New-to-ISMIR Mentoring Program 2024

The New-to-ISMIR paper mentoring program is designed for members new to ISMIR  (early stage researchers in MIR or researchers from allied fields who wish to consider submitting their work to an ISMIR conference) to share their advanced-stage work-in-progress ISMIR paper drafts with senior members of the ISMIR community (mentors) to obtain focused reviews and constructive feedback. The program supplements the generic submission guidelines. After a successful 2022 and 2023 editions, the 2024 edition is being run closely aligned with the ISMIR 2024 paper submissions deadlines.  

• The mentorship program encourages early stage researchers or researchers from other allied fields who wish to submit their work to ISMIR conference to share their advanced stage work-in-progress ISMIR paper submissions with senior members of the ISMIR community to obtain focused reviews and constructive feedback. The topics of the paper are expected to be in alignment with the topics of ISMIR conferences.
• The mentees are expected to apply to the program with a tentative abstract and submit an advanced-stage draft of the paper by the published deadlines (see below Important Dates). 
• A mentor will be assigned to each mentee paper in the program and will provide a detailed review and constructive feedback to improve the work and the paper quality for suitability in an ISMIR conference. The mentor will maintain confidentiality of the discussions and the unpublished work as agreed with the mentees. The mentor will be available for up to two cycles of review/feedback on the mentee paper revisions, and up to one discussion meeting (up to an hour). 
• Mentee authors get one cycle of review (authors submit, mentors provide a review) but are optionally encouraged to participate in an additional cycle where the authors incorporate the suggestions and mentor reviews the revised paper. Mentees are expected to provide additional information on their work, if requested by the mentor to provide better feedback. 
  We strongly encourage the mentored papers to be revised based on the feedback and submitted to the upcoming ISMIR 2024 conference. All mentored papers, if submitted to ISMIR 2024, will go through the usual process of review without any exceptions. Both mentors and mentees agree to clearly declare conflict of interests when the mentored papers are submitted to the ISMIR conference to facilitate double-blind review process. 
• In this pilot program, we will be able to support a limited number of papers for mentorship due to capacity constraints. If we receive more requests than we can support, we will prioritize papers considering authors’ needs and/or topics that fall under the special call for papers. 

The proposed authors of the papers submitted to the mentoring program must satisfy all the following criteria: 

• The authors are planning for a submission to an ISMIR conference on a topic aligned with the ISMIR conference. 
• The proposed first author of the paper has no previously published papers in ISMIR conferences. 
• None of the proposed co-authors of the paper have ever been meta-reviewers for ISMIR conferences.

The topics of papers to be submitted to the program should be closely aligned with those of ISMIR 2024, including but not limited to the following topics:  

• MIR fundamentals and methodology: music signal processing; symbolic music processing; metadata, tags, linked data, and semantic web; lyrics and other textual data; web mining, and natural language processing; multimodality.
• Domain knowledge: representations of music; music acoustics; computational music theory and musicology; cognitive MIR; machine learning/artificial intelligence for music; computational ethnomusicology.
• Musical features and properties: melody and motives; harmony, chords and tonality; rhythm, beat, tempo; structure, segmentation, and form; representations of music; timbre, instrumentation, and singing voice; musical style and genre; musical affect, emotion and mood; expression and performative aspects of music.
• MIR tasks: sound source separation; music transcription and annotation; music generation; optical music recognition; alignment, synchronization, and score following; music summarization; music synthesis and transformation; fingerprinting; automatic classification; indexing and querying; pattern matching and detection; similarity metrics.
• Evaluation, datasets, and reproducibility: evaluation methodology; evaluation metrics; novel datasets and use cases; annotation protocols; reproducibility; MIR tasks.
• Philosophical and ethical discussions: philosophical and methodological foundations; legal and societal aspects of MIR; ethical issues related to designing and implementing MIR tools and technologies.
• Human-centered MIR: user behavior analysis and mining, user modeling; human-computer interaction; music interfaces and services; personalization; user-centered evaluation.
• Applications: digital libraries and archives; music retrieval systems; music recommendation and playlist generation; music and health, well-being and therapy; music training and education; music composition, performance, and production; music videos, multimodal music systems; gaming, augmented/virtual reality; music heritage and sustainability; business and marketing.

Applications to the program must include a tentative title, author list and an abstract (200 words). 

The papers submitted to the program should be an advanced-stage draft of the paper. To get maximum benefit out of the mentoring program, please ensure the work is as complete as possible and avoid incomplete submissions lacking sufficient detail. The papers should strictly follow ISMIR conference submission guidelines, outlined in the ISMIR 2024 Call for Papers: https://ismir2024.ismir.net/authors/call-for-papers

Only exception would be that the papers should NOT be anonymized during the mentoring process since the paper mentoring program is not anonymous. The papers are to be uploaded on a channel whose details will be provided closer to the deadline. The submitted papers will be shared with the mentor assigned to each paper. Submissions that deviate from the guidelines will not be accepted for mentorship. 

If you are interested and eligible, use the following link to below to submit an application for the mentoring program. 

Q. How many papers are supported in the program in 2024? Is there a chance that my application for mentorship might not be accommodated? 
A. The number of papers we support is limited by our current organisational capacity and availability of mentors. It may be possible that not all applications are accommodated if we receive a large number of requests. However, authors will know regarding acceptance of their applications before submitting papers to the program. 

Q. Who will be my mentor if I apply to the program? 
A. Invited senior members from the MIR community have been kind enough to volunteer for the program. The mentors and mentees will be matched based on the topic of papers as chosen during submission and introduced to each other. 

Q. If I incorporate all feedback from the mentor into my paper, will my paper be accepted for publication in the ISMIR conference? Is there a different review process for the mentored papers? 
A. All mentored papers will go through the same review process as all other papers submitted to an ISMIR conference. There is no assurance that a mentored paper will be accepted to the conference. 

For any further questions, please write to us at ismir2024-diversity@ismir.net