The PAKDD Steering Committee provides oversight of the PAKDD series of conferences. Conferences are generally run autonomously, with reference to the steering committee for guidance. The following guidelines aim to capture the common understanding between the sterring committee and the conference organisers.

Locations

The PAKDD conference series aims to support the emergance of KDD research and technology in the Pacific and Asian regions. The conference locations are spread throughout the region. Whilst there is no explicit rule regarding location the general principle is to move through the region from China, Japan/Korea, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Australia/New Zealand, and the Pacific from year to year.

The next year's conference is announced at the current conference's banquet dinner. Any decision regarding the conference two years hence is not announced nor confirmed until it is only one year hence, when the General Chairs, PCs, and invited speakers are expected to have bene line up.

Proposals

Proposals for hosting the conference are always welcome and should be sent to the Steering Committee chair or any other member of the Steering Committee for their support and presentation to the Steering Committee.

Proposals are considered at the Steering Committee's annual general meeting hosted by the conference. The bid for the coming year's conference is considered and the steering committee makes their final decision on which bid to proceed with. This will then be announced at the conference dinner.

Proposals for more than just the following year are also welcome and encouraged. This allows the steering committee to review the proposal early and to provide feedback for the final bid.

Financials

A $5000 (USD) seed grant is available on application to the PAKDD SC Chair. The seed money is to be repaid to the PAKDD SC at the conclusion of the conference, before any surplus is calculated.

If a conference makes a loss (which has not occurred) the PAKDD SC can decide to underwrite that loss up to an amount of only $5000 (USD). If seed money was provided for the conference, the maximum amount of support for any loss will be reduced by the amount of the seed money provided.

If the conference ends up raising funds in surplus (the only situation we have had so far) the surplus (after returning any seed money) is split 50/50 with the PAKDD SC. Such funds are only to be used for the benefit of the conferences into the future, in line with the Steering Committee Rules.

The conference organisers use their own discretion as to their portion of the surplus for the benefit of research and researchers in Data Mining. Past uses have included the support of students in attending the conference in following years. This can be managed, for example, in collaboration with the following year conference organisers

Registration Fees

A registration fee of approximately USD $550 (early bird) is the target. A student fee of USD $350 (early bird) is also suggested. This covers conference, workshops, and tutorials. For particular locations, the conference organisers may decide to charge a smaller fee for local registrations to encourage local participation. Workshop-only fees (for example USD $180 early bird) may also be appropriate, but we do want to encourage attendees to stay on for the whole conference.

Program Committee Chairs

The Steering Committee recommends that a recognised international researcher in data mining be appointed as the Program Committee Chair. Their role is to encourage international participation in the conference and ensures the ongoing credibility and integrity of the conference.

Co-chairs will also be appointed by the particular conference organisers. One of the co-chairs will be identified as responsible for the administration of the paper submission and review system.

The organisation and program committees for the coming year's conference should be agreed to by the steering committee, finalised and confirmed by the time the conference is announced at the conference banquet.

Invited Speakers

PAKDD uses the following process for all invited speakers and especially those for whom financial support is provided e.g., airfare and accommodation). This includes Keynote Speakers, Tutorial Speakers, Summer School Speakers, etc.

For Tutorial Speakers, the Tutorial Chair will take care of the standard process. For Keynote Speakers and Summer School Speakers (if there is a Summer School), the General Chairs or Program Committee Chairs will execute the process.

The process is:

1. The PC Chairs and General Chairs propose names and also ask the Steering Committee for nominations.


2. The PC Chairs and the General Chairs create the list, and filter out anyone who has been an invited speaker in the past 4 years in PAKDD. The reason for this is to expose the PAKDD community to a diversity of opinions/view/ideas. This also helps to bring PAKDD to the notice of well regarded people outside of the existing PAKDD community, thus increasing its visibility.


3. The PC Chairs and the General Chairs rank the nominated candidates based on (i) their visibility, (ii) relevance of area, (iii) experience in speaking in other forums, etc.


4. The PC Chairs select the top 3 for Keynotes, and 1 for any Data Mining School and send it to the Steering Committee for approval. The Steering Committee can come back to the PC Chairs and the General Chairs with specific advice about exclusions.


