We hear from authors of papers being accepted. We hear from authors of papers being rejected with unfair reviews. What about reviewers regretting a decision to reject a paper? I‘ll start.

A long time ago, I sub-reviewed a paper by Larson and Austin on a combined static/dynamic method to find memory-safety errors in security critical code. It had all the ingredients of directed/concolic testing that happened a few years later.

To my regret, i was not able to grok how great the paper was! I said something stupid like the comparison to static analysis should be better (those were the days of static type systems to make C safe). The paper didn’t get in.

(I was a subreviewer and didn’t see other reviews)

A little later, I happened to meet Todd Austin at a workshop. He didn’t know I was a reviewer and explained his paper to me. Some time during his explanation, the shoe dropped! „I’ve made a huge mistake!“

I can only apologize in retrospect. Every time I am uncomfortable with a paper, i remind myself of this error: being uncomfortable with something really novel.