Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents

This is a chance to do someone a great favor and get one in return, as well as to learn what it's like to do peer review.

Read the below instructions carefully!

In this exercise you will review your fellow student's full paper. (See peer review assignments at the bottom of this page.)

As an author: Send your assigned fellow student the most recent version of your paper at least 5 days before the assignment deadline.

As reviewer: Read the below peer review guidelines carefully. Do your best to provide the author with useful, truthful, and appropriately detailed feedback on any and all aspects of the paper that you feel requires his/her attention for improving it. In typical peer reviews you give the editor a recommendation, which is either accept as is, accept with minor modifications, accept with major modifications, or reject. Here, instead, you will give the paper a grade (list this along with your hand-in in Canvas marked 'Grade: x,x'). Make sure this number makes sense in light of / matches your written comments. Make sure you submit a copy of the actual paper you reviewed with your submission.

If you do a good job you will get 3 points for this exercise.

• Typically you lay out the categories that matter in your review, even before you start.
• Categories you will use here (and these are fairly typical) are:
  • Clarity and ease of reading (including structure, figures, explanations, etc.)
  • Quality of the written English (grammar, spelling, and related)
  • Novelty - how much of an advance on current state of the art is the work (this should only play a minor role in your review here, since the assignment does not emphasize this factor)
  • Impact - potential for the work to have fundamental impact, both scientific, technological, and business wise
  • It is useful to have a category called “minor comments” or “other comments” where you put general points, spelling suggestions, questions about grammar, etc., because it is often easiest for the author to do a pass on these separately from deeper concerns about the content of the paper, structure, and other issues having to do with the content and that generally take much more time to fix.
• Do at least two read-through passes - especially to ensure that your early comments are coherent and consistent with those made later (often you see e.g. a better place to make a comment than the initial place you mentioned it)
• You should take notes while you read, some of which will probably change in a second pass
• Keep these questions in mind at all times: What are the most important things for the author to address, given the title and stated aims of the work? What is the most useful way for me to explain what these issues are?

EOF