With the final acceptance decisions behind us, the official VIS 2024 review process is coming to a close. We felt that it was worth taking a moment now to look back at this most recent milestone in the review process: the decision making. In fact, doing so can be quite educational; not so much for the vast majority of papers where the process went right, but rather for the very few where it went wrong (even very wrong).

Because IEEE VIS publishes its papers in a special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) journal, the VIS review process has real teeth. TVCG stipulates two full review rounds: an initial review round (starting April 1) followed by a second round for minor revisions (starting July 1). Papers that proceed to the second round are said to be “conditionally accepted”, but make no mistake: the second round is a real review round. The primary reviewer, after discussing with the full review panel, is supposed to list required revisions in the first round review. To address these, authors get almost a full month, which is consistent with TVCG (3 months for major revisions, 1 month for minor). If these required revisions are not addressed to the satisfaction of the primary reviewer, we have no qualms about rejecting conditionally accepted papers in the second round.

For VIS 2024, we conditionally accepted a total of 129 papers out of 557 submitted papers in the first round, yielding a provisional acceptance rate of 23.2%. Even if there is no explicit target acceptance rate, this is a low number; for comparison, it was 25.8% in 2023. While we regret the low rate, our decision-making was strictly based on scientific merit and not pursuit of an arbitrary acceptance rate. Following the process outlined in our last blog post on “From Reviews to Decisions”, the conditional accepts were determined through careful discussions between the reviewers, PC members, APCs, and OPCs. We shared the first-round notifications on June 6, 2024. Beyond the 129 conditional accepts, we also recommended an additional 29 as “TVCG fast-track”; submissions that showed promise but which we deemed would need a major revision requiring more than a brief month to bring over the finish line.

What followed in that interim of three weeks in June was no doubt feverish activity across visualization labs all over the world as authors of conditionally accepted papers raced to address all the required revisions. On July 1, all 129 papers were resubmitted to the second round. At this point, the second round reviewing commenced, with the primaries (and sometimes secondaries) checking each paper, then the APCs, and finally the OPCs.

That process ended earlier this summer, and we are happy to say that the majority of authors really did do their due diligence by carefully addressing all the required revisions. A total of 124 of the 129 papers that were conditionally accepted from the first round were finally accepted at the end of the second round. For a small number of these 124 papers, there were minor issues that the OPCs, APCs, and program committee members flagged and discussed. In the end, all of these issues could be handled within the confines of the regular review process. Congratulations to the authors of these 124 papers—we very much look forward to seeing your work being presented in Florida this October!

But what about the remaining 5 papers that were rejected in the second round? We feel there are valuable lessons here to share with the community while keeping the narrative high-level enough to protect the identities of the authors, reviewers, and PC members involved.

For one of the five rejected papers, the primary flagged a situation where the authors had failed to address a critical requirement: framing the novelty of the contributions of their work with respect to previous work. Moreover, they removed almost 20 references in their second round revision. When looking closer, we found that the authors had addressed a comment about reorganizing the related work by shrinking it in half and cutting many of the original references. Importantly, several of the missing relevant literature that the reviewers asked the paper to cite had not been added to the new version of the paper (even if the authors claimed they had done so in their revision report). We OPCs ended up spending a significant amount of time checking that this was not just a case of the authors trimming the fat off the paper, but came to the same conclusion as the primary. The changes to the related work did not sufficiently address the required revision. The paper was rejected.

For a second rejected paper, the new revision was submitted to the second review round with exactly 10 pages of content and 2 pages of references. As VIS authors will know, we only allow papers with up to 9 pages of content and up to 2 pages of references. Nevertheless, the authors—some senior ones among them—resubmitted the paper with a full page beyond the limit. The paper was rejected.

You might argue for both of the above cases that these are situations where the OPCs could have engaged the author team in a conversation to address the issues rather than rejecting outright. Unfortunately, there simply isn’t sufficient time in the schedule for authors to shrink their paper down by a full page, or address novelty concerns that were not handled during revisions. And besides, there is a fairness issue; why should some authors get special treatment? What if everyone did this?

The final three rejected papers share a common theme: a severe conflict of interest violation. During the final checks on the list of accepted papers, it was discovered that a paper had been managed by a primary reviewer who was the former Ph.D. student of the paper’s senior author. As we dug deeper, we found two more conditionally accepted papers involving that senior author that had been handled by the same primary reviewer (a member of the IEEE VIS 2024 program committee).

