PC Companion

A set of useful tools for a PC chair.

The current release is: v0.4

Seating Arrangement

When conducting a PC meeting in person, two reviewers should not sit next to each other, if one is a reviewer on a paper and the other one is named as a conflicting reviewer for this paper. Using this tool a seating arrangement with minimal conflicts can be computed.

Usage

Download three CSV exports from HotCRP:

1. The list of PC assignments: In the list of papers, select any paper discussed in the PC meeting, click on Download, select PC assignments, and click on Go.
2. The list of PC conflicts: In the list of papers, select any paper discussed in the PC meeting, click on Download, select PC conflicts, and click on Go.
3. The extended PC info: In the list of users, select the All reviewiers option and click on Go. Then select all reviewers participating in the PC meeting, click on Download, select PC info, and click on Go.

Start the pccompanion executable using the three downloaded files:

pccompanion --info /path/to/conf18-pcinfo.csv --assignments /path/to/conf18-pcassignments.csv --conflicts /path/to/conf18-pcconflicts.csv

This now starts the seating discovery using a simulated annealing algorithm. You can adjust the settings for this algorithm with these command line options:

--maxgen <value>
   The maximum number of generations (default is 1000000)

--maxnoimprovement <value>
   The maximum number of tolerated generation without improvement (default is 100000)

--sainittemp <value>
   The initial temperature for the simulated annealing algorithm (default is 0.3)

--sacooling <value>
   The cooling for the simulated annealing algorithm (default is 0.98)

--sacoolingschedule <value>
   The cooling schedule for the simulated annealing algorithm (default is 100)

History

The implementation used in this project is based on https://github.com/alexorso/easychairscripts and has been ported to Scala and adapted to HotCRP. Many authors have contributed to this implementation:

• Created by Kim Herzig kim@cs.uni-saarland.de on 2008-03-14.
• Edited by Andreas Zeller zeller@cs.uni-saarland.de.
• Edited by Alex Orso orso@cc.gatech.edu.
• Edited by Yue Jia yue.jia@ucl.ac.uk and Mark Harman mark.harman@ucl.ac.uk
• Edited by Darko Marinov marinov@illinois.edu.

Their work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/