The new automated IEEE INFOCOM review assignment system

In academic conferences, the structure of the review process has always been considered a critical aspect of ensuring the quality of the conferences. Assigning reviews manually, by either the TPC chairs or Area Chairs, is time-consuming, and the process does not scale well to the number of submitted papers. Organizing a conference with multiple symposia (or tracks) helps its scalability, but predetermined boundaries between tracks may lead to inefficient use of reviewer expertise and suboptimal review assignment. Inspired by a rich literature on the problem of automated review assignment, we have designed and implemented a new review assignment system, called Erie, and successfully deployed it for IEEE INFOCOM 2015 and INFOCOM 2016. Implemented in Python, Erie is designed to use Latent Semantic Indexing to compute the suitability score between a submitted paper and a reviewer's representative papers, and to solve an optimization problem that maximizes the total suitability score across all submitted papers to the conference. Anecdotal evidence shows that Erie outperformed the accuracy of manual assignments by Area Chairs, and helped to improve the percentage of expert reviewers by a substantial margin.