Your own masters, Ph.D., and postdoc advisors are permanent conflicts in the IEEE VIS community (and in most scientific communities). This means that unlike for your paper co-authors or grant co-investigators, where conflicts disappear after three years, your conflict of interest with your former advisor (and, inversely, with your former students) never goes away. This information is widely known in the VIS community; it is enshrined in our paper submission guidelines with a link to the IEEE VGTC Ethics Guidelines, and it was recently discussed in our Road to VIS 2024 blog post on “Handling Conflicts”. We tell all our PC members to be mindful of conflicts, both when they are recruited as well as when they bid on papers and recruit reviewers.

In other words, knowingly reviewing papers written by your own Ph.D. advisor is a very serious breach of the integrity of the IEEE VIS review process.

PC members see the identity of all authors in PCS (our submission reviewing system) even if a paper is anonymized. This particular primary reviewer had been given clear instructions, did not declare a conflict with their advisor, and failed to tell us that they had been assigned three of their advisor’s papers as primary reviewer—for four months!

As far as we can tell, nothing like this has ever happened before in the 30-year history of the VIS conference. We thus had no procedures or tool support to spot this specific problem. Furthermore, with a total of more than 1,900 unique authors submitting papers to VIS 2024, it is virtually impossible for the OPCs and APCs to be fully aware of all conflicts between them. Instead, we rely on our PC members, reviewers, and authors to carefully self-declare all these conflicts in advance of the review assignment process. Note that we don’t expect perfection: after the assignments are released, there is a chance for reviewers to let us know if a previously undetected conflict appears. There were several situations when this happened, causing us OPCs to swap papers between PC members when people discovered a conflict not previously declared.

Unfortunately, the fact that this conflict did happen irrevocably compromised the review process for all three of these papers. Primary reviewers have a significant impact on a paper’s fate by leading the discussion and summarizing the other reviews. There is no easy way to disentangle this impact. Perhaps if the problem had been spotted in the first round, we could conceivably have replaced the primary. At this point, near the very end, it is impossible to know whether these papers would have even made it to the second round with an unconflicted primary. There is also no time to run the review process all over again given our tight schedule. As a result, all three papers were rejected, but with a special offer from TVCG for the papers to be immediately resubmitted to the journal while retaining the two unconflicted reviewers and only replacing the primary.

The fallout from this incident is significant. Most serious is the impact on the graduate students whose papers were rejected due to factors beyond their own control. Second, the senior author (the Ph.D. advisor of the primary reviewer at fault) has three of their conditionally accepted papers rejected, again due to no fault of their own. And third, the primary reviewer who committed this breach of review integrity and professional ethics has opened themselves up to an academic misconduct investigation.

The greater lesson from this incident is to take conflicts of interest very seriously. Make sure that you carefully declare not only your co-authors and co-investigators in PCS, but also your masters, Ph.D., and postdoc advisors. If you have ever advised students, you should also declare your own current and former students as permanent conflicts! Vigilance about your own conflicts is one good strategy to protect yourself from situations like this in the future.

There is damage to the VIS review process as well. Our goal when addressing the incident was to protect the scientific integrity of VIS (and TVCG), but there can be no perfect solution to this kind of difficult problem. We OPCs and APCs will be reviewing our procedures to ensure that this problem will not happen again. We will be looking into ways to improve the PCS paper submission and reviewing system to spot problems of this nature. And we will do our best to educate the community about the importance of conflicts. This blog post is part of that latter effort.

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In a post by the VIS Executive Committee (VEC) earlier this year, we introduced our initiative to determine the extent to which VIS should assume a hybrid format, so as to broaden participation while ensuring positive experiences for both in-person and remote attendees. As part of this initiative, we partnered with members of the IEEE Visualization and Computer Graphics Technical Community Executive Committee (VGTC ExCom) to conduct an online survey to take the pulse of the community, to collect data regarding conference attendance patterns and preferences, to determine the sentiment toward potential hybrid experiences, and to collect ideas. In this post, we summarize the results of this survey.

Since January, 192 people responded to our call to participate in the survey, which we disseminated via community mailing lists and social media. 138 respondents selected VIS as their primary VGTC conference; our analysis focused on this subset of responses. We believe that the VIS community is reflected in the survey responses, which span the dimensions of world region, gender, level of education, age, affiliation, and VIS attendance history. However, some voices are either over- or under-represented when we compare the demographics of survey respondents to VIS attendance data; for instance, VIS attendees from North America are slightly over-represented, while those from Oceania are under-represented.

