percom-author-response

PerCom Author Response

Use this after PerCom reviews are released and you have been invited to submit a rebuttal.

PerCom's rebuttal is a single, bounded turn: it answers the reviewers' explicit questions,

resolves misunderstandings, and clarifies — and the call states that **new experiments are not

expected**. There is no journal-style revision that follows, so the rebuttal must win with the

paper you already submitted. It remains double-blind: reveal no author, institution, testbed,

or dataset-owner identity.

First: did you clear the early-rejection gate?

Papers with no positive review are early-rejected before the rebuttal opens — there is no

rebuttal to write for those. If you were invited, at least one reviewer sees a path to publication:

your job is to give that advocate the answers they need for the TPC discussion, and to neutralize

the specific doubts of the others.

Triage

• Answer what affects the decision: significance of the contribution, soundness of the method,

cross-subject / deployment evaluation, appropriate metrics (F1 vs. pooled accuracy), and

clarity.

• Use evidence that already exists in the submitted paper or dataset — a table, a figure, an

appendix result the reviewer overlooked. Do not promise a new experiment; the process does not

expect or reward one, and you cannot add it.

• Correct factual misreadings first; a reviewer who misread which split produced a number is often

persuadable with a pointer.

• Keep every word anonymous — do not name your testbed, deployment site, institution, or a

non-anonymized dataset, even to strengthen a point.

Structure the bounded reply

Group by reviewer, lead each item with the reviewer's own question, and answer with a pointer into

the existing paper:

[R1.Q1] "Is the eating-recognition result cross-subject or within-subject?"
        -> Table 2 already reports leave-one-subject-out F1 (0.xx, 95% CI ...); the pooled number
           in the abstract is secondary. We will make this ordering explicit in §4.1.
[R2.Q1] "The baseline seems untuned."
        -> The baseline used the same feature budget and a grid search reported in Appendix A;
           we point R2 to Table A1 and will surface it in the body.
[R3.Q1] "How does it behave under confounding non-eating activities?"
        -> Table 4 already measures false positives against typing/brushing; we clarify the caption.

The rule that wins a bounded rebuttal: every explicit question gets a direct, located answer. A

question left unaddressed is what the discussion punishes, because there is no later round to fix it.

Reviewer pushback patterns

| Pushback | What it signals | PerCom-ready response |

|---|---|---|

| "Evaluation is within-subject" | The core ubicomp doubt | Point to your leave-one-subject-out table; if you truly lack it, this is likely fatal — do not fake it |

| "Accuracy is inflated by class imbalance" | Metric-choice doubt | Point to reported F1 / event-level metrics and the class balance; clarify which metric is headline |

| "The baseline is not fair/tuned" | Soundness doubt | Point to the equal-budget tuning already in the paper/appendix; clarify placement |

| "Does this generalize beyond your subjects?" | External-validity limit | Point to the diversity of subjects and the stated limitation; do not overclaim |

| "The dataset/system is not available" | Open-data gap | Point to the (anonymized) release plan; describe what will be public post-acceptance |

| "Contribution overlaps prior work X" | Novelty doubt | Sharpen the delta in words; point to the comparison already present |

Anonymity in the rebuttal (easy to slip)

• Refer to your own prior work in the third person, as in the paper.
• Describe the dataset/testbed without naming the site, building, or repository owner; use the

anonymized location.

• Do not thank a named collaborator, funder, or institution inside the reply.

Calibration

• Respond to the criterion the reviewer actually raised, not the one you would rather defend.
• The rebuttal length limit and format vary by cycle; confirm the current instructions and stay

inside the limit — over-length rebuttals read as unfocused.

• The TPC discussion decides; write the reply as ammunition for your advocate, and let the paper

— not the rebuttal — carry the argument.

Output format

[Gate] invited to rebuttal? yes/no (if no: reroute, do not draft)
[Priority question] <reviewer's explicit question>
[Decision dimension] significance / soundness / cross-subject evaluation / metrics / clarity
[Located answer] <question -> pointer to existing table/figure/appendix; clarification to add>
[No-new-experiment check] <every answer grounded in submitted material? yes/no>
[Anonymity check] <no identity leak in the reply: passed/issues>