RAS Seeks Senior Reviewers for the Young Reviewers Program (YRP)

With the submission deadline of IROS 2023 and other exciting RAS conferences on the horizon, please consider participating as a Senior Reviewer in the Young Reviewers Program(YRP) of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS).

The YRP is intended to introduce young RAS members to best practices in peer review for scientific papers. Effective peer review is crucial for the scientific community, yet systematic training in peer review is often not provided. As a Senior Reviewer, you can give reviewing assignments to Junior Reviewers, and you oversee the review process in a mentor-mentee relationship. Agreeing to serve will not increase the number of papers that you review. Only papers that you have already agreed to review would be eligible for the YRP. In this way, there should be no net increase in your reviewing workload. The time you would normally spend writing a careful review would be invested instead in cultivating skills in a Junior Reviewer.

As a Senior Reviewer, you can email a Junior Reviewer listed on the YRP website. Assign to the Junior Reviewer one paper that you have been asked to review and then work with the Junior Reviewer to write and improve the review, which you will submit via PaperPlaza.

You may also ask competent members of your research group to join the YRP as Junior Reviewers and elect to work with them. Typically, a Junior Reviewer would be a doctoral graduate student or a post-doc, whereas a Senior Advisor would be the one who can be an academic advisor or a research supervisor of those Junior Reviewers. Reviewer applications will be evaluated by the YRP Chairs listed below.

Additionally, the YRP recently started to promote reviewing best practices throughout the entire RAS community with dedicated events and online material. The first YRP event was held online right after ICRA 2023 paper submission deadline; you can find the information and recordings here. And stay tuned for upcoming events!

Details of Eligibility and Procedure

Please sign up via the YRP website here.

YRP Chairs

Marta Lorenzini (IEEE-RAS YRP Executive Manager – marta.lorenzini@iit.it)

Paolo Robuffo Giordano (IEEE-RAS YRP Executive Manager - paolo.robuffo_giordano@irisa.fr)

YRP Advisory Board

Marco Morales (IEEE-RAS YRP Website Manager)

Arash Ajoudani (IEEE-RAS Chair of Young Professionals)

Nancy Amato (IEEE-RAS MAB member)

Easy Links