Resource Optimization for Program Committee Members: A Subreview Article

Michael A Bender (1) , Samuel Mccauley (1) , Bertrand Simon (2, 3) , Shikha Singh (1) , Frédéric Vivien (2, 3)

1 SBU - Stony Brook University [SUNY]
2 ROMA - Optimisation des ressources : modèles, algorithmes et ordonnancement
3 LIP - Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme

This paper formalizes a resource-allocation problem that is all too familiar to the seasoned program-committee member. For each submission j that the PC member has the honor of reviewing, there is a choice. The PC member can spend the time to review submission j in detail on his/her own at a cost of Cj. Alternatively, the PC member can spend the time to identify and contact peers, hoping to recruit them as subreviewers, at a cost of 1 per subreviewer. These potential subreviewers have a certain probability of rejecting each review request, and this probability increases as time goes on. Once the PC member runs out of time or unasked experts, he/she is forced to review the paper without outside assistance. This paper gives optimal solutions to several variations of the scheduling-reviewers problem. Most of the solutions from this paper are based on an iterated log function of Cj. In particular, with k rounds, the optimal solution sends the k-iterated log of Cj requests in the first round, the (k − 1)-iterated log in the second round, and so forth. One of the contributions of this paper is solving this problem exactly, even when rejection probabilities may increase. Naturally, PC members must make an integral number of subreview requests. This paper gives, as an intermediate result, a linear-time algorithm to transform the artificial problem in which one can send fractional requests into the less-artificial problem in which one sends an integral number of requests. Finally, this paper considers the case where the PC member knows nothing about the probability that a potential subreviewer agrees to review the paper. This paper gives an approximation algorithm for this case, whose bounds improve as the number of rounds increases.

Mots clés: Scheduling; Delegation; Subreviews

Domaines: Algorithme et structure de données [cs.DS]

Michael A Bender, Samuel Mccauley, Bertrand Simon, Shikha Singh, Frédéric Vivien. Resource Optimization for Program Committee Members: A Subreview Article. 8th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms, Jun 2016, La Maddalena, Italy. pp.20, ⟨10.4230/LIPIcs.FUN.2016.7⟩. ⟨hal-01326277⟩