CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2017/E17A7 Allow Reviewers to bid on what to review

This project describes the work done for the project E17A7, which involves adding the ability of conference paper reviewers to bid for what they want to review. The members of this project are:

Bikram Singh (bsingh8@ncsu.edu)

Introduction

Expertiza is an open source project created using Ruby on Rails. This project is an software primarily to create reusable learning objects through peer review and also supports team projects. Expertiza allows the creation of instructors and student accounts. This allows the instructors to post projects (student learning objects) which can be viewed and worked upon by students. These can also be peer reviewed by students later.

Background of the project

As explained above, Expertiza is currently able to support a university course, hosting students and instructors and able to assign and grade projects by the appropriate users.

Expertiza is currently not able to support a conference. The difference between a conference and an university course are several. However the focus of our project is the bidding ability.

In the existing Expertiza functionality, the bidding ability is only for bidding for a project topic. This involves the instructor posting a list of project topics, and each student (or all students together as a team, if some students have already formed a team) then posts a preference list, listing topics (s)he wants to work on. Then the bidding algorithm assigns the topics, particularly with the following features:

• Students (not in at team) with close preferences are assigned into a project team, and the common preference is the project topic assigned to the team. Alternatively, for existing teams the project topic is assigned as per the common project topic preference list
• Each team is assigned only one topic
• Each topic (if assigned) is assigned to a maximum of one team

Description of project

As stated above, Expertiza currently is not able to support a conference. This project is not responsible for adding code so as to support a conference. Rather, we are interested in the bidding algorithm used in the conference, which is significantly different from the project bidding algorithm as explained above.

For the purposes of the project, we assume that there are several reviewers in a conference who review papers which are proposed to be presented in the conference. Also, the entire list of papers proposed to be presented in the conference is also available.

Then the basic working of the project assumes:

• Before the bidding close deadline, reviewers submit a list of papers they wish to review.
• After the bidding deadline, the algorithm assigns papers to reviewers to review, such that:
  • Each paper (if assigned) is assigned to a maximum of R reviewers
  • Each reviewer is assigned a maximum of P papers to review
  • Assignment of papers is individual, that is no paper is to be reviewed by a "team" of reviewers

Project Requirements

In this section we discuss the problem statement, then discuss the existing code and possible changes required.

Problem Statement

• To take the existing bidding code in Expertiza (which is meant for students bidding for project topics) and make it callable either for bidding for topics or bidding for submissions to review. In the subsequent discussion with the mentor, it was concluded that the two bidding situations are very different hence it was decided to keep the two separate, at least initially.
• A possible extension is to add other methods, like a "late reviewer registration" method, in which each new reviewer is assigned one of the least-reviewed submissions so far. Methods like these require an extension of the basic working of the project.
• The matching algorithm is currently not very sophisticated. Top trading cycles is implemented in the web service (though it is currently not used by bidding assignment), and could be adapted to this use. However, in the subsequent discussion, as noted above, because the two bidding situations were found different the requirement is to first make the bidding for a conference (using any algorithm) and if time permits, to use a better algorithm like top trading cycles.

Understanding the Requirements

• Reviews are often assigned by having reviewers bid on papers they want to review. This is very similar to the kind of bidding that Expertiza implements for topics, and it should be possible to call the same code (which will be modified to make it more general).

• The reviewer bidding for proposed conference papers has not been fully implemented. Currently the bidding process for assigning topics is either manual or automatic. Manual means the instructor assigns topics based on the preference provided by the students. Automatic assignment means that topics are assigned on the basis of an implemented algorithm, which takes into account some parameters, including intelligent-property.

• Incompatible bidding algorithm. The existing bidding algorithm used by the application is only available for team assignment bidding. The algorithm itself groups all team members preferring specific topic together, then evaluates how frequently these people have worked together in the past through concept of top-trading cycle and obtains the k-mean distribution of resulted evaluation for assigning topics. This algorithm will not work on our implementation for several reasons:

     1. It is team-based where as our implementation is individual-based. Since the implementation is running on a web-service, we won't 
        be able to modify it as it is not an internal part of Expertiza application;
     2. The current bidding implementation only returns one bidding result each time, whereas expected bidding implementation must be able 
        to return multiple bidding results every time.
     3. The current bidding algorithm assigns topic to bidding team that has most members whom have worked together in the past. This will 
        work for our implementation since now each bidding team would only have one person.

The changes related to this project are required for reviewing conference papers and journals. The users are able to submit their works as either individuals or teams to be scrutinized. The other participants are allowed to review the papers of their interest from the list of submitted papers. The participants are allowed to bid on the papers of their preference in a preference list with the top most entry taking the highest priority. The bidding algorithm already exists as called by a web service in Peerlogic. The goal of this project is to generalize the algorithm for both review and topic based bidding.

Bidding Algorithm Overview

Currently, the Bidding algorithm implementation is based on k-means clustering and a weighting formula that favors increasing overall student satisfaction and adding members until the maximum allowable team size is reached. The approach to meeting these criteria is addressed by mining student preferences for topics with a clustering approach, and then matching them in groups to topics that suit their shared interests. You can read about it in detail here.

Our goal here is as follows:

• To implement a bidding algorithm for conference paper reviewer assignment functionality.
• To attempt to merge the existing and the new algorithm as much as possible

Possible Extension

A possible extension is to combine reviewer assignment by bidding with one of the other assignment methods--instructor assignment, or “automated” assignment, where each new reviewer is assigned one of the least-reviewed submissions so far. In this case, submissions that are not bid upon would be assigned to reviewers who “show up later,” as would reviews that are not completed by the reviewers who bid on them.

Use Case Diagram

Files to be Modified

• lottery_controller.rb
• New Controller to be specified for review bidding

Test Plan

Manual Testing

• UI testing of the implemented functionality to be done.

Automated Test Cases

• TDD and Feature Test cases to be written.

Edge cases

• Case 1: Users signing up after bidding is done need to be assigned the papers/journals with no or least reviews done.

• Case 2: Extending edge case 1, if somebody doesn't provide a list of topics s(he) wants to review, the topic with the least number of bids is assigned.

• Case 3: If a participant is assigned to review a paper in the (topics) preference list but decides to drop the review after the bidding process is done.