IJCAI-21 CALL FOR PAPERS

Important Dates:

Submission site opening: December 30, 2020
Abstract submission deadline: January 13, 2021 (11:59PM UTC-12)
Author information deadline: January 16, 2021 (11:59PM UTC-12)
Full paper submission deadline: January 20, 2021 (11:59PM UTC-12)
Summary reject notification: February 07, 2021
Author response period: March 24-28, 2021
Paper notification: April 30, 2021
Formatting guidelines, LaTeX styles, and Word template: https://www.ijcai.org/authors_kit

Submission site: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/IJCAI2021

Note that CMT does not automatically send confirmation email to authors when they submit a paper.

Submissions are invited for the 30th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-21), which is planned to be held in Montreal, Canada, from August 21st to August 26th, 2021. Starting from 1969, IJCAI has remained the premier conference bringing together the international AI community to communicate the advances and achievements of artificial intelligence research.

Submissions to IJCAI-21 should be significant, original, and previously unpublished results on all aspects of artificial intelligence. Papers on novel AI research problems and novel application domains are especially encouraged.

Please read carefully and watch the accompanying video:
http://ijcai-21.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IJCAI2021_review_process.mp4


Submission Process:

Mandatory abstract submission: The paper title, author names, contact details, and a brief abstract must be submitted electronically through the IJCAI-21 paper submission site (link above) by the abstract submission deadline. It will be possible to make minor edits to the title and abstract until the full paper submission deadline. Submissions with “placeholder” abstracts will be removed without consideration.

Author Information: Full papers must be submitted through the same site by the paper submission deadline. The list of author names provided at Author Information Deadline is final. Authors may not be added to, or removed from, papers following submission. (The author ordering may still be changed during the camera-ready period.)

All authors are required to log in and fill out a user information form in CMT by the Author Information deadline. Because of the rapid growth of IJCAI, the author information is very important for the control of COI in the review process. If any co-authors do not register and enter their information, a submission may be rejected without review.

Keywords: When submitting abstracts, authors will be required to choose up to three content area keywords. General categories should be used only if specific categories do not apply or do not accurately reflect the main contributions. The full list of keywords will be available on the submission site.

Submission limit: IJCAI-21 is enforcing a strict submission limit. Each individual author is limited to no more than 8 submissions to IJCAI-21. Submissions of authors with over-submitted papers may be rejected without review.

Copyright: IJCAI-21 is a conference held under the IJCAI rules. The papers published there will be solely IJCAI publications with IJCAI as copyright holder.

At least one author of each accepted paper is required to attend the conference to present the work. We are looking forward to the community meeting in person. At the same time, we are also planning for the possibility that the global public health situation might require us to run the conference as a partly or fully virtual event.

Submission Requirements

Paper format: Papers submitted to IJCAI-21 must be formatted according to the IJCAI-21 guidelines (link above). Submissions must be self-contained. Authors are required to submit their electronic papers in PDF format. Submissions that violate the IJCAI-21 style (e.g., by decreasing margins or font sizes) may be rejected without review.

Paper length: Papers must be no longer than 7 pages in total: 6 pages for the body of the paper (including all figures/tables), plus up to 1 additional page with references that do not fit within the six body pages. (For accepted papers, up to two additional pages may be purchased at an additional cost per page; note that, at the time of submission, papers are required to adhere to the 6+1 format above.) Over-length papers will be rejected without review.

Supplementary file: Authors may submit up to 50MB of supplementary material, such as appendices, proofs, derivations, data, or source code; all supplementary material must be in PDF or ZIP format. Supplementary material should be material, created by the authors, that directly supports the submission content. Like submissions, supplementary material must be anonymized. To submit supplementary material, first upload your submission. You will then be able to upload supplementary material from the author console. There are two entries for supplementary files: one is “TechnicalAppendix”, and the other one is “ResubmissionFile”. The latter one can be ignored if you are not resubmitting paper rejected at any peer-reviewed conference within the past 6 months. Looking at supplementary material is at the discretion of the reviewers.

Anonymity: Reviewing for IJCAI-21 is double blind. As an author, you are responsible for anonymizing your submission. In particular, you should not include author names or affiliations in your submission, and you should avoid providing any other identifying information (even in the supplementary material). Acknowledgments of funding or assistance should also be omitted. When referring to one’s own work, use the third person, rather than the first person. For example, say “Previously, Zhou and Gini [8] have shown that…”, rather than “In our previous work [8], we have shown that…”. All identifying information can be added back to the final camera-ready version of accepted papers. Supplementary materials and code should also be anonymized (including, for instance, hardcoded paths or URLs that may give away login identifiers or institutions). Submissions that violate anonymity will be rejected without further review.

