Submission Guidelines

Submission Guidelines

For main track, special track, and workshop papers

Submission Guidelines for other ACII 2023 calls

For Doctoral Consortium, please see the instructions here.

For Demos, please see the instructions here.

For a list of all topics relevant to ACII2023, please see the call for papers page.

Submissions to ACII 2023 should not have substantial overlap with any other paper already submitted or published, or to be submitted during the ACII 2023 review period. All persons who have made any substantial contribution to the work should be listed as authors, and all listed authors should have made some substantial contribution to the work. All authors should be aware of the paper being submitted to ACII 2023.

Proceedings will be published on IEEExplore. IEEE CS is a technical co-sponsor of ACII 2023. If a paper is accepted, it is assumed that an author will register and attend the conference to present the paper. The conference and IEEE reserve the right to exclude a paper from distribution after the conference, including IEEE Xplore® Digital Library, if the paper is not presented by the author at the conference.

The reviewing process for ACII 2023 will be “double blind”, thus the submitted version of the paper should be appropriately anonymized not to reveal either the authors’ identities or institutions. Any submission that contains information revealing the identity of the authors will be removed from the reviewing process. Please see the instructions below for more information about anonymized submissions.

The submission process will be handled through the EasyChair System. Submissions may be up to 8 pages (7 pages + 1 page for Ethical Impact Statement and references) in the conference paper format. Submissions must be in pdf format, are limited to a 10MB file size, and must be in final, publishable form by the submission deadline. Papers that use different formatting from the ACII 2023 Latex or Word templates, have more than 8 pages, or explicitly reveal identifying information about the authors will be automatically removed from the reviewing process.

Supplementary material (images, video, etc.) may optionally be submitted with papers, must be submitted as a single zip file, and must be no larger than 100MB. Be sure to maintain anonymity, including the file properties or other hidden text. The supplemental materials will not be part of the conference proceedings, so they are only there to aid the reviewing process. Reviewers are not required to view the supplemental material (though most reviewers are likely to do so), so any information critical to understanding the work should be in the main paper.

ACII 2023 will be using the IEEE PDF eXpress for enforcing the requirements for papers to appear in IEEE Xplore. The final versions of all papers accepted for publication must adhere to the IEEE Xplore PDF specifications.

Instructions for Authors

  • Prepare your manuscripts as per the IEEE specification:

                  ○   LaTeX and Word Templates

                  ○   LaTeX Template in Overleaf

  • Carefully proofread your submission.
  • For the main, Special Sessions, and workshop papers, submit to EasyChair and select the relevant category/track.
  • For the main track paper, if your main track paper submission is not accepted but you would like to have your paper transferred to one special session or workshop, please select one special session or workshop session. ● Submitting the same paper to multiple tracks is not allowed.
  • Fill out the ACII Reviewer Sign-up Form (all authors need to fill this out)

Arxiv Policy

Reposting articles publicly online (e.g., website, arXiv, social networks, etc.): To maintain the double-blind review process, we are requesting authors refrain from posting their articles online until the notification date. Reposting articles publicly online before the notification deadline would be considered a violation of the anonymized submission.

Author Registration

All accepted papers must be presented at the conference by one of the authors. One of the authors must register for the conference (under any registration category) and must register before the deadline given for author registration. Failure to register before the deadline will result in automatic withdrawal of your paper from the conference proceedings and program. A single registration may cover up to three papers.

Guides for Anonymizing Submissions

ACII 2023 follows a double-blind review process, requiring authors to prepare an anonymized submission.

Preparation of the anonymized submission

To prepare an anonymized submission, authors are expected to remove author and institutional identities from the cover page, the acknowledgments section, and the PDF meta-data. None of the submission material can contain any information that directly or indirectly reveals the identity of the authors.

