Instructions for Submissions to ASPLOS 2014
Introduction
This document provides instructions for submitting papers to the 19th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), 2014. Submissions that violate these instructions may not be reviewed, at the discretion of the program chair. An example submission (formatted using the ASPLOS'14 submission format) that contains the submission and formatting guidelines can be downloaded from here: Sample PDF. The contents of this document are the same as the contents of the submission instructions that appear on this website. The paper submission site is here. All questions regarding paper formatting and submission should be directed to the program chair.
What's new?
We specifically call attention to the following instructions/ features new to ASPLOS this year.
- Text must be in 10pt (not 9pt) font.
- Papers must be at most 12 pages, not including references and an optional appendix.
- Each reference must specify all authors (no et al.).
- Authors may optionally suggest reviewers.
- Authors may optionally provide information on previous rejections.
- Authors of all accepted papers will be required to give a lightning presentation (about 90s) and a poster in addition to the regular conference talk.
- Proceedings will appear in the ACM digital library up to two weeks before the conference.
Acceptance Philosophy and Author's Commitments
Every effort will be made to judge a paper on its own merits. There will be no target acceptance rate. We expect to accept a wide range of papers with appropriate expectations for evaluation -while papers that build on significant past work with strong evaluations are valuable, papers that open new areas with less rigorous evaluation are even more so. The mantra for this ASPLOS is: Always Support Potentially Long-term and Out-of-the-box Systems.
Accepting all worthy papers sometimes results in multitrack sessions, reduced talk lengths, and reduced interaction. To mitigate these downsides and in keeping with the spirit of ASPLOS as a melting pot for multiple disciplines, we will have the following (borrowed from Micro'12). We will kick off the conference with a lightning presentation session with a (roughly) 90s presentation of each accepted paper. There will also be a poster/demo session where all accepted papers will be required to participate with a poster and/or demo to facilitate closer interactions. Of course, there will also be the regular conference talks for each paper. Authors should be prepared to participate in all three sessions (lightning presentation, poster/demo, and regular talk).
The Paper
Formatting
Submitted manuscripts should contain a maximum of 12 pages of single-spaced two-column text, not including references and an optional appendix. You may include any number of pages for references and the appendix, but see below for more instructions. If you are using LATEX to typeset your paper, then we suggest that you use the template here: LATEX Template. (This document was prepared with that template.) If you are using a different software package to typeset your paper, then please adhere to the guidelines given in Table 1.
One exception is that authors may use the SIGPLAN style/class file here, but only with the 10pt body font option (9pt will be rejected) and modified as needed for the requirements of the references section below. This is marginally different from the specified template, but will be accepted due to its widespread use.
Please ensure that you include page numbers with your submission. This makes it easier for the reviewers to refer to different parts of your paper when they provide comments. Please ensure that your submission has a banner at the top of the title page, similar to this one, which contains the submission number and the notice of confidentiality. If using the template, just replace XXX with your submission number.
Content
Author List Reviewing will be double blind; therefore,
please do not include any author names on any submitted
documents except in the space provided on the submission
form. You must also ensure that the metadata included in the
PDF does not give away the authors. 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 in
the papers [2, 3, 4], you would say something like: "While the authors of [2, 3,
4] 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 IEEE CAL, workshops
without archived proceedings, etc. as discussed later in this
document.
Figures and Tables. Ensure that the figures and tables are legible. Please also ensure that you refer to your figures in the main text. Many reviewers print the papers in gray-scale. Therefore, if you use colors for your figures, ensure that the different colors are highly distinguishable in gray-scale
References. There is no length limit for references. Each reference must explicitly list all authors of the paper. Papers not meeting this requirement will be rejected. Authors of NSF proposals should be familiar with this requirement. Knowing all authors of related work will help find the best reviewers.
Optional Appendix. Authors may optionally include an appendix (no length limit) as the last section of the manuscript; however, reviewers are not obliged to read the appendix. An appendix may include proofs of theorems, more details on methodology, more results, and anything else that can potentially answer reviewer questions. The rest of the manuscript may cite the appendix, but the paper should stand on its own without the appendix. Authors need not feel compelled to include an appendix -we understand the author's time is best spent on the main manuscript.