Preprints: The existence of non-anonymous preprints (on arXiv, social media, websites, etc.) will not result in rejection provided that the preprints was submitted at least one month before the abstract submission deadline of IJCAI-21. Note that the submission to CMT must always be anonymized regardless of whether a preprint has been released. Reviewers will be instructed not to actively look for such preprints, but encountering them will not constitute a conflict of interest. Preprints (last update) uploaded no more than one month before the IJCAI-21 abstract submission deadline will be considered as violating anonymity.

Reproducibility: Authors must complete a reproducibility checklist at the time of paper submission. These responses will become part of each paper submission and will be shared with reviewers. Unless specified otherwise, please answer “yes” to each question if the relevant information is described either in the paper itself or in a technical appendix with an explicit reference from the main paper. If you wish to explain an answer further, please do so in a section titled “Reproducibility Checklist” at the end of the technical appendix. If you have further questions related to the reproducibility checklist, please contact the Reproducibility Co-chairs (Zhiyuan Liu (liuzy@tsinghua.edu.cn) and Jian Tang (jian.tang@hec.ca)).

Ethical/societal impact: It is optional for authors to include a statement of the potential broader impact of their work, including its ethical aspects and future societal consequences. This part can be put in either mainbody page or the reference page.

Resubmissions: Authors of papers that have been rejected at any peer-reviewed conference within the past 6 months must declare the resubmission by including a cover letter with their submission. The cover letter should summarize the main reasons for rejection and should describe the changes the authors have made to address the reviewers’ comments. The cover letter should be put in a separate file, along with the previous reviews and previous anonymized rejected submission. Such resubmissions must contain, in a single PDF file (different from the IJCAI-21 paper file):

the cover letter, starting with the title of the rejected paper, the tracking number (if any), and the name of the conference to which this paper was submitted,
the full reviews from the rejected conference,
the anonymized version of the rejected paper.
This resubmission information will be visible to reviewers only during the discussion phase after they submit their initial review.A paper rejected from a peer-reviewed conference within the past 6 months will be rejected without further review if the authors do not declare the resubmission.

To submit resubmission file PDF, first upload your submission. You will then be able to upload resubmission file from the author console as a supplementary file. There are two entries for supplementary files: one is “TechnicalAppendix”, which is the normal supplementary file for the main paper; and the other one is “ResubmissionFile”, to which you should upload the resubmission file. Note that the maximal size of the resubmission PDF is 10M.

Dual submissions: IJCAI-21 will not accept any paper that, at the time of submission, is under review for, has already been published in, or has already been accepted for publication in a journal or another venue with formally published proceedings. (As a guideline, authors should regard publications with a DOI, ISBN, or ISSN as formal publications. Questions about submission eligibility should be referred to the program chair before the submission deadline.) Authors are also required not to submit their papers to venues with formally published proceedings during the IJCAI-21 review period. These restrictions do not apply to workshops and similar specialized presentations with a limited audience and without published proceedings. As dual submissions waste valuable review resources of the community, IJCAI may take action upon authors of dual submissions, including – but not limited to – rejecting their submissions without further review.

Selection Process

Triple blind reviewing: The review process will be triple blind at the level of Area Chairs (AC), Senior Program Committee members (SPC), and Program Committee members (PC), i.e., AC/SPC/PC cannot see the identities of authors and other AC/SPC/PCs, and vice versa. Author identities are also invisible to Senior Area Chairs (SACs) and vice versa..

Selection criteria: Selection criteria include the originality of ideas, correctness, clarity, significance of results, and quality of presentation.

Summary rejects: Each submission will be first evaluated by a group of senior experts (AC/SPCs), and papers that are very likely to be rejected will be cross checked by SACs. Authors of papers that will not be further reviewed will be notified immediately. This process will try to help authors save time for revision and resubmission to other venues. By submitting a paper, authors acknowledge that they are aware of the possibility of receiving a summary rejection notification without any written review, though we will provide checkbox information and encourage reviewers to write brief reviews.

Full paper review: Papers passing the summary reject step will go through a full reviewing process. Each paper will be reviewed by a group of SPC/PCs, and an AC will coordinate the SPC/PC review process and write a meta-review with a recommendation, cross checked by an SAC.

Author response: The full paper review process will include the opportunity for authors to point out errors in the reviews. Author responses will be limited to clear factual errors in the reviews, and are not intended to create a dialogue between reviewers and authors. Author responses are visible to AC and SAC.

Confidentiality policy: All submissions will be treated in strict confidence until the publication date.

Conflict of interest policy: All individuals involved in the IJCAI 2021 review process must adhere to the IJCAI conflict of interest policy. Details can be found at http://ijcai.org/.

Frequently Asked Questions

Please check the Frequently Asked Questions page.