Evaluation criteria
RTNS is an open and friendly conference with a great sense for community. The evaluation criteria that will be applied to all submitted papers reflect the spirit of the conference.
Contributions and Originality
RTNS welcomes theoretical and practical contributions concerning all aspects of embedded real-time systems. The contributions must be original, i.e., not published or submitted elsewhere. Since the focus of RTNS is on discussions and community building, we explicitly ask for submissions that may spark interesting and lively discussions at the conference. Submissions presenting promising, but not fully mature results are also welcome provided that the submission presents a complete contribution.
Technical Correctness and Writing Quality
Each submission must be technically correct, and the technical correctness will be assessed during the review process. The authors are thus required to provide all necessary details and proofs to convince the reviewers of the correctness of the submission. Furthermore, we recommend to provide source-code of implementations and to participate in artifact evaluation, if applicable.
The writing quality is similarly important, and all papers published at RTNS must be well written and readable. We expect authors to check as best they can for spelling and grammatical mistakes before submission. However, we also recognise that authors may be writing in their second or even third language, and still developing their technical writing skills. Provided that it is possible to properly understand the submission, reviewers will consider primarily the technical contribution when making their decisions. Authors may be required to make improvements to presentation and writing quality before publication.
First Submission of Early-Stage Researchers
RTNS encourages young PhD students to submit their first paper (as first author) to a full conference. PhD students submitting their first paper to a full conference can indicate so during paper submissions. While the final version must fulfil all criteria for acceptance, shortcomings that can be corrected for the final version will be tolerated. The reviewers are instructed to be lenient in these cases, and will write a detailed reviews including instructions on how to improve the submission.
Transparency
Selecting the Program Chairs
Two program chairs are chosen by the steering committee, one from the French community and one from the international one, with the goal to cover network and system themes.
Selecting the Program Committee
The Program Committee (PC) is selected by the Program Co-Chairs and validated by the Steering Committee.
The PC has to ensure sufficient expertise in the topics addressed by the conference. It has to be representative of both the french community and the international one. Roughly one third of the PC is changed each year, in order to ensure a good balance between continuity and turnover.
Submitting papers
PC co-chairs are not permitted to submit regular papers, while PC members are.
The review process
The review process for RTNS is single-blind, meaning that the identities of the reviewers are anonymous, but the author’s names and affiliations are on the papers.
PC members bid for papers. They indicate their reviewing preferences and their Conflicts of Interest (CoIs). Based on these preferences, PC co-Chairs assign papers to PC members.
Each paper is reviewed by at least three PC members.
As soon as the initial reviews have been completed, PC members can access to the other reviews for papers they were allocated.
PC co-Chairs choose a small number of meta-reviewers, typically six, within the PC. Each meta-reviewer is assigned a subset of the papers within his/her area of expertise. He/she is in charge of organizing, for each paper, the online discussion between the reviewers, in order to come to a meta-review.
PC co-Chairs organize a meeting with the meta-reviewers. Each paper is discussed. The meta-reviewer summarizes the work and the review comments. The decision is made after discussion between PC co-Chairs and meta-reviewers, based on review comments. A paper can be accepted, rejected or shepherded. In the later case, points which must be addressed in the revision are clearly listed. The paper will be accepted only if these points are satisfactorily addressed.
PC members, including PC co-Chairs, having a CoI with a paper will not review, see the reviews or be part of the discussion about this paper.
The review process for papers where both PC co-Chairs have CoI is handled by an alternate chair outside of the conference management system. This alternate chair is one of the meta-reviewers and he/she takes over the physical meeting when these papers are discussed.
Awards
PC co-Chairs select a small sub-committee to consider which papers (typically three or four) are of outstanding quality. Those papers will receive Outstanding Paper Awards and form the shortlist for the Best Paper and Best Student Paper awards. The sub-committee gives these two awards on the basis of the final versions of the papers as well as the presentations. The recipient of the Best Student Paper Award must have as its first author a person who was a student at the time of the submission deadline.
PC Co-Chairs select a small sub-committee among the attendees to the conference who will choose the recipient of the Best Presentation Award.
Conflicts of Interest (CoIs)
RTNS considers the usual definition of a CoI. Therefore, a PC member has a conflict with a paper if they:
- had at any time a supervisor/PhD relationship,
- are both from the same institution, or have worked at the same institution in the past 3 years,
- are currently working together on a research paper or project, or have done so during the past 3 years,
- are related, or are close personal friends,
- are in some form of financial relationship, or have been at some point during the past 3 years,
- has any other reason or circumstance that creates a risk that professional judgement may be unduly influenced.
