Paper Kit

Part I: General Information

Procedure

The ICASSP 2020 paper submission and review process is being conducted in a manner similar to previous ICASSP conferences, including the change from previous years being an optional 5th page for references only:

• Authors who wish to participate in the conference will create documents consisting of a complete description of their ideas and applicable research results in a maximum of 4 pages for technical content including figures and possible references, and with one additional optional 5th page containing only references.
• Submit the paper and copyright form electronically. This paper submission must be submitted in final, publishable form before the submission deadline listed below.
• Check the ICASSP 2020 website for the status of your paper.
• Paper submissions will be reviewed by experts selected by the conference committee for their demonstrated knowledge of particular topics. The progress and results of the review process will be posted on this website, and authors will also be notified of the review results by email.
• If your paper is accepted, it will be assigned to either a lecture or a poster session by the program committee. Prepare a lecture or poster presentation accordingly, following the guidelines included in this document.

The review process is being conducted entirely online. To make the review process easy for the reviewers, and to assure that the paper submissions will be readable through the online review system, we ask that authors submit paper documents that are formatted according to the Paper Kit instructions included here.

Requirements

Papers may be no longer than 5 pages, including all text, figures, and references, and the 5th page may contain only references.

Papers must be submitted by the deadline date. There will be no exceptions.

Accepted papers MUST be presented at the conference by one of the authors. One of the authors MUST register for the conference at one of the non-student rates offered, 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 four (4) papers.

ICASSP 2020 requires that each accepted paper be presented by one of the authors in-person at the conference site according to the schedule published. Any paper accepted into the technical program, but not presented on-site will be withdrawn from the official proceedings archived on IEEE Xplore.

Deadlines and Important Dates

Submission of Regular Papers	October 21, 2019
Notification of Acceptance (by email)	January 24, 2020
Author’s Registration Deadline	February 13, 2020

Correspondence

Please make sure to put the conference name (ICASSP 2020) and the paper number that is assigned to you on all correspondence.

Part II: Preparation of the Paper

Document Formatting

Use the following guidelines when preparing your document:

LENGTH: You are allowed a total of 5 pages for your document. Up to 4 pages may contain technical content, figures, and references, while the 5th page may contain only references. This is the maximum number of pages that will be accepted, including all figures, tables, and references. Any documents that exceed the 5 page limit or have a 5th page containing anything other than references, will be rejected.

LANGUAGE: All proposals must be in English.

MARGINS: Documents should be formatted for standard letter-size (8-1/2″ by 11″ or 216mm by 279mm) paper. Any text or other material outside the margins specified below will not be accepted:

• All text and figures must be contained in a 178 mm x 229 mm (7 inch x 9 inch) image area.
• The left margin must be 19 mm (0.75 inch).
• The top margin must be 25 mm (1.0 inch), except for the title page where it must be 35 mm (1.375 inches).
• Text should appear in two columns, each 86 mm (3.39 inch) wide with 6 mm (0.24 inch) space between columns.
• On the first page, the top 50 mm (2″) of both columns is reserved for the title, author(s), and affiliation(s). These items should be centered across both columns, starting at 35 mm (1.375 inches) from the top of the page.
• The paper abstract should appear at the top of the left-hand column of text, about 12 mm (0.5″) below the title area and no more than 80 mm (3.125″) in length. Leave 12 mm (0.5″) of space between the end of the abstract and the beginning of the main text.

A format sheet with the margins and placement guides is available in the following file formats:

• PDF file (When you print this file, make sure the “shrink to fit” box is not checked!)
• PostScript file

These files contain lines and boxes showing the margins and print areas. If you print one of these files, then stack it atop your printed page and hold it up to the light, you can easily check your margins to see if your print area fits within the space allowed.

TYPE:

Face: To achieve the best viewing experience for the review process and conference proceedings, we strongly encourage authors to use Times-Roman or Computer Modern fonts. If a font face is used that is not recognized by the submission system, your proposal will not be reproduced correctly.

