ICML 2012 Survey Results

Comments about the conference format

Conditioned on questionee being an author of an rejected paper

1. If ICML wants to make a real-world impact you need to consider applications papers. See Kiri Wagstaff's paper.

2. Plenary sessions in the morning, Parallel sessions in the afternoon, Posters in the evening

3. Increase the number of reviewers and make sure each paper is reviewed by people who are experts in the problem addressed by each paper. I know it is very difficult task, but ICML is considered the top ML conference and should remain as is in the years to come.

4. 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.

5. + videotape all talks

6. no idea what would be a good thing to do.

7. Not my problem, but good luck with it.

8. Move to fewer tracks (5 is too many) and present some as posters only.

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

10. Make most papers into posters.

11. more parallel tracks

12. Accept papers on a rolling basis throughout the year, without a specific cap on the number of accepted papers. All papers accepted appear equally in the proceedings/online archive. Allow, but do not require, all accepted papers to present a poster and/or short talk, possibly in one of many parallel sessions (with the understanding that there is no added credit for doing this, once the paper is accepted anyway). Select a much smaller subset of papers for presentation, with more plenary sessions, or perhaps in sessions with less parallel tracks.