Mission Statement

The goal of the 2027 ACM CODASPY Shadow PC is to use the conference review cycle as an explicit reviewer-development program to train the next generation of reviewers and improve the reviewer pipeline. In its inaugural year, the 2027 CODASPY Shadow PC will serve as professional development program for junior researchers to learn about the academic peer review process as a reviewer, summarizing contributions, identifying decisive weaknesses, judging evaluation quality, and writing constructive reviews. In subsequent years, the Shadow PC would provide mid-career researchers an opportunity to practice the role of an Area Chair: overseeing a batch of papers, facilitating reviewer discussions, driving consensus, and maintaining consistency and calibration across submissions. In this manner, the ACM CODASPY Shadow PC would serve the data and applications security and privacy community in general and the CODASPY community in particular.

Shadow PC Program Description

The Shadow PC is a miniature, parallel PC—not “extra reviewers.” It would provide reviews on a subset of submissions to the research track of the conference (from authors who opt-in for their paper to be reviewed by the Shadow PC). It would provide additional technically informed feedback without changing the actual conference PC decision. The Shadow PC would be mentored by the Shadow PC Chair and a group of senior Mentors who are very well-regarded senior researchers from the CODASPY community.

The Shadow PC will mirror several features of the regular PC of the research track, including evaluating CODASPY submissions, bidding, discussions, and the technology platform used. It would focus on deliberate practice, constructive feedback, and calibration – in a multi-step process with many intermediate deadlines and a smaller review load. Shadow reviews for papers that are reviewed by the Shadow PC will be sent out to authors after the end of the actual review process, but shadow reviews will not affect the official decision made by the regular PC.

Participants will have to abide by the same rules and restrictions applicable to regular PC members. This includes, but is not limited to, conflicts of interest, double-blind reviews, and rules against discussing the papers outside of the PC context, restrictions on the use of AI, and using in any way results from reviewed papers before such papers have been published. Delegated reviews (i.e., external reviews) are not allowed for the Shadow PC.

Shadow PC Expectations

For 2027, the Shadow PC is via nomination. Shadow PC members must commit themselves to participating in the review process and in all its phases across a roughly 2-month period, writing reviews for 3 papers total and participating in discussions (approximately 20 to 40 hours of work). Timely reviewing and participation in discussions is essential to the good functioning of any PC. Candidates who might be unable to fulfil their reviewing duties should refrain from applying. Shadow PC members must follow the ethical standards of peer review (which we will explain), respect the anonymity of the review process, and not share which papers they have reviewed. Shadow PC members who do not adhere to the ethical standards of peer review will be excluded from the process and will be reported to the ACM for misconduct.

(See also Delvin Varghese, Hafeni Mthoko, Jessica Watterson, Pranav Kulkarni, Dan Richardson, Shaimaa Lazem, and Patrick Olivier. “Shadow Program Committee: Designing for Diversity and Equity within Academic Communities.” ACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies 2, no. 1 (2024): 1–24.)