What is ICTERI for as a conference?

Dear ICTERI Community members,

We have recently informed the authors of ICTERI 2020 submissions that:

• The registration service has been opened for ICTERI 2020 intended participants
• ICTERI 2020 will be run in a fully online mode due to COVID-19 pandemic and incurred restrictions on travel and assemblies

In this occasional context, as the organizers of the ICTERI series, we receive numerous emails with questions that, topically, could be grouped as follows:

• Our submission has been rejected. Why are you writing to me?
• Our submission has been rejected and now you offer to register. Did you (the PC) finally change your (their) mind and accept our paper?

I will try my best to answer these two questions, which are actually the same: What are Computer Science (including ICTERI) conferences for?

Before replying, I do sincerely apologize for taking your time spent to read evident things.

Academic conferences, also in Computer Science, also ICTERI series, are the assemblies for interested research community members. As professionals, we go to conferences for learning about the latest-breaking results in the field of our focus and discussing these results. Learning implies that our major objective is to listen to, discuss, and comprehend what have the other people done to date and what might be the implications to your own research. This is why we continue informing you about the conference even if your own submission has been rejected. Indeed, as you have submitted, you might be interested in the conference and its topical focus. Furthermore, as you have been rejected, you might be interested in learning what are the results presented in the papers that have been accepted. Hence, you might be interested to attend, listen, pose questions, and discuss. You might be also interested in extending your professional network.

This is why we ask you to register at the conference, as a participant. Registrations are also important for managing the conference. We need to know how many people will attend in order to get our conference infrastructure and your information packages prepared adequately for the load.

Giving a talk, to present your paper at a conference, is a Community service, which is an award – in the competition. As the organizers, we are supposed to offer the best achievable quality of service. This is why we employ our Program Committee for helping us select the very best from the bulk of submissions, based on scientific and professional merits. The better is the selection of the papers in the conference program the more effective we are in helping you achieve your objective as a professional community member. Therefore, once the authors are informed about the decisions, we do not change our mind. Furthermore, it would be unfair for the rest of those who competed. We continue informing the authors of rejected papers as they have declared their interest by submitting their papers. An offer to register means an offer to register as a participant (listener) in this context.

Some readers may point to a weakness in my logic in the above – what if they just want to be published? The only thing I can reply is that they have chosen a wrong kind of a venue for their submission. They are suggested to write to a journal, not conference.

Vadim Ermolayev

ICTERI Steering Committee