5. With the final list approved by the Steering Committee, the PC Chairs invite the speakers. They must be careful not to invite anyone or make promises to anyone before the process has been completed and the Steering Committee approval obtained.

Codified by Jaideep Srivastava 30 Jun 2010

Call for Papers

• KDNuggets: https://www.kdnuggets.com/gps.html
• DBWorld: https://www.cs.wisc.edu/dbworld/
• ML List: https://cll.stanford.edu/mllist/

Submission Management Systems

The Steering Committee, based on feedback from past conferences, recommends the use of the free EasyChair conference system, which is hosted by the University of Manchester Computer Science Department. Simply register at their web site.

The PAKDD 2010 committee has also recommended the use of the free and open sourceSubSift for assigning papers to reviewers.

Plagiarism is an important issue to be aware of. Papers can be searched for through Google, for example.

Please be sure to ask the submitter of a paper whether the paper is a student paper. A student paper would normally have a student as the first author and would register as a student.

Proceedings

The proceedings are published by Springer as part of the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series. Alfred Hoffman is the Springer contact and can often best be contacted by phone rather than email.

The Steering Committee should be listed in the Organisation section.

The workshop proceedings are also published by Springer as part of the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series as a post conference publication. Papers could be available during the workshop to attendees, and the workshop chairs should provide at least an additional review from the workshop presentations. Authors then have an opportunity to resubmit with any small changes for the post conference publication.

Review Process

Past PAKDD conference have had an acceptance rate from 15% to 30%. Do not exceed 30%. Up to 90 papers is the norm.

Conference organisers have conflicts of interest whenever they are also authors of papers. The conference PC chairs must not be an author of any accepted papers. Similarly, tutorial chairs can not submit tutorial proposals and workshop chairs can not submit workshop proposals. Also, conference organisers can not present invited/keynote talks.

Conference Schedule

Three and a half days is a good length.

The first day is generally for workshops and tutorials. These are run in parallel. Running tutorials in parallel with the main conference presents challenges, so the recommendation is to run them on the first day in parallel with the workshops.

The conference reception is often held on the evening of the day of the workshops and tutorials. Many attendees arrive that day. The reception often includes finger food, and often enough to make a light meal, but also allowing attendees to organise themselves to go out for dinner if they desire.

The second day is the openning of the main conference, often beginning with a keynote presentation. The evening is often kept clear for participants to make their own arrangements.

The second evening is also often the Steering Committee annual general meeting and working dinner, hosted by the conference.

The conference organisers will arrange the steering committee meeting and dinner. The meeting runs for 3 hours. The first 90 minutes covers the following agenda for all the SC plus invited guests from the current, previous and future conferences:

• Openning and welcoming by the SC Chair or Co-Chair
• Report from previous year's conference - financial summary
• Update on the current conference
• Presentation from the organisers of the next year's conference
• Proposal for the next year plus one conference
• General discussion

The remaining time is for the SC only to discuss other items and to make decisions regarding future conferences and SC membership.

The next year's conference decision will be announced at the conference banquet. The conference organiser will also make a presentation at the banquet.

The third day is often a half day, with a organised tour for the afternoon, followed by the conference dinnner.

The final day is a full day. Finishing the conference with an invited panel session including the invited and keynote speakers can often be a good closing point. Often something like learnings from the conference and where to now. The aim is to bring everyone together for the end of the conference for a wrap up, and to encourage attendees to remain until the end to avoid the slump in attendance for the final few sessions. It also provides a definite end point, rather than simply fading out!

Awards

• Two Student Paper Awards including complimentary registration for the next PAKDD conference and a $500 (USD) grant to support travel, funded by the PAKDD Steering Committee, selected by the PC.


• Best Paper Award selected by the PC. This can be split into two awards, one for best research paper and the other for best applied paper or the paper which best demonstrates good research and repeatability (e.g., by making the algorithm available as open source software). A plaque is arranged by the local organising committee to be presented.


