Submission Guidelines

For main track, special track, and workshop papers

Note: Please visit the respective calls pages for the submission guidelines for Demos, Doctoral Consortium, and LBR.

For a list of all topics relevant to ACII 2024, please see the Call for Papers page.

Submissions to ACII 2024 should not substantially overlap with any other paper already submitted or published, or to be submitted during the ACII 2024 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 2024.

Proceedings will be published on IEEExplore. If a paper is accepted, an author must 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. However, this exclusion is not for authors who could not come because of visa problems.

The reviewing process for ACII 2024 will be double-blind. Thus, the submitted version of the paper should be appropriately anonymized to not reveal either the authors’ identities or institutions. Any submission that contains information revealing the authors’ identity 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. The main body of the paper, through the conclusion, can be up to 7 pages. The Ethical Impact Statement can take up to one page (additional to the 7-page limit of the main content). The references do not have a page limit. Submissions must be in PDF format, in final and publishable form, by the submission deadline. Papers that use different formatting from the ACII 2024 Latex or Word templates 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. Please ensure anonymity, including the file properties or other hidden text. The supplemental materials will not be part of the conference proceedings, so they will only 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 2024 will use the IEEE PDF eXpress to enforce the requirements for papers appearing in IEEE Xplore. The final versions of all papers accepted for publication must adhere to the IEEE Xplore PDF specifications.

Instructions for Authors

  • Please prepare your manuscripts as per the IEEE specification:
  • Carefully proofread your submission.
  • Please submit the main, Special Sessions, and workshop papers to EasyChair. 
  • Submitting the same paper to multiple tracks is not allowed.

Arxiv Policy

ACII 2024 does not consider a paper on arXiv.org and other open repositories to be a dual submission. However, papers deposited to paid-access repositories (such as ResearchGate and Academia) will not be accepted.

Author Registration

Please refer to the Registration page for detailed information on author registration requirements.

Guides for Anonymizing Submissions

ACII 2024 follows a double-blind review process, requiring authors to prepare an anonymized submission.

To prepare an anonymized submission, authors must 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 authors’ identity.

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 generally 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 a greater impact on our daily lives. Yet, with AI’s increased societal benefit, 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. In 2021, the conference’s theme was “Ethical Affective Computing”.

Following the first initiative made in ACII2022 and ACII2023, where authors were asked to have ethical impact statements as part of the submission process, the ACII2024 organizing committee has committed to strengthening this ambition. For ACII 2024, including an Ethical Impact Statement in all submitted papers will be mandatory.

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 a shared understanding of the ACII community’s vision.

  • Papers must have a dedicated Ethical Impact Statement section at the end of the paper, before the reference list. Therefore, the Ethical Impact Statement would be a mandatory section, no longer than 1 page, and it will not be counted in the 7-page limit of the main content of the paper. In summary, the main body of the paper is limited to at most 7 pages + Ethical impact statement is limited to at most 1 page + References have no page limit.
  • 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 workshops, demos, or special tracks might require a mandatory Ethical Implications section. Thus, ensure you verify the Ethical Impact requirements in 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 based on papers flagged by technical reviewers and area chairs.
  • 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 the acknowledgments section

☐ Clear meta-data in a 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).

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 paper’s contributions 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, state the full set of assumptions and the complete proofs of the theoretical results. If the complete proofs of the theoretical results are too long to be included in the main paper, they must be included in the supplementary material.

☐ If you run Machine Learning experiments:

  • Ensure 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), properly cite the original source.

☐ If your work contributes new assets (e.g., code, data, models) and you can not release them, explain why you are 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 explain 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 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: