Paper Chair
(2025-10): latest update by Doga Cavdir, Yichen Wang and Florent Berthaut.
Main role: Be responsible for the scientific program during the conference. This includes:
Direct the paper reviewing and selection process.
Make the presentation/poster/demo program for the conference production.
Run the paper presentations (oral and poster) during the conference.
Prepare the proceedings archive.
The Paper Chair will work closely with the Paper Archive Officer.
General Organization
Timeline
We discussed the timeline with the general chairs to create some room for late reviews after suggestions from NIME 24 paper chairs; however, it was not possible to make many changes which made sense considering that this year’s submission deadline was later than usual. There are periods that require buffer times, such as after review deadlines and before sending decisions. But it is important not to stretch these deadlines because, depending on the location of the conference, there will be many logistical issues and it is helpful to provide the participants with a program when they are planning their attendance.
The timeline will be busier when finding reviewers which we strongly suggest starting early before the submission deadline. We will detail this process in the later sections.
Internal Timelines
We created an internal timeline, only for the paper chairs, based on the timeline shared by the general chairs. We suggest marking on the timeline/calendar and account for the time for communications around the deadlines. We set internal deadlines for 2 weeks, sometimes 1 week, and 2-3 days before the review deadlines or the start of a new review phase (e.g., when meta-review opens).
Deadlines
Submission deadlines
Like previous year’s chairs, we strongly recommend against extending the submission deadlines or accepting late submissions. More communication around the two submission deadlines are, of course, helpful, but more relevant in the later stages.
Because we had a relatively tight schedule to create the reviewers pool, go through the desk rejects, and complete review assignments, we did not accommodate late submissions. The first submission deadline already filters through those who are likely to ask for extensions. However, just to reiterate, it is not a good idea to accommodate late submissions. It is unfair to the other authors who submitted on time and creates delays in the review process.
At times, this request can be difficult to refuse and we found that communicating that no deadline extensions will be granted and how it impacts the review cycle on the submission site was helpful. Here is an example: https://nime2025.org/submissions/.
Review deadlines
Reminders and communicating the deadlines clearly during the review assignments were the most important to ensure reviews were submitted on time. Most reviewers submitted theirs on time with a few exceptions.
The problem we faced this year was that the quality of a few reviews were not up to the standards. There are a few reasons for this mismatch in review qualities. We will describe them later. But this is one of the reasons to add a few days, or a week if you can, between the review deadline and the meta review discussion phase.
Meta-Review deadlines
NIME review process does not make much use of CMT’s discussion option during the review process. This option was used by some meta reviews in the most helpful ways. We saw the benefit of encouraging the meta reviewers to 1) rate the reviews, 2) communicate with reviewers whose reviews do not meet the expectations, and 3) discuss any conflicting reviews between the reviewers and meta reviewers.
We had one week for meta-reviewers to lead the discussion phase and another week to decide on the acceptances.
Desk rejection (DR) timeline
All submissions must be checked whether or not they have to be desk rejected before starting the review assignments. Desk rejections were final in 2025 for one exception.
We had one case where the authors argued that the institution name was too generic to necessitate DR. This might not be much of an issue for larger conferences, but NIME is a small community and it is likely that the authors know each other or the NIME researchers in specific institutions.
Although it is important to include as many papers as possible in the review process, it is also not fair to the PC committee to mask or fix anonymization issues for each paper with anonymization issues. Likewise, it is not advised to re-open the submission process.
We sent out the desk rejections as soon as we knew their status without waiting for the review process to be completed to allow the authors to consider resubmitting their works to other conferences.
It is expected that there will be more rejections due to the anonymization issues during the review process. We had one case that was caught by one of us after the reviews were completed. Overall, the desk rejections reduce the number of reviewable submissions and save reviewer time.
Decision timeline
Decisions should reach the authors at the same time, except for desk rejects which we decided to announce once we finalized the initial DJ decisions.
