[agents] [Announcements] IJCAI 2023: Preliminary Call for Papers

[Vesna Sabljakovic-Fritz via Announcements]

Dear Colleagues!
This is our preliminary call for papers for the 2023 IJCAI Conference. 
Please distribute to your members/colleagues.
IJCAI-23 PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS
Important Dates (all times are Anywhere On Earth, UTC-12)
Submission site opening: January 4, 2023
Abstract submission deadline: January 11, 2023
Author information deadline: January 16, 2023
Full paper submission deadline: January 18, 2023
Appendix and resubmission information deadline: January 23, 2023
Summary reject notification: February 24, 2023
Author response period: March 20-23, 2023
Paper notification: April 19, 2023
Submissions are invited for the 32nd International Joint Conference on 
Artificial Intelligence, which is planned to be held in Cape Town, South 
Africa, from Aug 19th to Aug 25th, 2023. 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 2023 should report on significant, original, and 
previously unpublished results on any aspect of artificial intelligence. 
Papers on novel AI research problems, on AI techniques for novel 
application domains, and papers that cross discipline boundaries within 
AI are especially encouraged.
  In addition to the main track, the authors will be able to submit 
papers to the two multiyear special tracks (AI for Good and AI, The Arts 
and Creativity), as well as the survey track; these tracks will post 
their own calls for papers later this year, and their deadlines, 
procedures and policies may differ from what is described below.
A selection of the best papers submitted to IJCAI 2023 will be invited 
for a fast track in the Artificial Intelligence Journal and/or the 
Journal of AI Research.
New in 2023:
Page limit:  papers must be no longer than 9 pages in total: 7 pages for 
the body of the paper and 2 pages for references; the optional ethics 
statement can be placed either in the body of the paper or in the 
reference pages.  For accepted papers, the last two pages can also 
contain acknowledgements and the contribution statement.
Authors commit to review: by submitting to the conference, each author 
volunteers to be entered into the pool of potential PC members/reviewers 
for IJCAI 2023, and may be asked to review papers for the conference. 
This does not apply to authors who have already agreed to contribute to 
IJCAI'23 in some capacity (e.g., as PC/SPC members of the main 
conference or special tracks, area chairs, or members of the organizing 
committee) and authors who are not qualified to be IJCAI PC members 
(e.g., undergraduate students, junior graduate students, researchers 
with limited track record in AI). This requirement may be waived in a 
limited range of exceptional circumstances (researchers leaving 
academia, parental leave, etc.)
Separate deadline for technical appendix and resubmission information: 
the authors are given five extra days after the submission deadline to 
update their technical appendix and resubmission information.
Simplified procedure for resubmission information: the authors must 
declare whether their paper has been rejected from another peer-reviewed 
conference in the last 12 months before the submission. They will be 
requested to upload the latest rejected version (anonymized if 
necessary) together with the reviewer comments; a cover letter with a 
response to the reviews is optional. To avoid bias, the resubmission 
information will be made available to reviewers only after they submit 
their own reviews. The program committee reserves the right to reject 
papers that fail to report resubmission information. Further, reviewers 
will be encouraged to check whether the resubmission addresses factual 
issues pointed out in the reviews of the previous version (e.g., typos, 
incorrect attribution of results, etc.) and to reject submissions that 
fail to do so.
Contribution statement: for accepted papers, the authors can include 
contribution information, explicitly indicating the contribution of each 
of the co-authors to the paper.
Selection Process
Selection criteria:  Selection criteria include the novelty and 
originality of ideas, correctness, clarity, significance of results, 
potential impact and quality of the presentation.
Summary rejects: The reviewing process will proceed in two phases. In 
Phase 1, every paper will be reviewed by two PC members. If a paper 
receives two good-quality reviews that are not sufficiently positive in 
Phase 1, it will be rejected without any opportunity to submit an author 
response.  By submitting a paper, authors acknowledge that they are 
aware of the possibility of receiving a summary rejection notification.
Full paper review: Papers passing the summary reject step will go 
through the full reviewing process. Each paper will be reviewed by a 
group of  PC-members (PCs), and a Senior PC member (SPC) will coordinate 
the PC review process and write a meta-review with a recommendation, 
cross-checked by an Area Chair (AC).
Author response: The full paper review process will include the 
opportunity for authors to respond to the reviews. Author responses 
should be concise, and are not intended to create a dialogue between 
reviewers and authors. Author responses will be visible to AC, SPC, and 
PCs.
(Optional) triple blind reviewing: By default, from the perspective of 
the Senior Program Committee members (SPC) and Program Committee members 
(PC),  the reviewing process will be triple blind, i.e., SPC/PCs cannot 
see the identities of authors and other SPC/PCs, and vice versa. 
However, during the discussion phase, the PC members and the SPC member 
are allowed to reveal their names to each other, by signing their 
comments. The choice to reveal one's name to the co-reviewers is 
optional, and no one should be pressured to do so. In any case, this 
information will not be made available to the paper authors. Author 
identities are also invisible to Area Chairs (ACs) and vice versa.
Participation in the conference.  At least one author of each accepted 
paper is required to participate in the conference and present the work. 
We are looking forward to the community meeting in person. However, we 
are prepared to make the necessary accommodations for authors who are 
unable to attend the conference because of travel restrictions or 
visa/passport issues.
Ethics policy and ethics statement: similarly to the 2022 edition of the 
conference, we will employ a light-weight ethics review policy for IJCAI 
2023. Reviewers will be asked to flag glaring violations of ethical 
principles. Such flagged submissions will be reviewed by the Ethics 
Chair. In rare situations, the Program Chair advised by the Ethics 
Chair, reserves the right to reject submission on ethical grounds. 
However, we expect that the primary response to ethical concerns will be 
to require authors to revise their submission to include discussion that 
identifies these ethical concerns and suggestions how they might be 
mitigated.

