Submitted papers must describe original work not previously published or concurrently submitted elsewhere. Papers must be submitted by the submission deadline using the RTAS 2020 submission site (which will be made available soon). The submission deadline is firm: late submissions will not be accepted under any circumstances, and the deadline will not be extended.

All submitted papers must comply with the double-blind submission requirements.

Page Limits

The main body of each submitted paper is limited to 11 pages of technical content with additional pages permitted for the bibliography only (i.e., references do not count against the page limit). Note that to maintain anonymity, there should be no acknowledgments in the submitted version of the paper.

Accepted papers will be allowed one extra page, i.e. a total of 12 pages of technical content, not counting acknowledgments and bibliography.

Paper Format

Submissions must be formatted according to IEEE conference paper guidelines (10pt font, default margins, default linespacing). Figures, including figure labels, must be readable without magnification.

To ensure correct formatting, please use one of the available IEEE templates without modifications. When using the LaTeX template, which is recommended, use the following document class declaration:

\documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran}

For the original submission for review (not the camera-ready version of accepted papers) please also add page numbers by including the following after \maketitle:

\thispagestyle{plain}
\pagestyle{plain}

Submissions violating formatting specifications (whether or not detected by HotCRP’s formatting checker) will be rejected!

Prior Workshop Papers

A submission based on previous work (by the same authors) presented in a workshop with no digital object identifier (DOI) is eligible for acceptance.  A submission based on a workshop paper (by the same authors) published with a DOI is eligible for acceptance, provided it contains at least 30% new material.  As is always the case, the Chair of the Technical Program Committee makes the final determination on acceptance or rejection of acceptable papers.

Conflict of Interest (COI)

There is a conflict of interest between an author and a member of the technical Program Committee (PC) if they are relatives, friends, co-authors, partners of a common project, colleagues from the same institution, or one is student or advisor of the other. The COI is considered to hold for three years from the end of the relationship, with the exception of advisor-advisee relationships, which constitute an indefinite conflict.

COIs are indicated both by the authors during the submission process and by PC members during the bidding procedure. If a PC member has a COI with any author of a submitted paper, that PC member will not review the submission nor take part in its deliberation.

Unwanted Reviewers

Authors can optionally indicate a maximum number of 2 unwanted reviewers, providing proper motivations, to prevent the submitted paper to be assigned to them for review. Assignments are handled by the Track Chairs; the unwanted reviewers will not be informed of such requests. To indicate unwanted reviewers, send the relevant
Track Chair an email by the submission deadline including the submission ID, the names of the unwanted reviewers, and a brief justification.

Author Rebuttal

The peer-review process at RTAS incorporates a rebuttal process. After the PC members complete the review process, the contact author for each submitted paper will be provided with the set of reviews for that submission. Each review might further include a short list of questions for the authors in a clearly marked section.

Authors have three days to prepare and submit a rebuttal answer through the submission system. The rebuttal is strictly limited to responses to factual errors and misunderstandings in reviews, and to answers to explicit questions raised in the corresponding section of the reviews. The authors are not allowed to introduce new material/results to the submission.

Note that failing to provide a rebuttal does not lead to an automatic paper rejection. Nevertheless, authors are encouraged to address questions by the reviewers to the best of their ability. PC members are required to consider the rebuttal answer in the final deliberation.

The rebuttal period is during December 2019.

Submission System

RTAS 2020 uses the HotCRP conference management system. Please register for an account, which will allow you to submit papers.