Conditional Acceptance Process in NIME2025
At NIME2025, we had a conditional acceptance phase before the final acceptance.
The phase was primarily based oninitial review results, which are mostly swing / borderline scores, as well as meta-reviews. We have gone through all submissions’ decisions and decided to give conditional acceptance to submission with recommendations from meta-reviews. After carefully reviewing all submissions and considering the meta-reviews, we granted conditional acceptance to selected papers. These submissions are expected to address constructive feedback and incorporate reviewer suggestions to meet the acceptance criteria. Please see details below.
We want to highlight that CA should ideally remain a minority, as they increase the workload between the final decision and camera-ready deadline.
The conditional acceptance timeline is relatively short for PCs because it requires communicating with the authors, receiving the resubmissions on time, reviewing the conditional acceptance for camera ready, and notifying the authors. It is also an uncertain period for the authors while the registration opens and they have to make a decision whether or not to participate based on the acceptance and rejection decisions. At the end, general chairs decided to extend the registration deadline by one week to accommodate authors traveling from far.
One criteria we discussed among PCs was whether or not the missing ethics statement was a desk reject or conditional accept because ethics statements for all submissions are required by NIME Ethics Code. We decided to conditionally accept those cases and there are easy fixes. However, so many submissions miss including the ethics statements and it significantly increased the number of conditional accept cases and PC’s workload between the decision notifications and camera ready deadlines.
One important consideration is not to give the option for conditional accept decision to the meta-reviewers because it is far over-used and creates a great imbalance between decisions. We finalized the decisions on the conditional accepts with the reviewers and meta-reviewers’ suggestions. There is a very short period where the authors can revise their papers to meet the conditions for acceptance which should be clearly defined in the email with decision notifications. When this condition was not clear, we added one of the PCs as a second/senior meta-reviewer and left a short description about what the condition should be for some of the papers.
The distinctions between the conditional accept and rejections should be clear. Sometimes, the paper needs major revisions to be ready for publication even though it has potential for a great paper. Because all conditional acceptances require reviews for camera ready and unless it is clearly communicated with the meta-reviewers, PCs end up reviewing all of the camera ready papers which is another reason to be mindful of assigning conditional acceptances liberally.
On the other hand, this process benefited increasing the quality of the papers that need to address reviewer concerns and go through the minor revisions.
Preparing for the Conference
Another logistical nightmare is preparing the program for oral presentations. It is not an easy challenge to navigate multiple timezones (Americas, Europe, and Asia/Australia) and thematically group the papers. Consider communicating with the chairs regarding their plans for hybrid participation, local participation which was a big consideration in 2025, and sharing participation information from registration. Even the presentation formats that the conference decides to accommodate will impact preparing for the presentation programs.
Program Announcement and Presentation Formats
The presentation formats should ideally be announced before the registration deadline. We announced the presentation program approximately a month before because the more authors realized how far and expensive it was to travel to Australia, the more changes regarding registration and participation we had to accommodate in the program. Communicating with the general chairs earlier about their plans with participation formats and registrations and how well they want to accommodate different timezones is helpful.
Before you can finalize the program for the Paper Track, a few things have to be completed in parallel. First, you need to decide the presentation formats. This year, we had three types of papers because paper length corresponded to its contribution; however, not the quality. We had really good papers with oral presentations that were not necessarily long papers. Separating the timelines for announcing presentation formats and acceptances was very helpful and provided an additional week of selecting the better papers for presentations.
We planned for 40 oral presentations and approximately 60 poster presentations. We tried to balance different length papers among the oral presentations. Everyone could bring a demo and present their demos during the poster sessions regardless of presentation types.
Second, we grouped the papers according to research themes and time zones. With a conference location far from the majority of NIME research institutions, we had to plan for 2-3 sessions that were mainly online presentations. This process requires a bit of juggling and keeping some of the session topics flexible and broad.