Reflection on Prior Conference Experiences

In the first half of the survey, we asked about recent conference experiences, including the motivations for attending either in person or virtually, as well as the barriers that prevent people from attending a conference in person. The results are shown in Figure 1. For each question, respondents could select up to three considerations, which included an ‘Other’ option that allowed them to specify their own. Highlights include:

Figure 1: Community responses to three questions from an online survey regarding IEEE VGTC conferences, filtered to the subset respondents who identified IEEE VIS as their primary VGTC conference (N = 138). For each question, respondents could select up to three considerations, which included an ‘Other’ option that allowed them to specify their own.

• Top three motivations to attend VIS in-person: (1) networking, (2) present work, (3) attend paper presentations.
• Top three barriers to attending VIS in-person: (1) cost of travel and accommodation, (2) time availability, (3) paper not accepted.
• Top three motivations to attend conferences virtually: (1) no travel required, (2) no in-person attendance option offered, (3) affordability.

The open-ended comments largely corroborate what we saw in the fixed-response questions, however we also noted a recurring desire for hybrid formats to ensure accessibility. Additionally, respondents indicated how environmental concerns also influence their attendance decisions, with some choosing not to fly or combining travel with personal time to mitigate environmental impact. Finally, several respondents mentioned significant personal safety and human rights concerns associated with potential conference locations.

Next, we asked about respondents’ preferences and behaviors when attending conferences virtually. The majority of respondents reported consuming less than 50% of the conference program content, preferred livestreaming some of the content and watching the rest asynchronously. The majority preferred interacting with speakers via a basic chat interface, Slack or Discord, or a web application like sli.do. They preferred interacting with other attendees via Slack or Discord, a basic chat interface, or asynchronously via email. In the open-ended comments, we noted a particular appreciation for the Discord instance associated with VIS 2022, although the effectiveness of such a platform depends on activity levels.

Opinions on Future Conferences

In the second half of the survey, we asked respondents for their opinions and preferences with respect to future conferences. In particular, we asked participants to either to agree or disagree with a series of statements regarding the specifics of possible hybrid conference arrangements (See Figure 2), which included statements about presentation video recorded before the conference, presenting at satellite events, and the integration of in-person and virtual presentations.

Figure 2: Percentage of survey responses (N = 138) that Disagree or Agree with the statements regarding future VIS conferences listed in the left column, along with the percentage of Neutral responses.

So what do respondents largely agree on? Most respondents (88%) want video recordings of in-person presentations and panels to be made available after the conference (7% opposed, 5% neutral). The majority (59%) agree that presentations by speakers who cannot attend in person should be broadcast at the in-person conference venue at a designated time and room (13% opposed, 28% neutral). Similarly, the majority (57%) agree that Q&A following presentations should accommodate in-person and virtual attendees to equal measure (24% opposed, 18% neutral). Finally, the majority of respondents (55%) agree that those who wish to host a future VIS conference must propose a virtual attendee experience (29% opposed, 16% neutral). The open-ended comments largely support these preferences, with calls for standardizing presentation formats across sessions and using familiar remote communication technology.

There was no clear majority opinion for other questions that we posed, though if we consider the percentage of neutral responses, we should avoid requiring pre-recorded presentations from speakers who elect to present in-person, and we should not consider changing the annual cadence of an in-person VIS conference.

Unsurprisingly, nearly half of the respondents said “it depends” when asked if they will opt to attend future VIS conferences remotely; less than 10% said they would attend virtually for most / all conferences that offered such a format, with about the same percentage saying they do not plan to attend future conferences virtually. The majority of respondents indicated that the virtual registration fee should be 25% or less than the full in-person registration fee. If attending virtually, the majority of respondents indicated that they would livestream keynote sessions but opt to watch paper talks asynchronously. This preference is also reflected in CHI 2024 organizers’ decision not to provide a synchronous conference experience for remote attendees, or as they put it: “Live is Synchronous, Remote is Asynchronous”.

Opinions on Satellite Events

Finally, relative to remote participation in general, we noted less enthusiasm or willingness to attend satellite conference events. The comments suggest that the quality of satellite events depends heavily on attendance and local organization strength, and that the attendance of a satellite event is contingent on the number and presence of local paper presenters. However, European satellite events are particularly attractive relative to others due to Europe’s developed rail travel network, particularly when the VIS conference takes place outside of Europe.

