Submitted papers must describe original work not previously published or concurrently submitted elsewhere. Papers must be submitted by the submission deadline (October 17, 2018, 23:59 UTC-12) using the RTAS 2019 submission site. The submission deadline is firm: late submissions will not be accepted under any circumstances, and the deadline will not be extended.

NEW in 2019: All submitted papers must comply with the double-blind submission requirements.

Page Limits

The main body of each submitted paper is limited to 10 pages of technical content with additional pages permitted for the bibliography and acknowledgments only (i.e., references and acknowledgements do not count against the page limit).

Additionally, each submission may include an optional appendix with supplemental material that will be read at the discretion of the program committee; this appendix is limited to two pages (for up to 12 pages total of technical content, i.e., content not including the bibliography and acknowledgements). Authors of accepted papers that exceed 10 pages of technical content (due to the inclusion of an optional appendix) will be required to pay a fee of $100 for each page of technical content beyond the tenth.

Authors are advised to format their papers so that the case for acceptance is made clear in the main body of the paper (i.e., within the first 10 pages). The optional appendix can be used (for example) to provide additional performance graphs or to provide more detailed versions of proofs that are sketched in the main body of the paper.

Paper Format

Submissions (including the optional appendix) must be formatted according to IEEE conference paper guidelines (10pt font, default margins, default linespacing). Please use one of the available IEEE templates. When using the LaTeX template, which is recommended, use the following document class declaration:

\documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran}

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 a conflict indefinitely.

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 five 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 add 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 December 3rd to December 7th, 2017.

Submission System

RTAS 2019 uses the HotCRP conference management system. Submissions can be made here: https://rtas19.mpi-sws.org/.