Session Chair Assignments
A few weeks before the conference, we started selecting the session chairs mostly from local researchers, either from the host institutions or institutions within the country. The most important is to find session chairs who know the subject of the session’s theme well and can ask questions to the presenters. In a few cases, we reached out to authors whose in person participation was confirmed. We suggest assigning one main chair and a supporting chair and communicating with both of them so that in case of a change in the session chair’s schedule, there is another chair who can lead the session.
Awards
We select based on the average review scores. We get the top 5 to 10 candidates and go through them and vote our choice among paper chairs. This is given to general chairs for final decisions.
This is the paper award category for NIME2025:
1 best paper
2 highly commended
1 Pamela Z Award (inclusion)
Before Submission Deadline
Update the paper template
Ask the conference chair to be given access to the following repo : https://github.com/NIME-conference/nime-template
Update the conference information (and modification history) in nime-paper-template.tex and in the word template
Make sure everything compiles properly (e.g. on Overleaf)
Create a new release on the repo of the templates (see the previous releases for reference) :
Standalone .docx file
Zip archive for the .tex (so that it can be imported in Overleaf) containing :
images folder
ACM-Reference-Format.bst
nime-paper-template.tex
nimeart.cls
sample-references.bib
Set up the Conference Management System (October)
NIME presently uses the Microsoft Conference Management Toolkit (CMT) which is available for free and is used by ISMIR, WAV, and many other conferences. Previously to CMT, NIME used to use Easyconf and Precision and another option may be EasyChair. All conference management systems have a learning curve and chairs are advised to read CMT's help documents regularly when performing different tasks as well as to discuss the experiences with previous chairs.
There are a few important settings on CMT that need to be set up and reviewed before CMT opens for paper submissions. When any user (author, reviewer, meta) creates their profiles or logins to the conference submission form for the first time, CMT can request for their individual domain conflicts as well as their subject areas. This information becomes really important in the review process when matching reviewers with papers that do not have any conflicts. Another one is permission and visibility rules for the reviewers and meta-reviewers. We recommend enabling the discussion between meta-reviewers and reviewers which can be helpful in aligning reviews that are significantly different from each other.
Recruit reviewers (December)
Master list of NIME reviewers: The list of reviewers are passed on from one year to another. You should add new people as you see fit, and the previous chair(s) should also remove reviewers that did not work well. It is common to add some local people each year, and some of these should probably be removed if they are not regular NIMErs. The handle to past years' NIME reviewers.
Get the reviewer expertise areas and domain conflicts as early as possible (Do not hesitate to send an email through CMT to all reviewers and meta-reviewers).
Recruiting reviewers should start before the submission deadline. Otherwise, there is not much time to find reviewers after the final submission deadline because the next review phase should technically start right after the final deadline and all papers should be reviewed for desk rejection before the reviewers are allocated.
Feel free to make use of the peer review process by inviting authors to review other submissions. It is better to provide a good mix of peer reviews and more experienced reviewers.
We recommend publishing reviewer registration forms and how to guide for reviewers and meta-reviewers (or links to the guides) on the conference website before the submission deadline.
Gender parity (and also diversity): It should be addressed at all parts of the organization, and also at all times. It is important to encourage the community to reflect on the importance of these matters in order to deepen the awareness that simply reducing it to numbers (e.g. striving to include as many women as men) is worthless if not accompanied by the acknowledgment of the importance of each individual's contribution. It is also important to promote actions that strive to create equal opportunities to all participants by compensating unforeseen biases.
Be careful about accepting to take on reviewers that start out saying they have little time, and can do the reviews a bit late. If people first start being late, they may be vary late, or not deliver at all. It is a very tight timeline for the review process, so we cannot really have much delay.
Be very strict about deadlines, and plan well ahead. The reviewer pool should be ready way before the deadline, preferably before the end of December. It is better to get too many than too few reviewers, so that you can spread the task on more people. Maximum number of papers should be 5, but 2-3 papers per person is better.
