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.

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, but bad or boring ideas should be. Please familiarize yourself with the information in the Call for Participation.

ETHICS & PROFESSIONALISM. Please read the ethics guidelines. It is extremely important that we uphold our reputation for treating ideas confidentially and professionally. New this year: by accepting a paper for review, you are guaranteeing to review all materials submitted in the approved formats: PDF for documents, QuickTime MPEG-4 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. (The current version of the Apple QuickTime player is version 6.5; it plays QuickTime MPEG-4 files and is available for free from http://quicktime.apple.com/.) 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 acknowledgments. This information will of course be included in the published version.

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 paper.

ONLINE REVIEW

You will receive a customized email review form for each paper you are assigned. To access electronically submitted papers and supplemental material, log in to the e-review system the same way you would to make a submission to SIGGRAPH 2004, using your existing electronic submission account (if you submitted to or reviewed for SIGGRAPH 2003 or 2004). Once you have logged in, follow the "Reviewer Access/Papers" link to view the papers assigned to you for review. If you have any questions or problems with the online review system, please contact:

Karen Dickie SIGGRAPH 2004 Papers Program Administrator 617-621-7511 papersadmin@siggraph.org

If Karen is not available there are a few other people on the papersadmin@siggraph.org alias who can also assist you.

The deadline for completed reviews is Friday, 19 March 2004, unless your senior reviewer set an earlier deadline for your review.

ACM DIGITAL LIBRARY
ACM has generously provided full access to the ACM Digital Library for SIGGRAPH 2004 paper reviewer usage, effective 26 January through 29 March 2004. You are encouraged to make full use of this resource, located at:

http://www.acm.org/dl/

When you attempt to access the full text of an article, you will be prompted for a username and a password. Please use “siggraph” for the username and “reviewer” for the password. (Both username and password are all lower-case letters.)

TIMELY REVIEWS. Senior reviewers will give you a deadline for your reviews. 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 immediately preceding the Papers committee meeting.

WHEN YOU'RE DONE. When you have finished with your review, you should destroy any paper manuscript and/or supporting material (such as videotapes) you received, as described in the ethics guidelines. If you have written notes directly on a manuscript that you want to return to the author, send the marked-up paper back to the senior reviewer. Be sure that the marked-up paper is received by the senior reviewer prior to the review deadline.