Panel at IEEE VIS 2024 on VIS Conference Futures: Community Opinions on Recent Experiences, Challenges, and Opportunities for Hybrid Event Formats

We will host a hybrid panel dedicated to discussing the implications of the data summarized above, gathering together the diverse perspectives that will further contextualize and reflect the voices from our survey. Given the range of responses and the strong opinions that respondents voiced in the open-ended comments, we expect this to be a lively forum that will inform and inspire VIS community members and especially those in organizing committee roles (or who may undertake such roles in the coming years). This panel serves as a platform to address the complex and interconnected issues surrounding the future of VIS conferences, particularly with respect to those where community members have differing opinions, as well as to complement the perspectives that came across in the survey results. As we navigate the landscape of hybrid event formats, it is essential to gather diverse perspectives from the VIS community, to better inform decision makers in organizational roles so they they can ensure that VIS remains inclusive, engaging, and impactful.

We will begin by briefly summarizing the VIS attendance data and survey results. Next, we will ask the panelists to remark upon their own vision for future VIS conferences, as well as their opinion on what is unique about hybrid experiences for VIS relative to other conferences. We will then anchor the discussion around questions for which there is little agreement within the community (See Figure 2 above). To ensure that the panelists are well-prepared for the panel, we have provided them with access to interactive dashboards containing survey results; these dashboards have affordances to filter and facet results by different demographic segments.

Our panelists represent different cross-sections of our community, with perspectives spanning career level, region, gender, and affiliation. In keeping with the theme of the panel, some panelists will appear in person, while others will join remotely.

Our panelists include: Tim Dwyer, John Alexis Guerra-Gómez, Petra Isenberg, Takayuki Itoh, Elsie Lee-Robbins, and Andrew McNutt; the panel will be moderated by Matthew Brehmer and Narges Mahyar.

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We get it—waiting is hard. As we move into May, the early June notification date for the outcomes of your submissions seems no closer. Also, it could be that the decision-making process at IEEE VIS 2024 can appear opaque from the submitting authors’ viewpoint. Well, wonder no more: in this blog post, the next installment in our “Road to VIS 2024” series, we will describe what actually goes into these decisions on which papers get accepted or rejected to VIS 2024. Maybe it will not make June come sooner, but we hope that it at least will make understanding the decision-making process easier.

Let’s start with recent history. All VIS submissions were due on March 31, a date that has—save for the pandemic year of 2020 when authors were given an extra month—been constant across the decades for the IEEE visualization conferences. Once the submission deadline passed, we, the OPCs, closed the submission system, discarded incomplete submissions, and made an initial assignment of program committee (PC) members to each paper. We then handed these assignments over to the APCs on April 1—the very next day. The APCs had until April 4 to fine-tune the assignments, which were released to the PC members on April 5.

If you are a reviewer for IEEE VIS 2024—and we hope that you are—you have experienced the rest of this process firsthand. From April 5 to April 11, the PC members recruited one external reviewer for the papers for which they served as secondary. During this period, we also managed numerous paper swaps necessitated by conflicts of interest that were initially overlooked. On April 11, we sent out all review invitations in a single batch. This strategy allows external reviewers to select assignments they feel most qualified for and avoids penalizing PC members who were unable to recruit reviewers immediately. After the review request batch, there followed some hilarity as PC members scrambled—with varying degrees of success—to find replacements for review requests that were declined in the first round. This year, the period of hilarity (or tragedy, as it were) lasted until nary a week before the reviewing deadline.

The reviewing deadline on May 8 is followed by a week of discussions. During this time, all reviewers (primary, secondary, and one external) can see each other’s reviews and discuss their opinions of the submissions. Reviewers are encouraged to remain open to adjusting their evaluations based on the discussion, whether it raises new positives or negatives. At the end of the discussion period, the primary reviewer synthesizes all feedback into a summary review.

At this point, the APCs take over. Their job is now to triage the papers under their care to make preliminary recommendations and to identify the borderline cases that need deeper deliberation. This step often involves reading summaries, discussions, full reviews, and, in complex situations, the papers themselves. Each area enjoys considerable autonomy in discussing and determining the outcomes of the papers they manage. The APCs are also on the lookout for inappropriate, inadequate, or insufficiently clear reviews so that they can follow up with those reviewers to improve or clarify any problematic reviews. In some cases, they may even engage an entirely new reviewer to perform a “crash” emergency review at short notice. Once finished with their pass, the APCs hand off their recommendations to the OPCs, who discuss with each area, check that the decisions—especially the borderline ones—are sufficiently documented, and ensure that accept/reject criteria are applied consistently across areas.