Size: Use a font size that is no smaller than 9 points throughout the paper, including figure captions. In 9-point type font, capital letters are 2 mm high. For 9-point type font, there should be no more than 3.2 lines/cm (8 lines/inch) vertically. This is a minimum spacing; 2.75 lines/cm (7 lines/inch) will make the proposal much more readable. Larger type sizes require correspondingly larger vertical spacing.

TITLE: The paper title must appear in boldface letters and should be in ALL CAPITALS. Do not use LaTeX math notation ($x_y$) in the title; the title must be representable in the Unicode character set. Also try to avoid uncommon acronyms in the title.

AUTHOR LIST: The authors’ name(s) and affiliation(s) appear below the title in capital and lower case letters. ICASSP does not perform blind reviews, so be sure to include the author list in your submitted paper. Proposals with multiple authors and affiliations may require two or more lines for this information. The order of the authors on the document should exactly match in number and order the authors typed into the online submission form.

The LaTeX template has instructions for listing one or two authors. If you need to list more than 2 authors, please use the following structure:

\name{Author Name$^{\star \dagger}$ \qquad Author Name$^{\star}$ \qquad Author Name$^{\dagger}$}

			\address{$^{\star}$ Affiliation Number One \\
			    $^{\dagger}$}Affiliation Number Two

ABSTRACT: Each paper should contain an abstract of 100 to 150 words that appears at the beginning of the document. Use the same text that is submitted electronically along with the author contact information.

INDEX TERMS (KEYWORDS): Enter up to 5 keywords separated by commas..

BODY: Major headings appear in boldface CAPITAL letters, centered in the column. Subheadings appear in capital and lower case, either underlined or in boldface. They start at the left margin of the column on a separate line. Sub-subheadings are discouraged, but if they must be used, they should appear in capital and lower case, and start at the left margin on a separate line. They may be underlined or in italics.

RELATION TO PRIOR WORK (NEW): The text of the paper should contain discussions on how the paper’s contributions are related to prior work in the field. It is important to put new work in context, to give credit to foundational work, and to provide details associated with the previous work that have appeared in the literature. This discussion may be a separate, numbered section or it may appear elsewhere in the body of the manuscript, but it must be present.

You should differentiate what is new and how your work expands on or takes a different path from the prior studies. An example might read something to the effect: “The work presented here has focused on the formulation of the ABC algorithm, which takes advantage of non-uniform time-frequency domain analysis of data. The work by Smith and Cohen [1] considers only fixed time-domain analysis and the work by Jones et al [2] takes a different approach based on fixed frequency partitioning. While the present study is related to recent approaches in time-frequency analysis [3-5], it capitalizes on a new feature space, which was not considered in these earlier studies.

REFERENCES: List and number all bibliographical references at the end of the paper. The references can be numbered in alphabetic order or in order of appearance in the document. When referring to them in the text, type the corresponding reference number in square brackets as shown at the end of this sentence [2]. An additional final page (the fifth page, in most cases) is allowed, but must contain only references to the prior literature.

The end of the document should include a list of references containing information similar to the following example:

[1] D. E. Ingalls, “Image Processing for Experts,” IEEE Trans. ASSP, vol. ASSP-36, pp. 1932-1948, 1988.

ILLUSTRATIONS & COLOR: Illustrations must appear within the designated margins. They may span the two columns. If possible, position illustrations at the top of columns, rather than in the middle or at the bottom. Caption and number every illustration. All halftone illustrations must be clear in black and white. Since the printed proceedings will be produced in black and white, be sure that your images are acceptable when printed in black and white (the electronic, conference-distributed proceedings and the IEEE Xplore proceedings will retain the colors in your document).

PAGE NUMBERS: Do not put page numbers on your document. Appropriate page numbers will be added to accepted papers when the conference proceedings are assembled.

