+For funding agencies such as NSF program directors
+that co-ordinate panels, assigning proposals to
+reviewers is a major challenge. It is important that each proposal be
+reviewed by qualified experts, and at the same time we would like the
+workload across different reviewers to be roughly balanced. The same
+issue arises for a program committee chair, who may have to assign
+literally hundreds of papers to a program committee consisting of
+thirty to forty program committee members.
+
+What does CMT use? What does Easychair use?
+
+From now on we will focus on the problem of assigning papers to
+reviewers.
+We assume that each reviewer is given access to the
+list of papers to be reviewed, and provides input on their
+preferences by giving a ``desirability'' score to each paper.
+We also assume that each paper has to be reviewed by $at least r$
+reviewers.
+
+List of codes.
+
+We do not consider stable marriage type preference lists,
+because a strict ranking of papers would be rather tedious
+to produce. In this scheme, the papers are essentially grouped
+into a few categories.
+
+
+Ideally, from the perspective of the papers, we would like to
+assign each paper the $r$ ``best'' reviewers for the paper.
+Ofcourse, this would lead to a load imbalanced solution where
+the load on some program committee members is very high, and the
+load on others is low. On the other hand, we could insist
+on a perfectly load balanced solution in which the number
+of papers assigned to each program committee member do not
+exceed $\lceil rN/P \rceil$, where $N$ is the number of
+submissions and $P$ is the number of program committee members.
+Recall that each paper needs $r$ reviewers, so a total of $rN$
+reviews need to be generated. However this may lead to a solution
+which is not optimal from the perspective of the papers.
+
+One of our goals is to study precisely this tradeoff, and allow each
+reviewer to have upto $\lceil rN/P \rceil + C$ papers assigned to
+them, where $C$ is the {\em imbalance factor}. The main question
+we consider is: is it possible to obtain a high quality
+assignment with a fairly low value of $C$?
+
+One can ask the same question from the perspective of the reviewers
+as well. Each reviewer would ideally like papers
+that are the ``most desirable'' from their point of view.
+
+{\em Stinkers} are papers that pretty much no-one wanted to review.
+We would like to spread the load of the stinkers as evenly as possible.