The final approval before notifications are dispatched is handled by IEEE TVCG. As most visualization community members know, papers accepted to the annual IEEE VIS conference are published in a special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics journal. The TVCG Editor-in-Chief, Han-Wei Shen, and his editorial board have the final say on what gets accepted to appear in the journal. For the OPCs and APCs, this means that each accept and reject decision must be sufficiently documented so that the rationale is clear and founded on scientific principles. This rationale will later be used to verify that the second-round version of each conditionally accepted paper has addressed reviewer concerns—but that’s a story for another post.

On June 6, the fruits of our reviewers’ collective labor will be revealed. We wish you the best of luck for your submissions; may the odds be ever in your favor!

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March 31 has come and gone, which means that the IEEE VIS 2024 full papers deadline has passed. This is when us OPCs and APCs are starting our work, and when the PC and eventually the entire reviewer community will get involved. What is the task? Why, reviewing all those papers that were submitted to the annual deadline, of course! In this brief post, we will give some numbers about the submissions and then outline the next steps in the process.

A total of 680 abstracts were submitted for the abstract deadline on March 21. Out of those, 557 full papers were eventually submitted, a conversion rate of 82%. The number of submissions is up; in 2023, the conference saw 539 submissions out of 635 abstracts (85% conversion), and in 2022, there were 460 out of 560 abstracts (82% conversion). This means submissions increased by 3.53% from last year, and 21% from 2022. This is a fairly small increase compared to the 17% increase from 2022 to 2023. However, the conversion rate of abstract to full paper is consistent.

All APCs pull a very high load and we are grateful for their efforts. Still, some areas received more submissions than others. For the specific areas, Applications (Area 2)—not surprisingly—received the most number of submissions: 154. We wish Tatiana von Landesberger (University of Cologne, Germany) and Jiawan Zhang (Tianjin University) all the best with handling all these submissions! Second came Theoretical & Empirical (Area 1) with 112 submissions. This area is spearheaded by APCs Adam Perer (Carnegie Mellon University) and Matthew Kay (Northwestern University). This is narrowly followed by Representations & Interaction (Area 4) with 110 submissions, and stable hands Daniel Keefe (University of Minnesota) and Pierre Dragicevic (Inria Bordeaux) at the helm. Analytics & Decisions (Area 6) APCs Wenwen Dou (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) and Steffen Koch (University of Stuttgart) are handling 77 submissions. Data Transformations (Area 5) has 53 submissions, and is managed by Filip Sadlo (Heidelberg University) and Ivan Viola (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology). Finally, weighing in at 51 submissions is the Systems & Rendering area (Area 3) with Chaoli Wang (University of Notre Dame) and Christoph Garth (University of Kaiserslautern-Landau) at the wheel. Thanks all to these APCs who make our jobs as OPCs possible!

Supporting these 12 APCs is a program committee of 143 hard-working PC members who can expect to handle somewhere between 6 to 8 papers each (split between the role as primary or secondary reviewer). This PC, incidentally, was recruited earlier this spring from a total of 181 invitations. If you are thinking about serving on the VIS program committee in the future, we hope you look out for our annual PC volunteering deadline sometime next fall! We are deeply grateful to these PC members as well as the external reviewers they will be inviting to review these submissions in the weeks to come.

From this point onwards, the VIS review process will proceed with the PC member assignments, which will be released before April 8. After that point, secondary reviewers will look for an external reviewer for each submission. Remember that this year, there is only one external reviewer assigned to each paper. The initial batch of external review invitations will be released on April 11. The external reviews will be due on May 8. The reviews from primary and secondary PC members are due at the same time. Then, discussion will take place between all reviewers on the paper, and the primaries have until May 15 write their summary review. First-round notifications are expected to be released on June 6.

We OPCs are quite excited about all this and are eager to tackle this hard but important work. During our first skim of the submissions, we have seen some very impressive, creative, and potentially important papers. Thanks for submitting to VIS 2024, and we wish you the very best of outcomes for your hard work!

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We’re entering March and the game is heating up! With less than three weeks to go for the VIS 2024 full papers deadline, it is time that we OPCs start turning to critical matters. One of those is conflicts of interest (COIs). In the last installment, we talked about the importance of volunteering to review papers for the conferences to which you submit papers. However, it is equally vital not only that you are reviewing papers, but that you don’t review papers for which you have a conflict.