Prepare reviewers and meta-reviewers about what is coming when. Send out e-mails a week before every deadline. It is also important to send out information in advance to tell when papers are being distributed. That way people can plan time to do their review. This will save you time in the end.
Some useful links:
Music Track Meta-Reviewer (see Paper Track Meta-Reviewer)
NIME2025 Review process and instructions page present a good example of what mentioned above!
Reviewer Registration
To attract reviewers, we published a reviewer registration form on the conference website, NIME mailing list, and the paper submission form. The reviewers registered from the form should still be invited through CMT and accept the reviewer invitations because this process ensures better responsiveness and communication, unfortunately not the quality.
Call for Papers an& Author Enquires
Common FAQ encountered can be found here.
Author enquiries are addressed on NIME forum.
After Submission Deadline
Submission Management
Even though the submissions change between two deadlines, the first (abstract, title, authors) deadline indicates the maximum number of papers and reviewers/meta-reviewers needed.
Feel free to communicate with the prospective authors after the first deadline through CMT’s emailing option.
Desk Reject
It is always hard and sad to desk reject papers that have anonymization issues. Please, email to all authors on CMT after the abstract submission to remind them of the anonymization rules. This email will also eliminate disputes regarding desk reject decisions.
Regardless, you must go through all submissions whether they can proceed to the next review phase. Desk rejections are not limited to but mainly related to anonymization issues. Here are some basics to look for:
Is the file name anonymous (visible author names, visible institutions, links to videos or websites with visible author names)?
Are the author names at the top of the file removed?
Are the acknowledgments and ethics statements anonymized?
Does the file have reviewable content - is it complete, without empty sections?
Are the footnotes (ie, github links) anonymized? (We had some cases where the Github pages were not anonymized.)
Check the supplementary materials, are they anonymized?
Check if the word count is outside the allowed limits. Is it a desk reject or conditional accept in that case? This case depends on how short or long the paper is outside the word count boundaries.
Other and more obvious issues that lead to desk rejections:
Missing/Incomplete submissions.
The paper is written in a significantly different template. The template should be obviously different or unacceptable for a desk reject decision. You also do not want to lose a good paper or over-punish authors for small mistakes (e.g., using previous years’ templates is fixable in .).
The submission does not follow the basic academic paper flows.
The submission is clearly not a NIME or relevant research.
Some authors over-anonymize their papers, fearing a desk rejection, which often removes reviewable content such as blocking or removing images, etc. This is another reason to articulate what a desk reject is clearly both in the paper templates and on conference and submission websites (i.e., submission guide and CMT).
All these potential reasons should be explicitly given on the submission page and desk rejects should immediately be notified to the authors (a template can be created in CMT). In some cases, authors might respond quickly that fixes for anonymity can be done rapidly, in which case paper chair(s) can accept (or not) a new pdf that they will themselves check for other changes and upload on CMT (it is best not to reopen submissions only for that).
Desk rejections must be final.
Peer review (February)
This is the most critical phase for the paper chair(s), since time is limited and the pressure is high. It helps the process a lot if reviewers have been recruited early on. Please also be very precise in your communication, with clear deadlines and expectancy for everyone involved.
The paper chair(s) assign papers to reviewers (3-4 reviewers per paper to ensure that all papers are reviewed by at least 3 people) and follow up the deadlines
A group of meta-reviewers write summaries for each paper based on the individual reviews, and suggest a decision
The paper chair(s) do the final selection
Distribution of reviews
Centralized distribution: In the interest of running the process as smoothly as possible, the paper chair(s) should do the review assignment and follow-up. This is how it has always been (we only started with meta-reviewers in 2014). The CMS helps out a lot by coming up with suggestions of reviewers based on expertise. Having a centralized reviewer assignment also helps in avoiding individuals to be contacted by multiple meta-reviewers.