Templates

The following style files and templates are available for users of LaTeX and Microsoft Word from here.

We recommend that you use the Word file or LaTeX files to produce your document, since they have been set up to meet the formatting guidelines listed above. When using these files, double-check the paper size in your page setup to make sure you are using the letter-size paper layout (8.5″ X 11″) or A4 paper layout (210mm X 297mm). The LaTeX environment files specify suitable margins, page layout, text, and a bibliography style.

In particular, with LaTeX, there are cases where the top-margin of the resulting Postscript or PDF file does not meet the specified parameters. In this case, you may need to add a \topmargin=0mm command just after the \begin{document} command in your .tex file. The spacing of the top margin is not critical, as the page contents will be adjusted on the proceedings. The critical dimensions are the actual width and height of the page content.

Part III: Submission and Review of the Paper

The review process will be performed from the electronic submission of your paper. To ensure that your document is compatible with the review system, please adhere to the following compatibility requirements:

File Format

The ‘IEEE Requirements for PDF Documents’ MUST be followed EXACTLY. The conference is required to ensure that documents follow this specification. The requirements are enumerated in:

• IEEE Requirements for PDF Documents v3.2 [PDF]

Papers must be submitted in Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) format.

PDF and Postscript files:

• must not have Adobe Document Protection or Document Security enabled,
• must have either ‘US Letter’ or ‘A4’ sized pages,
• must be in first-page-first order, and
• must have ALL FONTS embedded and subset.

ALL FONTS MUST be embedded in the PDF file. There is no guarantee that the viewers of the paper (reviewers and those who view the electronic proceedings after publication) have the same fonts used in the document. If fonts are not embedded in the submission, you will be contacted by CMS and asked to submit a file that has all fonts embedded. Please refer to your PDF file generation utility’s user guide to find out how to embed all fonts.

Information for LaTeX users

Generating a PostScript file is straightforward for all LaTeX packages we are aware of. When preparing the proposal under LaTeX, it is preferable to use scalable fonts such as Type I, Computer Modern. However, quite good results can be obtained with the fonts defined in the style file recommended above (spconf.sty).

PDF files with Postscript Type 3 fonts are highly discouraged. PDF and PostScript files utilizing Type 3 fonts are typically produced by the LaTeX system and are lower-resolution bitmapped versions of the letters and figures. It is possible to perform a few simple changes to the configuration or command-line to produce files that use PostScript Type 1 fonts, which are a vector representation of the letters and figures.

For most installations of LaTeX, you can cause dvips to output Type 1 fonts instead of Type 3 fonts by including -Ppdf option to dvips. The resulting Postscript file will reference the Type 1 Computer Modern fonts, rather than embedding the bitmapped Type 3 versions, which cause problems with printers.

You may also need to tell dvips to force letter sized paper with the option: -t letter.

Some LaTeX installations also include pdflatex, which produces acceptable PDF files as well.

File Size Limit

Authors will be permitted to submit a document file up to 5 MB (megabytes) in size.

File Name

The filename of the document file should be the first author’s last name, followed by the appropriate extension (.pdf). For example, if the first author’s name is Johan Smith, you would submit your file as “smith.pdf”. The paper submission process will append the filename with a unique identifier when it is stored on our system, so multiple submissions with the same name will not overwrite each other and will be distinguishable.

Electronic Paper Submission

When you have your document file ready, gather the following information before entering the submission system:

• Document file in PDF format
• Affiliation, email address, and mailing address for each author
• Paper title
• Text file containing paper abstract text, in ASCII text format (for copying and pasting into web page form)

To submit your document and author information, go to the ‘Paper Submission’ link on the ICASSP 2020 homepage:

The submission system will present an entry form to allow you to enter the paper title, abstract text, review category, and author contact information.

ALL authors must be entered in the online form, and must appear in the online form in the same order in which the authors appear on the PDF.

