Understanding review activity in academic conferences

Human activities have been investigated and applied in various fields, such as context-aware computing, social network service, location-based service, etc. However, the human activities in the review process of academic conferences have seldom been analyzed. It is no doubt that review process plays an important role in deciding whether a paper could be accepted or not. In this paper, we present our work to understand the review activities by analyzing the anonymized review data of two conferences (ACM SIGCOMM and UIC). The descriptive statistics is used in the analysis. We got some interesting knowledge, which is significant for interpreting how the reviewers give their reviews in academic conferences, such as the relationships between the score, confidence and account of review characters.