ACM’s publications policies

NOTICE

Papers accepted for this conference will be published in the ACM proceedings. ACM’s publication policy is as follows.

• By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

Submission guidelines

Submissions

Authors will submit papers via the HotCRP conference review software here. Papers must be submitted in printable PDF format and should contain a maximum of 11 pages of single-spaced two-column text plus unlimited references. No appendices are allowed.

If you are using Latex please use the following template. A sample PDF generated from the template is available here. The general ACM templates (Latex, Microsoft Word or Overleaf) can be accessed here.

If you wish not to use the above template, please use the following specifications

Anonymity

Submissions (both abstract and paper) should be prepared for double-blind review, i.e., without author names or other identifying material. The submission system requests information about the authors. This information will not be given to the reviewers. Authors should refer to themselves in the third person when citing their own work. Authors should under no circumstances reveal their identity or affiliation through any side channels, including but not limited to the metadata of the submitted PDF files, their prior work, or acronyms of systems which have already been released to the public. If you are improving upon your prior work, refer to your prior work in the third person and include a full citation for the work in the bibliography. For example, if you are building on your own prior work, you would say something like: “While the authors of~\cite{your prior work } did X, Y, and Z, this paper additionally does W, and is therefore much better.” Do NOT omit or anonymize references for blind review. There is one exception to this for your own prior work that appeared in Computer Architecture Letters, arXiv, workshops without archived proceedings, etc. as discussed later in this document.

If authors have any doubts on whether any aspect of their submission violates anonymity they should contact the Program Chairs. Authors may contact only the Program Chairs for any matters regarding submitted papers during and after the review process. Contacting PC or ERC members about submitted paper(s) is an ethical violation and grounds for immediate rejection of the paper.

Declaring Authors

Declare all the authors of the paper upfront. Addition/removal of authors once the paper is accepted will have to be approved by the program chair, since it potentially undermines the goal of eliminating conflicts for reviewer assignment.

Areas and Topics

Authors should indicate specific topics covered by the paper on the submission page. If you are unsure whether your paper falls within the scope of the conference, please check with the Program Chairs — ICS is a broad, multidisciplinary conference and encourages new topics.

Declaring Conflicts of Interest

Authors must register all their conflicts on the paper submission site. Conflicts are needed to ensure appropriate assignment of reviewers. If a paper is found to have an undeclared conflict that causes a problem OR if a paper is found to declare false conflicts in order to abuse or `game’ the review system, the paper may be rejected.

Please declare a conflict of interest with the following people for any author of your paper. A conflict occurs in the following cases:

• Between advisors and advisees, forever.
• Between family members, forever (if they might be potential reviewers).
• Between people who have collaborated in the last FOUR years. This collaboration can consist of a joint research or development project, a joint paper, or a pending or awarded joint proposal. Co-participation in professional education (e.g., workshops/tutorials), service (e.g., program committees), and other non-research-focused activities does not generally constitute a conflict. When in doubt, the author(s) should check with the Program Chair.
• Between people who were at the same institution in the last FOUR years, or where one is actively engaged in discussions about employment with the other person’s institution.
  • Note: Graduate students are not presumed to have an automatic COI with their undergraduate institution. Similarly, students who have finalized internships at companies are not presumed to retain an automatic COI with that company. On the other hand, prospective graduate students do have a COI with any institution they have applied to if they are actively engaged in discussions with any faculty member at that institution. Once they join an institution to pursue graduate studies, automatic COIs with any other prospective institutions sunset. In all these cases, the collaboration COI above still applies.
• When there is a direct funding relationship between an author and the potential reviewer (e.g., the reviewer is a sponsor of an author’s research on behalf of his/her company or vice versa).
• Among the leadership of research structures supported by an umbrella funding award (i.e., people making funding decisions or representing members’ work before the funding agency) and other members under that umbrella award.
• Among PIs of research structures supported under the same umbrella funding award who 1) participate regularly in non-public meetings sponsored by that umbrella award, and 2) are regularly exposed to presentations or discussions of unpublished work at such meetings.
• Between people whose relationship prevents the reviewer from being objective in his/her assessment.