• The Most Influential Paper Award is selected from the conference 10 years ago by SC (e.g., in 2012 we selected from 2002). The SC chair appoints a selection committee (a chair and two members from the SC) in November each year for the next conference. The SC Chair identifies the paper citations using Google Scholar (an automated counter is available) and this may guide the selection of the committee. The most cited papers are reviewed by the committee for impact, influence, novelty, and significance. Recommendations are presented to the SC in January for endorsement and the conference organisers and winner informed in March so that plaques can be arranged and the recipient can arrange travel for attendance. A plaque is arranged by the local organising committee to be presented.


• The Distinguished Contribution Award is selected by a committee of previous recipients of the Award. Once the committee has decided on the recipient, the nomination is presented to the Steering Committee for their endorsement. The recipient is then notified to confirm their attendance at the conference. The conference organisers arrange for a plaque which is presented during the conference banquet by the SC Chair. A plaque is arranged by the local organising committee to be presented.


• Student Travel Awards are funded by the PAKDD Steering Committee to support student authors of accepted papers to help them defray part of the cost of attending the conference to present their work. The Student Travel Awards will be presented in cash to the winners at the conference reception. The amount of award for different winners may be different according to the needs of the applicants and the capacity of the fund. Typically, the amount for each award will be around USD $400 with 10 awards available. The awards are administered by the conference organisers. See PAKDD 2015 Student Awards for an example.

Final Programme

A serious problem is the no-show. Authors have paid their registration to get their paper published, but don't turn up - they've already got what they wanted or else last minute changes of plans have required them not to travel!

The main problem here is attendees turning up to a session where only 2 of the 5 presenters have arrived. It looks bad and provides a negative talking point.

A simple solution is to delay production of the final progamme as much as possible. Before final printing get confirmation from each author that they can still attend and remove from the programme those who can not.

Please also refer to the PAKDD No Show policy on the PAKDD Web Site and direct authors to this policy so it is very clear what our expectations are and waht actions the conference organisers will take if the rules are breached.

Session Chairs

Session charis must be organised prior to the conference and identified in the conference program.

Avoid having as a session chair one of the authors of a paper in the session. It tends to make it awkward for the chair to also present a paper.

Guidance for Chairs of PAKDD Sessions

Prior to the beginning of your session:

1. Please check "Program" on the Web Page in advance. Your session may consist of long presentations (20min talk and 5min discussion) and short presentations (12min talk and 3min discussion).
2. Come to the room approximately 5 minutes before your session starts, and check that each speaker is in the room. In addition, confirm the pronunciation of the speaker's name and affiliation.
3. Ask all speakers to copy their slides into the conference provided computers.
4. If you find any problem with the environment of your session room, please contact our volunteer who is in the room. The volunteer is identified by their name badge and t-shirt.
   
   During and after your session:
   
   
5. At the beginning of your session, inform the speakers of the times allocated to their talks and discussions according to the conference program booklet.
6. Please keep the session on schedule. You are responsible to maintain the schedule accurately.
7. Please let all speakers use the microphone when it is provided. Please take care of the speakers not to hide the screen from the audience.
8. Remind every speaker their remaining time. The presentation of a long presentation-based paper includes 20min talk and 5min discussion, the presentation of a short presentation-based paper includes 12min talk and 3min discussion.
9. Please take note of "NO SHOW" presentations and inform the registration desk after your session.
10. In case that a presentation ends earlier than the scheduled time or is a "NO SHOW", you may use the extra time for discussions among the audience and yourself, in order to cater for the schedule for the next presentation.
11. Emergency: If there is any urgent business, please contact the volunteer at the conference room, or the registration desk.

    Conference Services

    Airport Transportation

    Transfers to and from the airport can often be organised by the conference and are a welcoming sign to the conference attendees! If other very convenient transfer arrangements are available (e.g., direct link into the local train or bus system and convenient location of a station or stop to the hotel) then that is often adequate and could be clearly noted on the conference web site.

    Other Items to be Clarified Here

    • Student support
    • Honorarium
    • Bank account

    Suggestive Timeline

    January : Previous Recipients : Decide on Distinguished Contributions Award
    
    
    
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