Uneven distribution: It is important to avoid an uneven distribution of reviews (some reviewers with many reviews, and some reviewers with none). You should aim for a better distribution of papers to the community of reviewers by distributing at least one paper for each reviewer. This also involves the community more broadly, and helps get new and young people on board early in their careers.
Ask reviewers to complete their profile: To ensure better fit with reviewers, you should promote adding sample papers to the CMS profile, and also open for bidding for papers.
Tentative reviewers: We had a number of reviewers who did not reply / were tentative. With the aim of getting 3 reviews per submission and helping the meta-reviewers, we send out more invitations, and once we achieved the quota, we deleted the tentative reviewers. It turned that some of the reviewers were having an independent conversation with the meta-reviewer, and perhaps agreed using another medium (e.g. email). We recommend that it is OK to leave tentative reviewers hanging in the system even after inviting new reviewers. This may have a double advantage: on the one hand we can't really know in advance if tentative reviewers will eventually respond nor if accepted reviewers will in fact comply with their promises, so the worst-case scenario for having 5 or 6 external reviewers with some "pending" is to end up with a few extra reviews for a few papers; on the other hand, by leaving them hanging in the system, by the end of the reviewing period we would have a clear picture of the "unreliable reviewers", maybe to serve as a heads-up for the next chairs (sort of a blacklist).
Removing reviewers: For each submission, the system is unclear with reviewers who are removed for any particular reason (reassignment due to lack of anonymisation, unresponsiveness, busy, etc). We recommend to have some kind of history and be able to see for each submission 1) who has been already invited to be a reviewer and removed (and the reason why, e.g. lack of anonymity, unresponsiveness, busy), and 2) who has declined the invitation already. This would not apply if we keep the tentative reviewers as suggested in the previous point.
Meta-reviewers
NIME has been using meta-reviewers since 2014. This has helped to improve the general quality of reviews. Meta-reviewers have typically been responsible for 5-15 papers each. Obviously, the quality of the work goes up with fewer papers, but having more meta-reviewers also makes the whole process more vulnerable if they do not deliver. It is important to set up a reliable group of meta-reviewers, and they should ideally know the conference fairly well.
Meta-reviewers read the individual reviews and write up a meta-review for each paper. The meta-reviewer should base his/her argument on the individual reviews, but could/should also read the paper in question to make up an opinion. This is particularly important when the individual reviewers disagree.
The meta-reviewers should be encouraged to make a clear suggestion as for whether to accept or not (since many individual reviewers tend to gravitate towards borderline). Decisions on acceptance/rejection should always be based on a qualitative judgment. The scores are useful to help in sorting papers, but should not be used as the basis for the final decision.
For many papers, making a decision is quite straight forward. For some papers there may be a lot of disagreements between individual reviewers. Then the meta-reviewer could ask the individual reviewers about their arguments before making their recommendation.
The final decision of acceptance/rejection is made by the paper chair(s), and if they do not reach an agreement, it is ultimately the general chair that will have to make a decision.
Double-blindedness
This is how double-blind policy is implemented in the PCS System used at NIME:
authors do not know external reviewer nor meta-reviewer names
external reviewers do not know author names
meta-reviewers know both author and external reviewer names
external reviewers do not know other external reviewer names
external reviewers know meta-reviewer names
The only strictly double-blind part is that between external reviewers and authors.
A few number of poorly anonymized submissions that were detected were "rescued" by asking the authors to submit a corrected manuscript and redistribute it to new external reviewers, which was a hard task (meta-reviewers could be kept because they are able to see the author names of the submissions). We recommend to check if papers are properly anonymized before distributing them among reviewers.
Anonymization: The templates are anonymized with seemingly real names. It is not the first time that this creates confusion among reviewers and even meta-reviewers. Often times, the anonymization is so strict that it is very difficult to get the full picture. It is very important to take the anonymization policy seriously otherwise some authors will be better positioned than others. We recommend offering solutions / options to the authors so that they can still upload videos, datasets, links, etc to improved the reviewing experience.