`Service’ collaborations, such as co-authoring a report for a professional organization, serving on a program committee, or co-presenting tutorials, do not themselves create a conflict of interest. Co-authoring a paper that is a compendium of various projects with no true collaboration among the projects does not constitute a conflict among the authors of the different projects. On the other hand, there may be others not covered by the above with whom you believe a COI exists, for example, an ongoing collaboration which has not yet resulted in the creation of a paper or proposal. Please report such COIs; however, you may be asked to justify them. Please be reasonable. For example, you cannot declare a COI with a reviewer just because that reviewer works on topics similar to or related to those in your paper. The program chair may contact co-authors to explain a COI whose origin is unclear.

Most reviews will be solicited among the members of the PC, but other members from the community may also write reviews. Please declare all your conflicts (not just restricted to the PC) on the submission form. When in doubt, contact the program chair.

ArXiv Submissions

Authors may submit their work to ICS 2025 for publication even if the paper has been submitted to or currently appears on Arxiv. However, please do recognize that Arxiv submissions cause serious issues with the double-blind review process. The PC chair will advise the PC members not to consider Arxiv submissions in their evaluation. However, we encourage the authors to reduce the possibility of their name being disclosed. While there is no magical solution to hide from the power of web search in locating Arxiv papers, we encourage authors to avoid substantially similar titles, abstract etc., to reduce this match.

Concurrent Submissions and Workshops

By submitting a manuscript to ICS 2025, the authors guarantee that the manuscript has not been previously published or accepted for publication in a substantially similar form in any conference, journal, or the archived proceedings of a workshop (e.g., in the ACM/IEEE digital libraries) — see exceptions below. The authors also guarantee that no paper that contains significant overlap with the contributions of the submitted paper will be under review for any other conference or journal or an archived proceedings of a workshop during the review period. Violation of any of these conditions will lead to rejection.

The only exceptions to the above rules are for the authors’ own papers in (1) workshops without archived proceedings such as in the ACM/IEEE digital libraries (or where the authors chose not to have their paper appear in the archived proceedings), or (2) venues such as IEEE CAL or arXiv where there is an explicit policy that such publication does not preclude longer conference submissions. In all such cases, the submitted manuscript may ignore the above work to preserve author anonymity. This information must, however, be provided on the submission form — the Program Chairs will make this information available to reviewers if it becomes necessary to ensure a fair review. As always, if you are in doubt, it is best to contact program chairs. Finally, we also note that the ACM Plagiarism Policy covers a range of ethical issues concerning the misrepresentation of other works or one’s own work.

Ethical Obligations

• Authors are not allowed to contact reviewers or PC members to encourage or solicit them to bid on any paper.
• Authors are not allowed to attempt to sway a reviewer to review any paper positively or negatively.
• Authors are not allowed to contact reviewers or PC members requesting any type of information about the reviewing process, either in general or specifically about submitted papers.
• Authors are not allowed to contact reviewers or PC members to ask about the outcomes of any papers.
• Authors must also abide by the ACM ethics policy. Violation of the ACM ethics policy may result in rejection of the submission and possible action by the ACM.
• Authors are not allowed to advertise their submissions or related technical reports and postings (e.g., to arxiv.org or online repositories) on social media or community blogs and web pages during the period starting from the submission deadline and ending when the ICS acceptance results are public.
• ICS follows the ACM Policy on Authorship.

Upon Acceptance of Your Paper

Authors will be notified of acceptance or rejection on the Decision Notification Date. At this point, contact authors of accepted papers will receive instructions on how to prepare and submit a final version by the Camera-Ready Deadline.

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date may affect the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. (For those rare conferences whose proceedings are published in the ACM Digital Library after the conference is over, the official publication date remains the first day of the conference.)

Your Paper at the Conference

Authors are required to present their work in a scheduled session with other ICS Papers. Papers whose authors are not at the conference to present their paper may be removed from the ACM Digital Library.

Acknowledgments

Elements in this document were adapted from those of the previous ICS conferences, the program chairs of which we wish to thank.