After you submit this information, the system will display a page with the data that you entered so that you may verify its accuracy. If you need to change the data to fix a mistake, you may use the back button on your browser to return to the information entry form. Once you approve of the data that you have entered, you may choose your document file for upload at the bottom of the verification page. When you click on the button labeled ‘Continue’ at the bottom of this page, the page will check the filename extension to make sure it matches the submission criteria, then your browser will upload your file to our server. Depending on the size of your file and your internet connection speed, this upload may take a few minutes. At the end of a successful upload, you will see a confirmation page displaying the paper number that is assigned to you, and and email message will be sent to the corresponding authors’ email addresses to confirm that the file has been uploaded. If you do not see the confirmation page after uploading your file, we may not have successfully received your file upload.

IEEE Copyright Transfer Form

All submissions must have an IEEE Electronic Copyright form submitted before the manuscript is allowed to be delivered to reviewers. If the submission is not accepted, the copyright transfer form becomes null and void.

The electronic copyright form is digitally linked to your submission; if you revise/update your paper’s title or author list, the copyright form will still apply. There is no need to submit a new copyright form.

The confirmation page that is displayed after uploading your final, camera-ready document file will also have a link to the IEEE Electronic Copyright Form (eCF) system. That system will guide you through a series of questions to determine the type of copyright form required for your manuscript and will electronically record your signature. You will have the opportunity to download a PDF version of your electronically-signed copyright form, and both the IEEE eCF system and the ICASSP 2020 system will send you a confirmation of the receipt of the properly signed form.

Online Review Process

Your submitted paper will be converted to PDF format by the submission system if necessary, then visually inspected by our submission system staff to assure that the document is readable and meets all formatting requirements to be included in a visually pleasing and consistent proceedings publication for ICASSP 2020. If our submission inspectors encounter errors with your submitted file, they will contact you to resolve the issue. If your paper passes inspection, it will be entered into the review process. A committee of reviewers selected by the conference committee will review the documents and rate them according to quality, relevance, and correctness. The conference technical committee will use these reviews to determine which papers will be accepted for presentation in the conference. The result of the technical committee’s decision will be communicated to the submitting authors by email, along with any reviewer comments, if any.

Notification of Acceptance

Authors will be notified of paper acceptance or non-acceptance by email as close as possible to the published author notification date. The email notification will include the presentation format chosen for your paper (lecture or poster) and may also include the presentation date and time, if available.

The notification email will include comments from the reviewers. The conference cannot guarantee that all of the reviewers will provide the level of comment desired by you. However, reviewers are encouraged to submit as detailed comments as possible.

Because of the short amount of time between paper acceptance decisions and the beginning of the publication process, ICASSP 2020 is not able to allow for a two-way discourse between the authors and the reviewers of a paper.

Accepted Paper Revisions

Limited revisions to accepted papers will be allowed. In general, changes should be limited to areas in which improvement was recommended by the reviewers. Changes to the title and author list are not allowed except for extraordinary circumstances. The time period allowed for revision to accepted papers is very short and the schedule will be held strictly, so if you decide to make revisions to your paper, be sure it is finished during the paper revision time period.

Required Author Registration

Be sure that at least one author registers to attend the conference using the online registration system available through the conference website. Each paper must have at least one author registered, with the payment received by the author registration deadline (see above) to avoid being withdrawn from the conference.

Copyright Issues for Web Publication

If you plan to publish a copy of an accepted paper on the Internet by any means, you MUST display the following IEEE copyright notice on the first page that displays IEEE published (and copyrighted) material:

Copyright 2020 IEEE. Published in the IEEE 2020 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2020), scheduled for 4-9 May, 2020, in Barcelona, Spain. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works, must be obtained from the IEEE. Contact: Manager, Copyrights and Permissions / IEEE Service Center / 445 Hoes Lane / P.O. Box 1331 / Piscataway, NJ 08855-1331, USA. Telephone: + Intl. 908-562-3966.

