Information about the ISCA’19 investigation

Dear members of the computer architecture community,

We recently communicated an announcement about an ACM SIGARCH / IEEE TCCA jointly-appointed committee investigating the review process related to an accepted ISCA’19 paper. In this announcement, we would like to provide further information about how the investigation was conducted:

1. The investigation process, the questions the reviewers of the paper were asked, and the preparation of the report were each conducted by a committee that was established in consultation with leadership and ethics committee members from IEEE and ACM. The investigation process, the questions, and the participants in the investigation were reviewed and approved by the IEEE leadership in consultation with IEEE TCCA and ACM SIGARCH. At least one lawyer from the societies provided advice in the process.

2. The investigating committee was composed of two leading members of the ISCA’19 Program Committee and two senior members of our community who were neither in the ISCA 2019 Program Committee nor part of the ISCA Steering Committee. No member of the committee had reviewed the paper under investigation during the peer review process. As per the societies’ publications policy, the names of any and all participants involved in the investigation must remain anonymous.

​3. The investigation involved interviewing ISCA’19 Program Committee members. In all interviews conducted for the investigation, the ACM and IEEE representatives had an opportunity to ask additional questions and ensure that all questions, interviews, and interview summaries were handled fairly and without bias.

4. The investigation did not include any segments involving Program Committee members from ISCA’19 without additional oversight present from the IEEE and ACM representatives of the committee.

5. The investigation was not a self-investigation. Throughout the investigation, ACM and IEEE representatives participated.

If you have further questions about ACM’s or IEEE’s involvement in the investigation, please contact Scott Delman (ACM’s Director of Publications at scott.delman@hq.acm.org) and Melissa Russell (IEEE Computer Society’s Executive Director, at m.a.russell@computer.org) respectively.

SIGARCH & TCCA Chairs
Babak Falsafi & Josep Torrellas