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 52 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!