Those look like sweet vibes though..

I had paper that was rejected from VIS for the same premise (Passing the Data Baton Work - ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/doc...). It snuck into to TVCG via VDS and has been reasonably cited. But even when I presented it at VDS the only question I got was "how is this vis?".

I’m really sorry to hear that. Your work is wonderful and very impactful.

I feel like I have been involuntarily recruited into a reality tv show where they need to manufacture crisis as the basis of a “plot”

We also conducted a preliminary comparison to what humans look at and found interesting alignments with VLMs, particularly those fine-tuned on ChartQA tasks.

Our approach allows you to look at each text token of the input question and examine what the model is `looking' at. To demonstrate this in action, we administer the mini-VLAT & VLAT tests (a standard tool for assessing visualization literacy in humans).

Vision Language Models can jointly reason over images and text, but what is it reasoning about? In this pre-print, we explore the internals of several open-source VLMs to examine what they focus on and what information they prioritize for ChartQA tasks.

Saw this in another (lesser impact) situation. It was bots, in high volume. It was bad. It’s probably not meant to boost a specific paper, but more like someone is using conference platforms to experiment with peer review bots.

Somewhere out there a thought leader has now found his chart

I think CHI and CSCW + others are experiencing reviewer fatigue, particularly of senior reviewers. I was an AC and what I saw in the backend of CSCW was concerning (I am AC for CHI too, and it has issues but, but they didn’t seem as bad).

Anecdotal evidence, but, I think also partly reviewer immaturity in the topic (true also at CHI) + long cycles. I withdrew a paper that got an R&R decision because the reviews were so poor we thought it would be a waste of time to resubmit. I’ve had bad reviews before, but this was something else.

I’ve heard this too from a few folks. At what age did your kid start playing?

If the list is real, it seems like math grants would be flagged but very quickly deemed as not DEI (because they don’t understand it, but they know it’s math), whereas any application with research on females also gets flagged and might be deemed DEI (and so potentially banned).

Pray that it stays that way and that they don't evolve to the point of only contact napping.