Authors can include in the main body of their paper, or on the reference 
pages, an ethics statement that addresses both ethical issues regarding 
the research being reported, and the broader ethical impact of the work. 
Note that such an ethics statement is not required, but we recommend 
that papers working with sensitive data or on sensitive tasks include 
such discussion. The IJCAI review form will include a section asking 
reviewers and ACs to flag any serious ethical concerns. Toby Walsh 
(tw at cse.unsw.edu.au) will continue to serve as an Ethics Chair for the 
conference in 2023.

Conflict of interest policy: All individuals involved in the IJCAI 2023 
review process must adhere to the IJCAI conflict of interest policy. 
Details can be found at 
https://www.ijcai.org/IJCAI_Conflict_of_Interest_Policy.pdf. All authors 
of papers submitted to IJCAI 2023 agree to be bound by the conditions 
outlined in this call for papers (w.r.t. multiple submissions, 
authorship, resubmission policy, submission limit, etc.). Authors and 
reviewers acknowledge that IJCAI may take action upon individuals in 
breach of the conflict of interest and call for papers policy including 
– but not limited to – rejecting their submissions without further 
review and banning individuals from submitting their work to a limited 
number of IJCAI conferences in the future.
Withdrawing submitted papers: all papers that are withdrawn from the 
conference after February 7, 2023, Anywhere On Earth (UTC-12), will also 
be formally rejected from IJCAI 2023.
Confidentiality policy: All submissions will be treated in strict 
confidence until the publication date.
Submission Process
Formatting guidelines: The updated LaTeX styles and Word template will 
be made available at https://www.ijcai.org/authors_kit in December 2022.
Submission site: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/IJCAI2023
Mandatory abstract submission: The paper title, author names, contact 
details, and a brief abstract must be submitted electronically through 
the IJCAI 2023 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. However, 
submissions with “placeholder” abstracts may 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. The author information is 
important to control the COIs in the review process. If any co-author 
does not register and enters the necessary information, a submission may 
be rejected without review.
Submission limit: IJCAI 2023 will enforce a strict submission limit. 
Each individual author is limited to no more than 8 submissions to IJCAI 
2023.
Keywords: When submitting abstracts, authors will be required to choose 
up to three content area keywords (these are called “subject areas” in 
CMT). 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.
Copyright:  IJCAI 2023 is a conference held under the IJCAI rules. The 
papers published there will be solely IJCAI publications with IJCAI as 
copyright holder.
Submission Requirements
Paper format: Papers submitted to  IJCAI 2023 must be formatted 
according to the IJCAI 2023 guidelines (link above). Submissions must be 
self-contained. Authors are required to submit their electronic papers 
in PDF format. Submissions that violate the  IJCAI 2023 style (e.g., by 
decreasing margins or font sizes) may be rejected without review.
Paper length: Papers must be no longer than 9 pages in total: 7 pages 
for the body of the paper (including all figures/tables), plus up to 2 
additional pages with references; the optional ethics statement can be 
placed either in the body of the paper or in the reference pages. For 
accepted papers, acknowledgements and the contribution statement can be 
included in the two reference pages. Moreover, for accepted papers, up 
to two additional pages may be purchased at an additional cost per page. 
Overlength papers will be rejected without review.
Supplementary material: 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. There are two entries for supplementary 
files in the CMT system: one is “TechnicalAppendix”, and the other one 
is “ResubmissionFile”. The latter one should be used for providing 
resubmission information only. Looking at the technical appendix is at 
the discretion of the reviewers.
Anonymity: From the perspective of the authors, reviewing for  IJCAI 
2023 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 at the 
submission stage. When referring to one’s own work, use the third 
person, rather than the first person. For example, say “Previously, 
Elkind et al. [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 
material (including the resubmission information) and code should also 
be anonymized (including, for instance, hardcoded paths or URLs that may 
give away login identifiers or institutions). In case of resubmissions, 
if the previous version of the paper was non-anonymous, the authors are 
asked to remove/cover their names, affiliations and acknowledgements in 
the resubmission PDF, but not to alter the previous version or the 
reviews in any other way. The authors should also take care to remove 
identifying information from the PDF metadata. Submissions that clearly 
violate anonymity will be rejected without further review.
Preprints: The existence of non-anonymous preprints (on arXiv, social 
media, websites, etc.) and prior publication in non-archival venues will 
not result in rejection. 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.
Reproducibility: Authors must follow the reproducibility guidelines 
(available here) and checklist at the time of paper submission.
Ethics Statement: Authors may 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 the main body of 
the paper or on the reference pages. It is optional but is highly 
recommended for papers working with sensitive data or on sensitive 
tasks.
Dual submissions: IJCAI 2023 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 2023 review period. These restrictions do not apply to 
workshops and similar specialized presentations without formally 
published proceedings.


-- 
Vesna Sabljakovic-Fritz
IJCAI Executive Director and Secretary

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