Conflicts of interest
It is very important to take conflicts of interest seriously, and to follow the NIME statements published online. Conflicts of interests are self-reported, but there are cases where reviewers have not reported possible conflicts. So it is important that the chair(s) do an extra check of this. You should remove any reviews that appear to be based on conflicts of interest.
On Reviewer and Meta-reviewer Assignments and Communication
Although we did not experience problems with ghost reviewers so much, we had some issues with the quality of the reviews and meta-reviews. Unfortunately, there is not an easy way of knowing it because we had some reviews or meta-reviews from reviewers who were seniors, responsive, and willing to review. In our experiences, new reviewers put more effort in detailing their reviews than some of the more senior reviewers.
Different types of communication helps eliminate these issues:
Communicating the expectations with the reviewers early. Courtney and Astrid had really nice reviewer guides which we published a shortened version on Github. Even better would be signing a reviewer agreement to make sure that the reviewers read the expectations.
Another place to communicate expectations is CMT’s review submission portal. We had several questions guiding reviewers on CMT to write fully rounded reviews.
Facilitating communication between reviewers and meta-reviewers. Meta-reviewers should also remind the authors of the deadlines and check the quality of the reviewers to keep them up to standards. We took extra time to allocate experienced (and trustworthy) meta-reviewers. We mostly utilized our own networks which resulted in faster communication and better review quality.
Communicating with the music chairs or overseeing that the reviewers are not getting overloaded with BOTH paper and music reviews. It is a really bad idea to assign duplicate review assignments because some reviewers just accept any requests unrealistically. (check duplicate emails –institutional and personal emails for the same reviewers– and check music and paper tracks.) We also did not assign meta-review and review tasks to the same reviewers, and instead prioritised them for one or the other.
The last one is very important! We had almost no communication with the music chairs but we shared a subset of the reviewer pool with their track. We absolutely recommend separating the two reviewer lists. We saw some reviewers who accepted reviewer requests from both tracks AND from multiple emails and were assigned more than 10 reviews in total. We ended up removing those reviewers from the paper track or assigning them a small number of reviews which resulted in very poor reviews.
Respecting reviewers/meta-reviewers’ requests for the maximum number of reviews when accepting the request. We experienced that most reviewers say yes if we ask them to review less than three papers.
Wild suggestions would be to hold group meetings, similar to subcommittee meetings, with the meta reviewers to communicate the expectations from them and from the reviewers as well as the changes in the review process. In general, it is a good practice to encourage meta-reviewers to establish a closer communication with the reviewers because most reviewers/meta-reviewers often do not read the reviewer guides or information in long emails.
Dealing with reviews that do not meet the expectations
We reached out to the reviewers individually whose reviews did not meet the expectations and requested expanding and detailing their reviews further. Almost all of them expanded their reviews after communicating the expectations.
Having a few backup reviewers that you know who are fast in communication and reviewing can be a lifesaver. We had 2-3 cases where we needed to bring emergency reviewers.
How many reviewers and meta-reviewers needed:
Because some reviewers ghost, some request less than 3 reviews, and some reviews will not meet the expectations, to ensure at least 2-3 good quality reviews and 1 meta-reviewer, we assigned each submission 4 reviewers and 1 meta-reviewer.
After the first deadline, we started with 211 submissions. A few of them deleted or withdrew their submissions and at the end, we received 194 submissions. 39 papers were either withdrawn or desk rejected before reviewer assignments. 14 of them were desk rejected due to one of the reasons above and 25 of them were incomplete submissions. 155 submissions were eligible for reviews. One paper was withdrawn in the conditional accept process and one was desk rejected after the reviews.
We believe that 4 papers per reviewer can be too much and cause delays. We tried to keep the quota at 3 max, except for 15 reviewers who received 4 assignments. For 155 papers, we had 267 reviewers who completed all their reviews and 6 of them partially. Reviewers received assignments between 2 - 4 reviews. In addition to the reviewers, we had 58 meta-reviewers with only one ghost meta-reviewer.
