otherwise, are each of the panelists needed for representing a full range of perspectives on the panel topic?

While your review text should clearly support your scores and recommendation, please do not include your preference for acceptance or rejection of a submission in the feedback to the authors. Instead, use the provided radio buttons to make a recommendation (the authors will not see this) based on your summary review and provide any details that refer to your recommendation directly in the confidential comments to the APC or track chairs. Remember that as a reviewer, you will only see a small portion of the submissions, so one that you recommend for acceptance may be rejected when considering the other reviewer recommendations and the full set of submissions.

Discussion

The discussion and recommendation period provides the opportunity for the Track Chairs to discuss reviews and feedback so they can provide the best recommendation for acceptance or rejection to the Program Chairs and that the submission is given full consideration in the review process. We ask that Reviewers engage in discussion when prompted by other reviewers and the Track Chairs by using the Comments feature of EasyChair. During this period you will be able to revise your review based on the discussion, but you are not required to do so.

The Track Chairs will make a final recommendation to the Program Chairs from your feedback.

Recalcitrant Reviewers

Reviewers who don’t submit reviews, have reviews with limited constructive feedback, or who submit inappropriate reviews will be removed from the reviewer list (as per SIGCSE policy). Recalcitrant reviewers will be informed of their removal from the reviewer list. Reviewers with repeated offenses (two within a three year period) will be removed from SIGCSE reviewing for three years.