Why don’t we have peer reviewing for oral presentations?

Panos Ipeirotis writes in his blog post:

Everyone who has attended a conference knows that the quality of the talks is very uneven. There are talks that are highly engaging, entertaining, and describe nicely the research challenges and solutions. And there are talks that are a waste of time. Either the presenter cannot present clearly, or the presented content is impossible to digest within the time frame of the presentation.

We already have reviewing for the written part. The program committee examines the quality of the written paper and vouch for its technical content. However, by looking at a paper it is impossible to know how nicely it can be presented. Perhaps the seemingly solid but boring paper can be a very entertaining presentation. Or an excellent paper may be written by a horrible presenter.

Why not having a second round of reviewing, where the authors of accepted papers submit their presentations (slides and a YouTube video) for presentation to the conference. The paper will be accepted and be included in the proceedings anyway but having a paper does not mean that the author gets a slot for an oral presentation.

Under an oral presentation peer review, a committee looks at the presentation, votes on accept/reject and potentially provides feedback to the presenter. The best presentations get a slot on the conference program.

While I’ve enjoyed quiet time for meditation during boring talks, this is a very interesting idea – cost permitting. As the cost of producing a paper and a presentation to pass peer review goes into weeks, a lot of super-interesting early-stage research just moves off the radar.