The number of reviewers can be less, meaning that each reviewer will review more papers which is easier to keep track and communicate with. However, more delays and rushed reviews should be expected. We also realized in our communication with previous reviewers, that assigning too many reviews will decrease the chance of them reviewing in the next few years.
Acceptances and Rejections
Acceptances
Conditional Acceptance
Selection of papers
The acceptance of papers should be based on the quality of the papers. We do not use a specific percentage for acceptance, it should solely be based on the quality reported by reviewers.
While there is usually a good correlation between the review scores and quality, there may be cases, particularly with disagreements between reviewers, where also papers with borderline or even negative scores may be accepted. These, and other borderline cases, are usually discussed between meta-reviewers and chair(s).
Confirmation letter to send
After paper reviewing there are different kinds of letter to send:
submitted and accepted as paper
submitted as paper but downgraded to poster
submitted as poster and accepted as such
submitted as concert but performed as club
submitted as concert but downgraded to demo
Prepare proceedings
It is very important to thoroughly check that all camera-ready papers fulfil the requirements of the template.
At NIME2025, the conference proceedings were handled by the conference proceeding chair.
Preparing for / During the Conference
Programming
Programming of papers should be based on a combination of the quality of the paper and the chairs' idea about how well suited the paper is for the different presentation formats.
Relatively few papers can be accepted for oral presentation, typically 20-30 dependent on the artistic program. This means that it is very competitive to get an oral presentation slot. Please keep in mind that the program is curated, and there should not be a one-to-one relationship between reviewer scores and oral presentation. It is more important to think about creating balanced and relevant sessions, and to ensure a diverse oral program. This diversity should include a good balance between different fields, artistic vs scientific content, institutional/national distribution, gender diversity, etc.
If the chair(s) think it works best, it may be worth "upgrading" a poster submission to an oral presentation. This should be checked with the authors first. Some people deliberately submit for a poster for various reasons, and should not be forced to present orally if they do not want to. Other times people are shy and don't dare to submit for oral presentation, and in these cases they may be honored by being "upgraded".
It is more common to "downgrade" an oral presentation to poster, or a poster to demo. It should be communicated clearly that at NIME, both posters and demos are of high value, and often also papers that receive very high review scores are being presented as poster. It is the responsibility of the chair(s) to decide whether a "downgrade" should also be combined with a reduction in the number of pages of the paper. This is a question about the content of the paper, and whether the reviewers think the paper has enough content to fill, say, 6 pages. If not, then the authors should be asked to reduce it to 4 pages.
NIME2025 presentation format logistics
Considering authors attendance decision, and travel costs, and other factors, all accepted paper submissions were assigned a presentation slot (either oral or poster) at the conference, independent of onsite or remote attendance.
The presentation format was chosen by the paper chairs for the conference program curation.
More can be found here.
Presentation duration
The presentation duration can depend on the conference programming.
In the past, it had both different or equal long presentation duration for different paper categories (short, medium and long.)
There have been different duration of the talks, but they generally follow this pattern:
5/10/15 min presentation + 3 min questions + 2 min turnover
Remember to inform presenters about the duration of talks every time you have the chance, since people tend to forget.
Running paper sessions
Time is short, so it is important to have a structured approach to chairing the oral sessions. The paper chair needs to find session chairs to run each session. It is common to use experienced participants as session chairs, but please also consider giving new people a chance (and remember the diversity also of session chairs).
It is important that the paper chair clearly informs the session chairs about their duties:
Arrive early to the session, and welcome all presenters.
Ask presenters to test their setup before their session.
Start on time, every minute matters. Remember to close the doors.
Keep track of the time, and signal to presenters when there are 5, 2, 0 minutes left.
Ask next presenters to set up during the Q&A session.
Please also ensure that you have volunteers available to assist during the session. Ideally you will have one volunteer helping with the audiovisual setup, and at least one volunteer to run with microphones during Q&A sessions.
