Leaders Corner

by Vladik Kreinovich

From Conference discussing new results with colleagues,

especially major conferences where
audiences are large. When results are
Papers to Journal not presented at conferences, they have
less of an impact on the research and

Papers: Challenges practitioner communities.

There is also another related nega-

and New Ideas tive effect: the decrease in confer-

ence submissions hurts the financial
well-being of IEEE Societies, since
the conferences are our main source
of income. Societies, in general, lose
money on journal papers.
So how can we deal with this chal-
lenge? At the recent April 2016 IEEE

I
n our profession, there are two brought a challenge since it disrupted Panel of Editors meeting in San Diego,
main ways of ­p ublishing new the usual conference-to-journal pub- California, a special panel was devot-
results: as a paper in conference lication sequence. ed to this problem, where representa-
proceedings and as a journal paper. A At present, for an extended version tives of different IEEE Societies
few decades ago, the arrangement of a conference paper to be accepted in described their ideas and their experi-
was very clear: conference proceed- the journal, a minor extension is not ence. One of the possible approaches
ings were difficult to find and, there- enough—because that would amount is currently being implemented by the
fore, not considered to be archival. to publishing the IEEE Power & Energy
As a result, authors of good confer- same paper twice. Society (PES). PES
ence papers were encouraged to To be accepted, the encourages authors
extend their conference papers into extended version In our whose papers have
journal versions. In many cases, the must contain a large been accepted for
profession,
resulting extended versions appeared amount of new mate- publ icat ion i n a
in easier-to-access form as journal rial. Because of this there are two major Society’s jour-
papers. The amount of extension dif- requirement, most main ways nals to present at
fered from paper to paper, often authors who submit major conferences
extensions were reasonably minor— papers to conferenc- of publishing as well. The authors
but this was an accepted practice es are unable to come new results: of accepted papers
because it made results more accessi- up with follow-up who agree to present
ble to others. journal publications.
as a paper in then submit their
In the last decades, however, the Since, in many re­­ conference accepted jour na l
situation has changed drastically, search areas, journal papers to the corre-
proceedings
especially with conferences orga- publications are more sponding conference
nized or sponsored by IEEE. Now the prestigious than con- and as a under a special ar­­
same conference papers also appear ference papers, many journal paper. rangement. Under
in IEEE Xplore as journal papers; au­­thors do not sub- this arrangement,
they are as archival and as easy to mit their results to these submissions
access as journal papers. Easy conferences and sub- a re not refereed
access to conference papers is clearly mit directly to journals instead. again since they have already gone
beneficial to the research communi- Why is this a problem? Well, the through an even more rigorous refer-
ty, but this same easy access has main purpose of conferences is not eeing process. The corresponding
necessarily to publish proceedings; papers do not appear in the confer-
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSMC.2016.2557467
conferences are provably good venues ence proceedings section of IEEE
Date of publication: 23 August 2016 for disseminating information and for Xplore, but a link appears at the

54 IEEE Systems, Man, & Cybernetics Magazine Apr il 2 0 1 6

c­ onference site pointing to the corre-
sponding  journal paper.
Many authors of accepted journal
papers have agreed to this arrange-
ment since this gives them an addition-
al opportunity to promote their ideas.
(As of now, authors of such papers pay
full registration fees—although the
Society is considering the possibility of
special discounted fees since, for these
papers, we do not need to referee, so
expenses are slightly less.)
These papers are often the best
at the conferences since they have
undergone more rigorous vetting
than the usual conference papers.
Interestingly, since PES has adopted
this policy, conference attendance
has significantly increased, not only
by adding new presenters but also
by adding new nonpresenting partic-
ipants who are interested in hearing
these results.
The above idea takes care of
papers that have a lready been
accepted by a journal, but what
about other papers, especially papers
presenting very recent new ideas?
For such papers, PES uses another
model: conference participants who
Society News (continued from page 52)
In addition, we allowed the audience
to interact with hands-on demonstra-
tions, thus enabling them to experi-
ence the previously ex­­plained shared
control concepts. In this way, we
hoped to stimulate young researchers
new to the field while also inspiring
discussions with other relevant
research groups.
Our technical committee has also
organized events with the hope of
reaching other researchers interested
in shared control outside of the SMC
community. A half-day tutorial,
“Human-Centered Design and Evalua-
tion of Haptic Shared Control,” was
organized at the 2015 IEEE World Hap-
tics Conference in Chicago, Illinois, a
are interested in the future journal
submission declare this intent from
the very beginning. The correspond-
ing submissions are then limited to
four pages, so there are usually plen-
ty of possibilities to seriously expand
to a usual 8–12-page transactions
size; of course, ­journal reviewers
check the significance of the addi-
tions created by the authors.
The IEEE Robotics and Automa-
tion Society (RAS) has a different
model. Since 1 January 2016, RAS
has launched a new publication,
IEEE Robotics and Automation Let-
ters, whose main objective is the
speedy publication of short papers.
After the first review, the editor may
recommend a paper to the program
committee of the relevant confer-
ence, after which the revised paper is
sent both to the journal editors and
to the conference program commit-
tee. If the paper is accepted by the
journal, it is published in the journal
(but not in the conference proceed-
ings). If the paper is accepted by the
conference and by the journal, then it
is presented at the conference and
published in the journal. If the paper
highly interdisciplinary conference
that brings together psychophysicists,
engineers, and designers. This tutorial
focused on shared control through
physical interaction, or haptic-shared
control. The program consisted of pre-
sentations, hands-on demonstrations
with robotic devices, and a stimulating
panel discussion with invited experts
from both the neuroscience and engi-
neering communities.
The year 2015 also saw the publi-
cation of a special issue on shared
control in the Journal of Human-
Robot Interaction. This special
issue was made possible through
the visibility of our activities at the
IEEE SMC conferences a nd the
Ap ri l 2016
is rejected by the journal but accept-
ed by the conference, it is published
in the conference proceedings and
­p resented at the conference. The
paper is not published if it is rejected
by both.
The IEEE Signal Processing Soci-
ety (SPS) has a similar model with
IEEE Signal Processing Letters. The
difference is that at SPS, not only
IEEE Signal Processing Letters edi-
tors can recommend papers to con-
ference program committees but also
vice versa; a conference program
committee can recommend the paper
to the IEEE Signal Processing Let-
ters editors.
How efficient are these approach-
es? In all three Societies, approximate-
ly 10–20% of conference pre­­sentations
were by journal papers, and con­
ference attendance has increased by
more than that.
All these approaches lead to a
win-win situation: more quality pa­­
pers appear in journals, more good
papers are presented at conferences,
and conference attendance increases.
Let us try something like this in our
Society as well!
network of enthusiastic researchers
that the committee has built since
its conception.
In the years to come, we plan to
continue organizing special sessions,
workshops, tutorials, joint journal
publications, special issues, and
social events for the SMC and other
relevant communities, while actively
recruiting more members to our
Technical Committee on Shared Con-
trol. We look forward to meeting and
collaborating with others who share
our goal of advancing research on
sh a red cont rol a nd i mprov i ng
human–machine interaction!
—Tricia Gibo

IEEE Systems, Man, & Cybernetics Magazine 55