Other Information for the Submission Site
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
ASPLOS emphasizes multidisciplinary research. Submissions should ideally emphasize synergy of two or more ASPLOS areas: architecture, programming languages, operating systems, and related areas (broadly interpreted). Authors should indicate these areas on the submission form as well as specific topics covered by the paper for optimal reviewer match. If you are unsure whether your paper falls within the scope of ASPLOS, please check with the program chair - ASPLOS 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 (COI) with the following for any author of your paper:
- Your Ph.D. advisor, post-doctoral advisor, and Ph.D. students.
- Family relations by blood or marriage (if they might be potential reviewers).
- People with whom you co-authored accepted/ rejected/pending papers in the last five years.
- People with whom you co-authored accepted/pending grant proposals in the last five years.
- People who shared your primary institution in the last five years.
Optional Information on Previous Submissions
In addition to your paper, you may optionally upload your past similar (rejected) submissions, their reviews, the author responses, and/or a statement of how your ASPLOS'14 submission improved over the previous submissions or addressed the previous reviews. Please use only one PDF file for all this information and include the venue(s) where the previous work was submitted. Please do not include any material that will compromise author anonymity.
Each paper will undergo a full new review process independent of whether such a PDF file is submitted. The ASPLOS'14 reviewers will see this document (and learn about its existence) only after they have finalized their review. It is, however, possible that reading this document will influence the ASPLOS reviewers to request a change of their review or request the PC chair to get another opinion from one of the previous reviewers. Please consider all such implications carefully before submitting the PDF file.
Authors are under no obligation to submit such a document. Reviewers will be given explicit instructions not to hold the lack of such a document against the paper in any way. Similarly, reviewers are under no obligation to read such a document (unless a review brings up a past submission explicitly).
Optional Reviewer Suggestions
Authors may optionally mark (non-conflicted) PC and ERC members that they believe could provide expert reviews for their submission. If authors believe there is insufficient expertise on the PC and ERC for the topic of their paper, they may suggest alternate reviewers. The program chair will use the author's input at her discretion. We provide this opportunity for input mostly for papers on non-traditional and emerging topics.
Concurrent Submissions and Workshops
By submitting a manuscript to ASPLOS'14, 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 digital library) -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 ASPLOS'14 review period. Violation of any of these conditions will lead to rejection. The only exceptions to the above rules are for the author's own papers in (1) workshops without archived proceedings such as in the ACM digital library (or where the authors chose not to have their paper appear in the archived proceedings), or (2) venues such as IEEE CAL 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 PC chair will make this information available to reviewers if it becomes necessary to ensure a fair review. (This policy will be explicitly conveyed to the reviewers.)
As always, if you are in doubt, it is best to contact the program chair. Finally, we also note that the ACM Plagiarism Policy (http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/plagiarism_policy) covers a range of ethical issues concerning the misrepresentation of other works or one's own work.
Early Access in the Digital Library
The ASPLOS'14 proceedings will be freely available via the ACM Digital Library for up to two weeks before and up to a month after the conference. Authors must consider any implications of this early disclosure of their work before submitting their papers.
Acknowledgements
Several ideas in this document and parts of the document text have been taken from previous conferences and we thank their program chairs; especially, Christos Kozyrakis (Micro'13), Margaret Martonosi (ISCA'13), and Onur Mutlu (Micro'12).
References
[1] Leslie Lamport. LATEX: A Document Preparation System. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 2nd Edition, 1994.
[2] Firstname1 Lastname1 and Firstname2 Lastname2. A very nice paper to cite. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, 2012.
[3] Firstname1 Lastname1, Firstname2 Lastname2, and Firstname3 Lastname3. Another very nice paper to cite. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, 2011.
[4] Firstname1 Lastname1, Firstname2 Lastname2, Firstname3 Lastname3, Firstname4 Lastname4, and Firstname5 Lastname5. Yet another very nice paper to cite, with many author names all spelled out. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, 2011.