Remember that session chairs do a very important job during the conference! An important part of the job is to smile, breath, and help nervous presenters to relax. But it is equally important to keep the time, nobody likes to be delayed to a coffee break.
No-shows
We do not accept remote presentation, video presentation, or presentations by non-authors at NIME conferences. The reason for this is that the conference should not only be a place for publishing papers (then a journal is more appropriate), but be a meeting point of people. That is not possible if the authors are not present. No-shows happen, for various reasons, but it should be discouraged. The most efficient way of doing this, is to remove no-show papers from the proceedings.
This rule was created after seeing a number of cases in which people would submit their work, get it accepted, and not show up to present it at the conference (usually last minute or not even without notice). This is unfortunate for the participants, because it creates "holes" in the program, and it prevents other papers from being accepted for presentation. In addition it undermines the idea of the conference as a meeting point and a venue for active discussion.
We do realize that this rule may seem unnecessarily strict, but we also see that it would be very difficult to come up with another rule that does not have a number of unintended side-effects.
For people that have been accepted for one conference but that could not make it, we have allowed for the paper to be presented at the next conference without a new submission/reviewing process. Please do consider this option.
After the conference
Getting the proceedings on NIME.org
The nime.org archive is built on BibTeX files stored at Github. As paper chair it is your job to prepare a complete BibTeX file adhering to the NIME standards. The steps involved in this is as follows.
Remove papers that were not presented
There are always some accepted papers that are not presented for various reasons. No matter the reason, papers that are not presented at the conference should be removed from the proceedings. This is because the proceedings should reflect what actually happened at the conference. It is also very important to let all (future) authors know that NIME has a strict no-show procedure.
Fix errors in the metadata or papers
Due to the short time in preparing the proceedings before the conference, there may be occasional errors in metadata (author names, affiliations, etc.) or in the PDF files (most often wrong page layout, missing fonts, low-resolution images, etc.).
It is in NIME's interest to have as good metadata and PDFs as possible, so we do accept such error corrections and minor PDF modifications.
Export from PrecisionConf
When the basic "post-processing" of the proceedings is done, it is time to generate the BibTeX file. As of 2018 it should be possible to export BibTeX directly from Precision Conference. Prior to that we had to do some post-processing with the script Precision2BibTeX.
Massaging the BibTeX file
The exported BibTeX file need some "massaging" to match the other BibTeX files in the repository. Please check the files on Github to see how the file shold be formatted. Typically this includes:
Check the title of the proceedings. It should be the generic title "Proceedings of the international conference on new interfaces for musical expression". The year and place should be included in separate fields, not as part of the title. This is because the ISSN for the series is bound to the generic proceedings title.
Check that abstracts are included for all papers. Please also check that there are no line-breaks in the abstracts.
Check weird formatting (typically unicode-related issues). Can be done automatically using for example JabRef or bibclean
Insert ISSN number (and possibly ISBN) in each post (query-replace usually works fine)
Insert right link to PDFs. Should be something like nime20XX_ID.pdf.
Bibtex with Pubpub
Here is a script that scrapes Bibtex information from NIME's Pubpub community: scrapeBibtexFromPubpub.py. Instructions can be found at the top of the file. Note that the author names collected this way is based on what the author supplied on pubpub, and may differ from registration data (e.g. on CMT).
Here is a script that converts the scraped Bibtex into NIME-compliant formats: writeBibtexToBibFile.py. Carefully check the output for errors.
If you are using your own scripts, remember to replace line breaks with whitespaces in the "abstract" field of Bibtex. Beware of unusual line breaks such as LS (Unicode character 2028) and PS (Unicode character 2029).
Conference Proceedings and NIME proceedings officer
The NIME paper proceedings officer will help with the above, and will also do the final upload to nime.org.
Ideally, conference proceedings should be ready on the conference website's before the conference.
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