Institution information should also be removed from the body of the text. For instance, use “…participants were recruited from a university campus” instead of “…participants were recruited from University X.” Additionally, we recommend removing marks that identify institutional affiliation from images and supplementary videos (e.g., institutional attire, logos) as much as possible. However, pictures of robots used and study setup, in general, do not need to be anonymized, even if the robot uniquely identifies your group.

We also ask authors to leave the citations to their previous work following the same format as citations to others’ work. More concretely, as an example, when the authors refer to their previous work in the text, they should use “Prior work by [6]…” instead of “Our prior work [6]…”, and [6] should be included in the reference list with the same format as the other citations.

Ethical Impact Statement Guidelines

In the past few years, we have seen greater deployment of AI in our society, which has resulted in greater impact on our daily lives. Yet, with the increased societal benefit that AI brings, we have also seen greater risks for potential harm. The Affective Computing community, in particular, is particularly aware of the risks and possible harm of the technology that we study. AAAC has had an Ethics Special Interest Group since its founding, and our community’s attention to ethics has also grown in recent years to match the growing risks: In 2019, ACII held a community-wide town hall to discuss the ‘misuses’ of Affective Computing and in 2021, the theme of the conference was “Ethical Affective Computing”.

Following the first initiative made in ACII2022 where authors were asked to have Ethical Impact Statements as part of the submission process, the ACII2023 organizing committee has committed to strengthen this ambition. For ACII2023, it will be mandatory to include an Ethical Impact Statement in all submitted papers.

Please refer to this document on how to write an Ethical Impact Statement for a lengthier discussion of the details of how to write an Ethical Impact Statement. Both authors and reviewers should use this document for clarity and for a shared understanding of the ACII community’s vision.

  • Papers must have a dedicated Ethical Impact Statement section that comes at the end of the paper, before the reference list. The Ethical Impact Statement would be, therefore, a mandatory section, no longer than 1 page, and it will not be counted in the content 7 page limit of the paper. Thus, the page limit remains at 7 full pages of content (which may include the Ethical Implications section and references) + (1 page that can only contain Ethical Impact Statement and references). In other words, the Ethical Impact Statement can spill over into the 8th page, but the full paper must still be 8 pages or less. The following table summarizes these instructions:
  Within the 7 pages of content Within the 8th page
Main Body Content through the Conclusion OK  
Ethical Impact Statement (mandatory) OK OK
References OK OK
  • This Ethical Impact Statement requirement applies to papers to the ACII main conference, special session, and workshop paper tracks. Please, notice that extended abstracts for workshop, demos, or special tracks might require a mandatory Ethical Implications section. Thus, make sure you verify what are the Ethical Impact requirements in any of your submissions.
  • Please note that any mention of IRB approval or other Ethics related information should also be anonymized in the initial submission (and replaced with the correct information in the camera-ready version).
  • The Ethical Impact Statement will also be reviewed. Ethical reviews will be carried out based on papers flagged by technical reviewers and area chairs.
  • Note that ACII reserves the right to reject submissions that do not fulfill the Ethical Impact requirements for submissions and/or have violated the ethical principles stated in this document.

Checklists for authors

A. Checklist for anonymization

Author checklist for anonymizing submissions:

☐ Remove author and institution information from the cover page as well as from acknowledgments section

☐ Clear meta-data in word processor or PDF viewer/editor

☐ Replace institution information in the body of the text (including any approvals from IRBs or equivalent ethics boards) with generic identifiers (e.g., “this research was approved by [anonymized] Institutional Review Board”; “we obtained approval from our university ethics committee”).

☐ Use third person for citations to own work

☐ Remove marks for institutional affiliation from images and supplementary materials (as much as possible).

☐ Refrain from reposting articles publicly online (e.g., website, arXiv): To maintain the double-blind review process, we are requesting authors refrain from posting their articles online until the notification date.

B. Checklist for best practices on how to write a paper and best practices on responsible Machine Learning research

Author checklist for best practices on paper writing as well as on responsible Machine Learning research:

☐ Read the ACII Submission Guidelines.

