Purpose. The Shepherding Track serves as a novel venue for high-quality publications of research conducted by pre/early-PhDs and honours/master students. This track aims to enrich the academic training and experience of junior students by selecting early-career researchers as shepherd mentors to provide actionable instructions on students' preliminary submission and results. If the submission's research contribution and quality meets the expectation, the submission will be accepted into the main conference.
Relationship to ADC. Submissions to the track will be part of the main ADC conference, presented alongside the main conference research track papers. Accepted papers will be published in the ADC proceedings. We will maintain a page on the ADC website with all accepted submissions.
Presentation. The students will present their accepted papers in the Doctoral Consortium. Mentors and senior researchers will give feedback in-person.
Criteria. We are aiming for an equally stringent review as that of the research track but tailored to cater towards a shepherding process. Submissions to this track will be reviewed by the selected shepherd mentors.
Relevant Topics. Please refer to those in the CFP of the research track.
Instructions
Submission format.
- All submitted papers must be in English and conform to the formatting instructions for the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) including references and figures.
- The format style files are available at LNCS Authors Instructions Page.
- Authors should consult Springer’s authors’ guidelines and use their proceedings templates, either for LaTeX or for Word, for the preparation of their papers. Springer encourages authors to include their ORCIDs in their papers. In addition, the corresponding author of each paper, acting on behalf of all of the authors of that paper, must complete and sign a Consent-to-Publish form. The corresponding author signing the copyright form should match the corresponding author marked on the paper. Once the files have been sent to Springer, changes relating to the authorship of the papers cannot be made.
- The length of the initial submission should be at least 8 pages but not exceed 12 pages (excluding any references), presenting most of the components (e.g., main ideas, algorithms, experiments) of a research full paper for shepherding. The length of a demo paper should be at most 4 pages (excluding any references). Paper format is consistent with the research track. Please refer to the CFP of research track for details on paper format.
Shepherd assignment. When a submission to this track is received, two shepherds from the ADC Shepherding Committee will be assigned to the paper. The shepherds will follow up with the corresponding author to provide guidance on improving the paper and to review the paper. Authors will receive email notifications of their delegated shepherds one week after the submission is received. Note that shepherds are not expected to be listed as a co-author of the paper. They act as mentors.
Important Dates
Submission deadline. Continuous until 30 September, 2024 (23:59 AEST UTC+10). The shepherding process will be carried out at any time when a submission is received until the deadline. Authors considering this track are encouraged to submit their preliminary work as early as possible for timely feedback from the delegated mentors/shepherds.
Author notification. 15 October, 2024 (23:59 AEST UTC+10).
Camera-ready deadline. 27 October, 2024 (23:59 AEST UTC+10). When preparing the camera-ready version, authors are required to include a “Shepherding Process” section to describe briefly what has been changed after the shepherding.
Submissions
- The submission of a paper should be regarded as an undertaking that, should the paper be accepted, at least one author will attend the conference in person to present the work.
- Submission link: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ADC2024