The European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery will take place in Riva del Garda, Italy, during September 19–23, 2016.
This event is the premier European machine learning and data mining conference and builds upon a very successful series of 26 ECML and 19 PKDD conferences, which have been jointly organized for the past 15 years.


Conference Track
Submissions are solicited for the 2016 edition of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECMLPKDD). The conference provides an international forum for the discussion of the latest high-quality research results in all areas related to machine learning and knowledge discovery in databases and other innovative application domains. The 2016 conference will take place in Riva Del Garda, Italy, September 19-23. This edition will feature a full day of plenary presentations, for papers of general interest to the whole community, and two days of parallel sessions. All papers will be presented both orally and as posters. Papers on all topics related to machine learning, knowledge discovery, and data mining are invited.

Submission process

Electronic submissions will be handled via CMT at the following address: https://cmt2.research.microsoft.com/ECMLPKDD2016/. Please note that user accounts in each CMT conference is independent of other conferences so you will need to create a new account.

Abstracts need to be registered by Friday April 1, 2016, 23:59 Central European Time, and full submissions will be accepted until Monday April 4, 2016, 23:59 Central European Time.

Papers must be written in English and formatted according to the Springer LNAI guidelines. Author instructions, style files and copyright form can be downloaded at: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.

The maximum length of papers is 16 pages in this format. Overlength papers will be rejected without review (papers with smaller page margins and font sizes than specified in the author instructions and set in the style files will also be treated as overlength).

Up to 10 MB of additional materials (e.g. proofs, audio, images, video, data or source code) can be attached to the submission. Note that the reviewers and the program committee reserve the right to judge the paper solely on the basis of the 16 pages of the paper; looking at any additional material is up to the discretion of the reviewers and is not required.

Reviewing process

The review process is single-blind (authors identities known to reviewers). Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of technical quality, novelty, potential impact, and clarity. Authors will have the opportunity to point out factual errors, obvious mistakes, or misconceptions by reviewers during a rebuttal phase following the release of initial reviews.

Dual submissions policy

Papers submitted should report original work. ECML PKDD 2016 will not accept any paper that, at the time of submission, is under review or has already been accepted for publication in a journal or another conference. Authors are also expected not to submit their papers elsewhere during the review period. The dual submissions policy applies during the whole ECMLPKDD 2016 reviewing period from April 1 to June 20, 2016.

Reproducible research papers

Authors are encouraged to adhere to the best practices of Reproducible Research (RR), by making available data and software tools for reproducing the results reported in their papers. Authors of accepted papers may flag their submissions as RR and make software and data accessible to reviewers and to the program committee who will verify the accessibility of software and data. Links to data and code will be then inserted in the final version of RR papers. For the sake of persistence and proper authorship attribution, we require the use of standard repository hosting services such as Dataverse, mldata.org, OpenML, etc. for data sets, and mloss.org, Bitbucket, GitHub, etc. for source code. If data or code gets updated after the paper is published, it is important to enable researchers to access the versions that were used to produce the results reported in the paper.

Proceedings

The conference proceedings will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series (LNAI). There will be no difference in the proceedings between papers presented in parallel sessions and papers presented during the plenary day.

In addition to normal conference submissions, papers can be submitted to the ECMLPKDD 2016 journal track. Accepted papers will be presented at the conference and published either in Machine Learning or in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. For information about the journal track, please see the separate Journal Track call for papers.

Important dates

Abstract submission deadline: Friday, April 1, 2016
Paper submission deadline: Monday, April 4, 2016
Author notification: Monday, June 20, 2016
Camera ready submission: Friday, July 1, 2016
Contact

For any additional questions you can contact the Program Chairs (Paolo Frasconi, Niels Landwehr, Giuseppe Manco, Jilles Vreeken) at program_chairs@ecmlpkdd2016.org.

Journal Track
We invite submissions for the journal track of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECMLPKDD) 2016. The conference provides an international forum for the discussion of the latest high-quality research results in all areas related to machine learning, data mining, and knowledge discovery. The conference will take place in Riva Del Garda, Italy, September 19-23, 2016. This edition will feature a full day of plenary presentations — for papers of general interest to the whole community — and two days of parallel sessions. All accepted papers will be presented both orally and as posters.

What papers are eligible for the journal track?

Papers on all topics related to machine learning, knowledge discovery, and data mining are invited. However, given the special nature of the journal track, only papers that satisfy the quality criteria of journal papers and at the same time lend themselves to conference talks will be considered. This implies that journal versions of previously published conference papers, or survey papers will not be considered for the special issue. Papers that do not fall into the eligible category may be rejected without formal reviews but can of course be resubmitted as regular papers. Authors are encouraged to adhere to the best practices of Reproducible Research (RR), by making available data and software tools for reproducing the results reported in their papers. For the sake of persistence and proper authorship attribution, we require the use of standard repository hosting services such as Dataverse, mldata.org, OpenML, etc. for data sets, and mloss.org, Bitbucket, GitHub, etc. for source code. Authors who submit their work to the special ECMLPKDD issues of the journals commit themselves to present their results at the ECMLPKDD 2016 conference in case of acceptance.

How to submit?

To submit to this track, authors have to make a journal submission to either the Springer Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal or the Springer Machine Learning journal, and indicate that the submission is for the "ECMLPKDD 2016" special issue. It is recommended that submitted papers do not exceed 20 pages including references and appendices, formatted in the Springer journal slyle (svjour3,smallcondensed). This is a soft limit, but if a submission exceeds the limit, please provide a brief justification regarding the length in the cover letter.

Authors are required to include a cover letter containing a short summary of their contribution (2 pages max), where they address the following questions:

What is the main claim of the paper? Why is this an important contribution to the machine learning/data mining literature?
What is the evidence provided to support claims? Be precise.
What papers by other authors make the most closely related contributions, and how is the paper related to them?
Who are the most appropriate reviewers for the paper? Authors are encouraged to suggest up to four candidate reviewers (especially if external to the Guest Editorial Board), including a brief motivation for each suggestion.
What is the reviewing process?

The journal track allows continuous submissions from the end of September 2015 to March 2016. We expect two cutoffs per month on which we distribute papers to reviewers with the first one being the 27th of September 2015 and the last one being the 30th of March 2016. For papers accepted without revisions we strive for a turn around time of two months. This means that we should be able to include all of those submissions in the special issue. However, in the last years there has often been the need for revisions and we therefore recommend to submit papers as early as possible.

What are the next cut-off dates?

The 2016 cut-off dates for the bi-weekly batches are: Jan 3, Jan 17, Jan 31, Feb 14, Feb 28, Mar 13, Mar 27.

Contact

You can contact the Journal Track Chairs (Thomas Gaertner, Mirco Nanni, Andrea Passerini, Celine Robardet) at jt_chairs@ecmlpkdd2016.org.