Easychair as a Pedagogical Tool — Engaging Graduate Students in the Reviewing Process

One of the more important aims of graduate artificial intelligence courses is to prepare graduate students to critically evaluate the current literature. The established approaches for this include either asking a student to present a paper in class, or to have the entire class read and discuss a paper. However, neither of these approaches presents incentives for student participation beyond the posting of a single summary or review. In this paper, we describe a class project that uses the popular Easychair conference management system as a pedagogical tool to enable engagement in the peer review process. We report on the deployment of this project in a mediumsized graduate AI class, and present the results of this deployment. We hope that the success of this project in engaging students in the peer review process can be used better train and bolster the future corps of AI reviewers.