NIPS*2006 Author Instructions

This document contains information about the process of submitting a paper to NIPS*2006. You can find general information for authors at http://research.microsoft.com/conferences/nips06/ , including a Call for Papers and suggestions for improving your NIPS paper.

On September 5, the accept/reject decisions will be sent.

1.     Paper Submission Deadline

The submission deadline is 11:59PM Pacific Daylight Time on June 9, 2006. The server may be open for a few more minutes.

2.     Author feedback

Starting August 3, authors will be given the chance to see the reviews and respond to their content.

Giving feedback is optional: your feedback can be used by the reviewers to alter their judgment about the paper. The system allows you to respond to each review individually in a text box. These responses are due back by 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday August 9.

A few things to note about the author response:

§         Due to a limitation in ConfMaster, you can submit feedback only once per review. We strongly recommend that you read the reviews, discuss the authorsouir response amongst your co-authors, draft the response off-line, then upload the response(s). Only the contact author can upload the response.

§         We’ve limited each response to be 250 words long (per review). This is computed somewhat differently than the UNIX wc program: a word is a contiguous string of one or more characters from the set A-Z, a-z, underscore, or backslash. Digits are completely ignored. If you exceed 250 words according to the algorithm, the system will silently reject the response and allow you to try again.

§         Note: the system only has accepted your response if you can read it after you click “Submit”. Otherwise, it is not registered in the system and reviewers cannot read it.

§         If you have Perl installed on your computer, you can emulate ConfMaster’s word counting program by saving your response in a file, and typing

perl –ne “END {print $x} s/\d+//g; @w = /([A-Za-z\\_]+)/g; $x += @w” filename

§         Remember that we are double-blind this year. Do not include any information in the response that can identify you or your co-authors. Please do not include any URLs in your response.

§         Every response to a paper can be seen by every reviewer, so there is no need to repeat information between responses.

Finally, we recommend using the response to influence the reviewers where they can be influenced. If a reviewer has expressed uncertainty about an issue, or is making an incorrect assumption, or has misunderstood a point in the paper, that is ideal to address in an author’s response. It may be difficult to change a reviewer’s value judgment about a paper, such as overall clarity or significance. In any event, the best strategy is to be polite and professional.

3.     Keywords

The purpose of the keywords is to assist assignment of papers to area chairs and reviewers. However, the separation between different areas does not play a major role anymore, and authors should refrain from choosing keywords based on past rumours of what may increase their chances of acceptance. Here is the list of keywords to choose from:

o        Bioinformatics

o        Biological vision

o        Brain imaging and brain computer interfacing

o        Clustering

o        Cognitive science

o        Control and reinforcement learning

o        Dimensionality reduction and manifolds

o        Feature selection

o        Gaussian processes

o        Graphical models

o        Hardware technologies

o        Kernels

o        Learning theory

o        Machine vision

o        Margins and boosting

o        Monte Carlo methods

o        Neural networks

o        Neuroscience

o        Other algorithms

o        Other applications

o        Semi-supervised learning

o        Speech and signal processing

o        Text and language

 

4.     Electronic submission

The web site for electronic submission is http://papers.nips.cc .

Since we do not accept paper submissions, particular care should be taken to ensure that your paper prints well on the reviewers' hardware. Please consult Section 6 in the PDF/PS example file.

Please follow the style files: papers longer than 8 pages will be rejected before review.

Note that the maximal file length for submissions is 5MB.

You can upload an early version of your paper well before the deadline. If you start registering your paper only a few minutes before the deadline, you may not have enough time to fill in all the forms. Replacing an earlier version later is no problem and does not take as long ("upload early and often").

If you are not only an author but also a reviewer, please use the same login. If your paper is registered by your co-author, tell them which of your email addresses to use (the same as the one you are using as a reviewer).

Note that NIPS reviewing is now double blind, so please follow the style files provided and make sure the submission does not include author names and affiliations.

5.     Submitting extra material

In previous years, authors could include URLs to extra supporting material for their papers. Because of double-blind reviewing, this year we will permit authors to upload such supporting material with their paper. Please make sure that the supporting material is also anonymized, removing your name from any extra material, and referring to previous work in the third person.

Such extra material may include long technical proofs that do not fit into the paper, image, audio or video sample outputs from your algorithm, animations that describe your algorithm, details of experimental results, or even source code for running experiments.

Note that the reviewers and the program committee reserve the right to judge the paper solely on the basis of the 8 pages of the paper: looking at any extra material is up to the discretion of the reviewers and is not required.

To submit a paper with extra material, please create an archive file and upload it to ConfMaster. This archive file can be in the .zip format (using WinZip or equivalent), or in .tar.gz format (using tar and gzip). There is a strict upper limit of 5 megabytes for any submission --- archives larger than this will be rejected by ConfMaster.

If you do create such an archive, please name your paper file in the following way: start with “paper_”, then use a few words from your title to disambiguate your paper from others, then end with “.pdf” or “.ps” as appropriate. For extra files, start with a description of the extra material, such as “proof_” , or “appendix_”, or “video_”; then use the same words as your main submission, then the appropriate extension.

Please use these naming schemes: failure to do so will break our automated scripts.

6.     Submitting previously published work

Submissions that are identical (or nearly identical) to versions that have been previously published or that have been submitted in parallel to other conferences whose audience significantly overlaps with the one of NIPS are not appropriate for NIPS. Exceptions to this rule are the following: (1) NIPS will review shorter write-ups of longer papers that have been recently (i.e. in the current calendar year) submitted to journals, and (2) NIPS will review papers whose content has been previously published, but only in a form that is particularly inaccessible to the NIPS audience. Authors of such papers should cite the earlier work if the previous work has already appeared in public. In these cases, the NIPS submission should involve a substantial revision of the original paper, in style if not in content.

Examples of conferences that are too close to NIPS and where double submission will not be considered: ICML, COLT, ICCV, ECCV, CVPR, ECML, KDD, ICANN, IJCNN, WCNN, SODA, FOCS, STOC.

Examples of conferences where the papers are generally unfamiliar to the NIPS audience include application-oriented conferences, such as SIGGRAPH, SIGIR, and WWW; or regional machine learning conferences such as BNAIC, Benelearn, DAGM, and PAKDD.