Dear Program Committee and Organization Committee members of
NICOGRAPH International 2012:

I am Takayuki Itoh, one of the program chair of the conference.
Let me briefly explain the review process of the conference on this message.

1) Just after the submission deadline of full papers (March 20), I will assign the reviewers for them as soon as possible. Just after the submission deadline of short papers (April 1), I will assign the reviewers for them as soon as possible. The assignment will be based on the research field selection of program committee members themselves.  Excuse me that it is possible that some of reviewers receive multiple review requests while some others receive no review requests.  Review deadline will be around April 20 for both full and short papers.

2) After the review deadline we will have on-line discussion for acceptance decision.  Once I tried to prepare a discussion board on Google Group, but I gave up because of many registration troubles.  I may prepare another discussion board somewhere on the Web, but it is also possible that all discussion will be via e-mail.  We plan to send every acceptance notifications around April 30.

3) We would like to keep the acceptance level of full papers somewhat high, because we plan to recommend every accepted full papers to a quick review of the journal of the society for art and science. It means that every accepted full papers can be accepted by the journal just after minor revisions. Also, we need to maintain the number of presentations due to schedule constraint.  We estimate that around 40 papers (e.g. 15 full papers and 25 short papers) can be accepted in this conference, arranging two-track parallel paper sessions, assigning 20 minutes for full papers and 15 minutes for short papers. I think it is a good number because average number of presentations in the past NICOGRAPH International was around 25.  Anyway, please remark that we may need to accept some of full paper submissions as short papers, and therefore it is possible that some of submissions accepted as short papers may be withdrawn for the submission to another conference or journal.

I welcome any questions or suggestions for the above review policy.  Thanks!