What is a conflict of interest? COIs arise because of relationships you have with an author or their institution that could affect your judgment of the work or the community’s perception of your judgment. Note the last point. You may be a person of exceptional integrity that could objectively handle reviewing even your own sibling’s work fairly and with no special treatment, but reviewing your own sibling’s paper would look bad for everyone else. One of the pillars of scientific peer review is that it is objective, and that this objectivity can be confirmed by everyone. Conflicts arise in many ways and have varying durations; see the IEEE VGTC reviewer ethics guide for all the details. Family relationships are obviously conflicts with no expiration, but those are relatively rare and quite straightforward. Another conflict is the academic equivalent of a family relationship: your Ph.D. and postdoc advisor, or anyone who has had a close mentorship role for you, are “forever conflicts”. The same is true in the other direction, i.e. for your advisees. Your close relationship means that neither of you can be expected to (or perceived to) treat each other objectively. The same can be said about close personal friendships (or, for that matter, personal animosities, which hopefully are rare).

Most other conflicts have a time expiration, and for IEEE and VIS, this expiration is three years. In other words, once a relationship has ended (e.g. collaboration on the same paper), you can consider the conflict gone after three years.

The rule of thumb is the same for conflicts with an expiration as those with none: is there a relationship that would (or would be perceived to) affect your ability to treat a person objectively? Conflicts with an expiration include sharing an affiliation, co-authorship on published work, working on the same research project or grant, or similar. Service commitments are special: you are obviously not conflicted if you serve on the same program committee, because then basically everyone in the community would be conflicted with each other. In general, even if you work with somebody closely on a small committee over an extended period of time, conflicts do not automatically arise; however, if you become sufficiently close to somebody that it feels like a conflict, then do declare it. Use your best judgment here.

As an aside, us OPCs are selected not to be conflicted with each other because we need to be able to handle each other’s submissions and conflicted submissions.

If you have a conflict with a paper, you should not be involved in any formal publication decisions regarding it. For external reviewers, this means not reviewing papers you are in conflict with. For PC members, this also means not reviewing such papers, and informing the papers chairs immediately if you are assigned to such a paper. For APCs at VIS, this means that if both APCs are in conflict, the conflicted paper will be moved to a different area to avoid the conflict. If just one APC is in conflict, one of the OPCs will step into their place. For OPCs, there is no such option, so in these situations, the conflicted chair will have to recuse themselves from any decisions involving the conflicted paper. Practically speaking, this will mean not participating in the Zoom call when discussing it. The PCS submission system provides good support for handling conflicts, by ensuring that papers chairs cannot see information about such papers.

Here’s the final question we want to cover: how do we detect these conflicts in the first place? This is where you come in. If you are a reviewer for VIS 2024 (either as a PC member or as an external reviewer), it is your responsibility to ensure that your affiliation is correct and that your conflicts have been updated in PCS (the submission system). Because VIS allows for double-blind submissions, we need PCS to flag situations when there is a conflict even if you as a reviewer don’t see the author names. Even for single-blind submissions, where the author names are visible to you, correct affiliations and declared conflicts will minimize situations where you get assigned a paper you really shouldn’t review, and then we all have to go through the hassle of getting the paper reassigned to another reviewer.

Many early-career researchers in the community will have recently changed affiliations, for example Ph.D. students who have graduated and moved on to new institutions. Please make sure you have updated PCS with your new primary affiliation, and also keep your old institution listed as your secondary affiliation for 3 years—the three-year rule applies here as well. Conversely, once those 3 years are up, please remove that institution from your own affiliation list. If you are still actively collaborating with people there, that should be handled through the usual conflicts identification mechanisms in PCS, not through your affiliation.

Speaking of PCS and conflicts: the good news is that PCS will now help accelerate the process of declaring your conflicts by checking against all recent submissions in its database. The bad news is that it’s sometimes over-enthusiastic: it uses a 4-year window rather than a 3-year window, and includes a few tracks where we do not consider conflicts to occur (such as shared participation in a panel or tutorial). So do take a close look at the automatic inferrals, in addition to entering information about any other conflicts such as new collaborations where you have not yet submitted papers together as co-authors.

With all this information fresh in your mind, please take a moment to go into PCS and make sure your affiliation is up to date. (If you’re on the VIS PC, you will also be asked to update your conflicts after the abstracts submission deadline.) Providing all this information already now will make everybody’s life easier.

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