Call for Shadow PC Participation

Pascal Felber (U. Neuchâtel, Switzerland) and Rüdiger Kapitza (TU Braunschweig, Germany) are organizing a shadow program committee for the EuroSys 2016 conference under the sponsorship of EuroSys. If you are interested in participating, please send e-mail to shadow2016@eurosys.org before September 25th 2015. Please include a short paragraph describing your current research, areas of expertise, and publications: this will help us with selecting candidates and assigning papers for review. Please also get in touch if you have any queries.

Principle

Being on a shadow PC is an excellent opportunity for young systems researchers (PhD students, post-docs and new faculty members) to get experience in community service, i.e., program committee practices.

Shadow PC members are expected to write their own detailed and rigorous reviews for their assigned papers. We expect a review load of 15–20 papers per member. Members especially those based in Europe are also expected to attend a one-day shadow PC meeting in person: this will be in Lisbon, Portugal. Members will be responsible for their own travel and accommodation for the PC meeting. EuroSys has some limited funds that we will use for travel grants to help with the costs of this; please contact shadow2016@eurosys.org for more details.

The EuroSys shadow PC will follow roughly the same timeline as the main PC (http://eurosys16.doc.ic.ac.uk/). We plan to have the shadow PC meeting close in time to the main PC meeting (week of January 25-29, 2016) and in the same place (Lisbon). We are also planning a one-day workshop in Lisbon that week to which both shadow and main PC members are invited.

Being a member of a shadow PC is a lot of work without any recognition. However, it is also very rewarding and worthwhile for a number of reasons, including:

Getting to know how a PC is run and how it operates.
Seeing how more experienced reviewers judge the same papers that you review.
Getting to see both strong and weak papers at the submission stage.
Discovering what it takes to publish a paper in a highly selective conference such as EuroSys.
Having a chance to read top-notch papers in your area of expertise before they are published.
Submitting high quality reviews makes one a possible candidate for future PCs.
Discussing the papers with one or more EuroSys PC members who will attend the shadow meeting.
Getting to know other shadow PC members.