☐ Make sure the contributions of the paper are clearly stated in the abstract and introduction.

☐ Make sure your claims in the paper match the theoretical and/or experimental findings.

☐ If you include theoretical results, make sure you state the full set of assumptions and the complete proofs of the theoretical results. If the complete proofs of the theoretical results are very long to be added in the main paper they must be added in the supplementary material.

☐ If you run Machine Learning experiments:

☐ Make sure you include and share all the necessary information to reproduce your results (e.g. hyperparameters, training splits). We encourage you to release your code and trained models, if you are allowed to do so.

☐ Make sure you provide evidence of the stability of your results. For example, run the experiments multiple times with different random seeds if you use random initialization, and provide error bars.

☐ We encourage you to share the amount of computation and the type of computational resources used.

☐ If you run statistical inference:

☐ Explicitly state which statistical test(s) you ran (e.g., Welch’s t-test, Mann-Whitney U-test, OLS regression, Pearson correlation), and ideally include your analytical code in the supplemental materials

☐ Report all your p-values including non-significant ones, and report them exactly unless they are smaller than .001 (e.g., p=.459, p=.003, p<.001)

☐ Report effect sizes and confidence intervals (e.g., the mean of Group 1 was 0.4 SDs higher than that of Group 2, d=0.40, 95% CI: [0.30, 0.50])

☐ Avoid causal language unless testing for causality (e.g., talk about X explaining or being associated with Y, rather than X causing/leading to Y)

☐ Briefly discuss the plausibility of the assumptions of your model(s)

☐ If you use existing assets (e.g. code, data, models) make sure you properly cite the original source.

☐ If your work contributes any new assets (e.g., code, data, models) and you can not release it, make sure you explain the reasons for not releasing the asset.

C. Ethical Impact Statement Checklist

☐ Please read through the Ethical Impact Statement Guidelines and this document on how to write an Ethical Impact Statement for a lengthier discussion of the details of how to write an Ethical Impact Statement.

☐ Fill out the Ethical Impact Checklist (this checklist) and note any items that do not apply or that you would like to elevate for discussion.

☐ If you conducted research with human subjects:

☐ Include in your Methods section a short, clear summary of what instructions were given to the participant that may have influenced your findings. (Note that full study instructions may be too long to include; it is fine to omit lengthy instructions that are not likely to have influenced the study findings)

☐ State if the study was IRB-approved, IRB-exempt, or not given to any IRB. Give the IRB approval number. In the case of “no IRB”, say why not.

☐ Describe how informed consent and/or assent were obtained from human subjects or reasons for why these were not applicable. (These should go in the Methods section of your paper)

☐ Explain how human subjects were compensated for their participation and how that compensation was determined. (These should go in the Methods section of your paper)

☐ Discuss any potential negative impact of your work and strategies for mitigating these risks.

☐ Can the research be used to deceive people? What steps could be taken to mitigate this?

☐ Does or could the research contain bias against certain groups of people that could result in discrimination? Will it exacerbate already-existing biases (e.g., will it perpetuate gender or racial bias?)?

☐ Can the research or technology described be used in applications that limit human rights or impact people’s livelihoods? For example, surveillance, or limiting access to jobs, schools, etc.

☐ Discuss the limits of generalizability of your work.

☐ For example, point out strong assumptions and discuss how robust your results are to violations of these assumptions.

☐ Discuss the scope of your claims. For example, maybe you used a small dataset with poor demographic diversity. If that’s the case, you might want to discuss how the limited diversity of the dataset you used affects the scalability of your approach to larger and more diverse datasets.

☐ Discuss the factors that can influence the performance of your approach. For example, an English affective speech-to-text system might not be able to work properly for non-native English speakers.

☐ How sensitive is the research to contextual factors? If the work is “generic”, e.g., a generic facial expression classifier, what are the considerations about generalizing to particular contexts?

Acknowledgments

The ACII submission guidelines take inspiration and information from the following guidelines: