ICML 2012 Survey Results

Comments about the conference format

Conditioned on questionee being a reviewer

1. the loss is more. i have seen many borderline papers in proceedings.

2. Another option is to make all of the presentations 15 minutes instead of 20. There is far too much noise in the reviewing process for it to be useful in determining the relative quality of different papers amoung those that have been accepted. Also, lower scores can sometimes indicate problems with writing and have nothing to do with the quality of the ideas and whether they are worth being presented for longer than 5 minutes.

3. Have the authors upload a 20 minute video of their presentation/results/slides to an appropriate site. Such sites can be an ICML 2012 youtube/vimeo/whatever channel or something with more structure like videolectures where content is categorized by sessions. This should be optional for the authors.

4. No 'short talks'. Either no talk, spotlight (one or two slides, one or two minutes, top), or full talk. I conjecture that the five-minute 'short talk' format will tempt too many people into cramming too much into their slides and/or going overtime. (Perhaps poll again after the conference.)

5. + videotape all talks

6. I particularly like the ICML decision in the past to give each paper a talk. This allows nice focused sessions, contrary to conferences such as NIPS, CVPR, ICCV.

7. The fact that ICML offers the opportunity to give a talk (even short) to *all* papers is absolutely essential. As a speaker or attendee in ICML, it makes a big difference in the conference experience.

   I think this feature should be saved.

8. Reduce presentations to 17+3 or 16+4 instead of 20+5.

9. In case of the poster option, I would suggest to have long poster sessions in order to not penalize the papers accepted only as posters.

10. Shorten each talk a little. Remove the option of 'invited application papers' again.

11. definitely 5 tracks is enough, perhaps too many. I'd rather add a day and reduce number of tracks while keeping paper count the same.

12. Create a numerus clausus: authors cannot co-author more than X submissions. This

    will force some authors, who tend to flood co-authorship, to limit their submissions, work better on the papers submitted, and given the 'prestige' of ICML, this should make them select their best works to submit (and not 'test the water' with some of them).

13. Short talk + poster is the best idea. I have such experience at ACL related conferences and it can be even valuable having very short talk. The ICML feature of presenting poster in any case is a big plus!