If you post an electronic version of an accepted paper, you must provide the IEEE with the electronic address (URL, FTP address, etc.) of the posting.

IEEE Xplore® Open Preview – April 9th, 2020

ICASSP 2020 papers will be published in IEEE Xplore® Open Preview. Please note that papers will be available in the IEEE Xplore digital library, free of charge to all customers, one month before the conference until the conference ends. During this time, all papers will be available via the conference mobile app and on IEEE Xplore and open access for this one month prior to the conference. Therefore, the effective publication date of your paper will be April 9th, 2020. Please, keep this in mind if you are planning to submit a patent application related to your work.

Part IV: Preparation of the Presentation

When we send the review results for your paper by email, that email message will specify whether accepted papers have been assigned for presentation in a poster session or lecture (oral) session. To help authors prepare for lecture and poster presentations, the following suggestions have been created:

Lecture Presentations

Presentation time is critical: each paper is allocated 18 minutes for oral sessions. We recommend that presentation of your slides should take about 15 minutes, leaving 3 minutes for introduction, summary, and questions from the audience. To achieve appropriate timing, organize your slides or viewgraphs around the points you intend to make, using no more than one slide per minute. A reasonable strategy is to allocate about 2 minutes per slide when there are equations or important key points to make, and one minute per slide when the content is less complex. Slides attract and hold attention, and reinforce what you say – provided you keep them simple and easy to read. Plan on covering at most 6 points per slide, covered by 6 to 12 spoken sentences and no more than about two spoken minutes.

Make sure each of your key points are easy to explain with aid of the material on your slides. Do not read directly from the slide during your presentation. You shouldn’t need to prepare a written speech, although it is often a good idea to prepare the opening and closing sentences in advance. It is very important that you rehearse your presentation in front of an audience before you give your presentation at ICASSP. Presenters must be sufficiently familiar with the material being presented to answer detailed questions from the audience. In addition, the presenter must contact the Session Chair in advance of the presenter’s session.

Poster Presentations

Poster sessions are a good medium for authors to present papers and meet with interested attendees for in-depth technical discussions. In addition, attendees find the poster sessions a good way to sample many papers in parallel sessions. Thus it is important that you display your message clearly and noticeably to attract people who might have an interest in your paper.

Your poster should cover the key points of your work. It need not, and should not, attempt to include all the details; you can describe them in person to people who are interested. The ideal poster is designed to attract attention, provide a brief overview of your work, and initiate discussion. Carefully and completely prepare your poster well in advance of the conference. Try tacking up the poster before you leave for the conference to see what it will look like and to make sure that you have all of the necessary pieces.

For your poster, a board will be provided; dimensions to be posted here later.

The title of your poster should appear at the top in CAPITAL letters about 25mm high. Below the title put the author(s)’ name(s) and affiliation(s). The flow of your poster should be from the top left to the bottom right. Use arrows to lead your viewer through the poster. Use color for highlighting and to make your poster more attractive. Use pictures, diagrams, cartoons, figures, etc., rather than text wherever possible. Try to state your main result in 6 lines or less, in lettering about 15mm high so that people can read the poster from a distance. The smallest text on your poster should be at least 9mm high, and the important points should be in a larger size. Use a sans-serif font (such as “cmss” in the Computer Modern family or the “Helvetica” PostScript font) to make the print easier to read from a distance.

Make your poster as self-explanatory as possible. This will save your efforts for technical discussions. There will not be any summaries given at the beginning of the poster sessions at ICASSP 2020, so authors need not prepare any overhead slides for their poster presentations. You may bring additional battery-operated audio or visual aids to enhance your presentation.

Prepare a short presentation of about 5 or 10 minutes that you can periodically give to those assembled around your poster throughout the 2 hour poster session. If possible, more than one author should attend the session to aid in presentations and discussions, and to provide the presenters with the chance to rest or briefly view other posters.