Thank you for agreeing to review a paper for SIGGRAPH. Your reviews have a direct and important impact on the quality of the most important conference in computer graphics. Your reviews also help the computer-graphics community as a whole to improve the quality of its research. To access review materials and the web review forms, please login to the online submission system using your standard submission account.

What to Look For

Look for what's good or stimulating in the paper. Minor flaws can be corrected and shouldn't be a reason to reject a paper. Each paper that is accepted should, however, be technically sound and make a substantial contribution to the field. Please familiarize yourself with the information in the Call for Participation. Please note also that the quality standard at SIGGRAPH Asia is exactly the same as that of SIGGRAPH. Lastly, it is important to support new ideas that will spawn future work. As a reviewer, you should be particularly receptive to fresh new ideas, even if those ideas aren't perfectly examined and validated in the submission. An important factor in evaluating a paper is the degree to which it will inspire follow-on research. After all, we are looking for papers that will propel the field forward as rapidly and vibrantly as possible, while at the same time keeping us well grounded academically. Finding the right balance obviously isn't easy, but doing so will ensure that SIGGRAPH (Asia) remains a breeding ground for significant new areas of research.

Please read the ethics guidelines. It is extremely important that we uphold our reputation for treating ideas confidentially and professionally. By accepting a paper for review, you are guaranteeing to review all materials submitted in the approved formats: PDF for documents, QuickTime MPEG-4 and DivX Version 6 for videos (and don't forget to check for an audio track!), and TIFF, PNG, or JPG, for images. If you are not willing to make this guarantee, please recuse yourself from reviewing the paper.
You are also expected to make a reasonable effort to review materials in non-approved formats, but you are not under the same absolute obligation to do so.

Blind Reviews

We are using blind reviewing again this year. Authors were asked to take reasonable efforts to hide their identities, including not listing their names or affiliations and omitting acknowledgements. This information will of course be included in the published version.
One area where anonymity can affect your evaluation of the submitted paper is if the paper builds on ideas that were previously available, for instance as a SIGGRAPH Sketch or Talk, or as a technical report or thesis. SIGGRAPH policy says that such previous availability should not be considered as prior art for the authors of the previously available material and need not be cited in such a case, but it should be considered prior art and should be cited otherwise. Because of blind reviewing, you won't know which case applies, so please make it clear how your evaluation would differ if the author of the paper was or was not the author of the previous material. (Example: "If the paper author is the poster author, my score is 4, and I'd recommend that the paper add a half-page giving a bit more detail about .... If the paper author is not the poster author, my score is 2.")

Be Specific

Please be specific and detailed in your reviews. In the discussion of related work and references, simply saying "this is well known" or "this has been common practice in the industry for years" is not sufficient: cite specific publications or public disclosures of techniques! The Explanation section is easily the most important of the review. Your discussion, sometimes more than your score, will help the Papers Committee decide which papers to accept, so please be thorough. Your reviews will be returned to the authors, so you should include any specific feedback on ways the authors can improve their papers. For more suggestions on writing your reviews, please read Greg Turk's web page on Writing Technical Reviews.

Online Review

To access electronically submitted papers and supplemental material, log in to the online submission system the same way you would to make a submission to SIGGRAPH 2011, using your existing electronic submission account. Once you have logged in, follow the "Access the Jury/Review System" link to view the papers assigned to you for review. If you have any questions or problems with the online review system, please contact:
Katja Muenzer
SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 Technical Papers Program Administrator
katja_muenzer (at) siggraph.org

ACM & Eurographics Digital Libraries

ACM and Eurographics have generously provided full access to their respective Digital Libraries for SIGGRAPH 2011 paper reviewer usage. You are encouraged to make full use of these resources:
ACM Digital Library
Eurographics Digital Library
You must login to access the full text of an article. A username and password will be made available via our electronic review system to each person who has agreed to review a SIGGRAPH paper.

Timely Reviews

The deadline for completed reviews is 14 July 2011, unless your senior reviewer set an earlier deadline for your review. The Papers Committee has a lot of work to do after the reviews are in. Adhering to this deadline is extremely important. We will once again be offering an author rebuttal process this year preceding the Papers committee meeting.

When You're Done

In previous years, these guidelines said "after the review process, destroy all copies of papers and videos that are not returned to the senior reviewer and erase any implementations you have written to evaluate the ideas in the papers, as well as any results of those implementations." However, SIGGRAPH now has a new process for revised papers that were rejected from a previous SIGGRAPH conference, where the authors can choose to release the previous reviewers' names, so that the same reviewers can be reassigned. Therefore, there is a chance that you will be asked in the future to review such a resubmission, and may need your notes, marked manuscripts, or implementations. So you may keep them if necessary, but please be careful to insulate the ideas you learned from the review from your own research, and from your colleagues and students. Also, please be aware that your reviews may be perused by other future SIGGRAPH reviewers.