Publicity Guide page	Responsibilities page	Publicity channels page	Planning page	Website tie-ins & tracking page
Mass emails : page	IEEE-CIS ListServers page	SENDER Instructions page	EDITOR Instructions page	OWNER Instructions page

Conference Guides for [IEEE-CIS, INNS] conferences : Although this guide was initially set up for IJCNN2019, and was used for IEEE WCCI 2020, hopefully some of the basic information may still help [organising committee members, authors] up to 2023-2025 (assuming a half-life of links and process information of 3-5 years?). The Authors' and Publications menus have been combined, allowing authors to see the Publications Chair perspective as well. I am no longer keeping this up to date. Bill Howell, 11Dec2020

Publicity Planning

Introduction :

This web-page is very incomplete, with no plans to get back to it any time soon. With the INNS-IJCNNs (odd years), there has been very much more teamwork than for the last couple of WCCI conferences. To coordinate the INNS-IJCNN Publicity efforts, and because of the demands by the General Co-Chairs, updates and reporting was eveery 2-3 months, if I remember correctly. Publicity is not an exciting topic, so there usually isn't usually much feedback from out side of the Publicity Committee.

Here is an example of a INNS-IJCNN [planning, tracking] spreadsheet.
There may also still be "leftover scraps of information" in the source document.
Below are comments by Simone Scardapane summarizing Publicity efforts for the INNS BigData conference of 2015.

Simone Scardapane's Publicity Report

INNS Big Data Conference 2015

This report provides some insights on activities done by the publicity committee for the conference. When possible, we give some advices for future years.

Journal advertisements Task: publish the call for papers (CfP) in as many targeted journals as possible.

Before starting, we had agreement from Neural Networks (thanks to Prof. De Shuang Huang) and Evolving Systems (thanks to Prof. Plamen Angelov).
We contacted multiple editors from the major journals (see attachment 'Journal Advertisement' for more information).
Unexpectedly, we got free publication from two journals: Neural Computing & Applications and Machine Learning.

Advices:

Increase number of journals targeted - check lists from IEEE, ACM and other.
Organize booths at major conference (e.g. NIPS?).
Start as soon as the CfP is ready (takes several months for publication).
[IMPORTANT] Have ready two high-quality versions of the CfP, in color and black and white. We lost a lot of time preparing the B&W when the journal was already ready.

Interviews Task: interview plenary speakers.

Interviews (particularly on hot topics such as deep learning) seem to be able to generate an incredible amount of traffic: for example, the interview to Prof. Schmidhuber got several thousand of visits in a short amount of time.

Advices:

[IMPORTANT] Merge website and blog were the interviews are published. In this way, each visit to the interview is a visit to the conference.
Try to increase the amount of "original" material published (e.g. video interviews, tutorials etc.).

Social Media Task: advertise the conference on the social media.

We opened pages on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. We used Hootsuite to manage the three channels simultaneously.
It is hard to estimate the impact of this operation without a thorough analysis of the traffic website.
In addition, it is very hard to obtain a good number of followers (starting from 0) without paid advertisements.
Channels seem to have different audience: the Google+ page was extremely effective in sharing the interviews, while the Facebook page is good for people that want to ask questions.

Advices:

[IMPORTANT] Reuse the current channels for next editions. In this way, it is possible to use the followers obtained up to now.
Experiment with paid advertisement?
Run a pool between the participants to understand the effectiveness of the social media advertisement.

Emails Task: gather new emails for spreading the CfP.

We started by gathering emails by manually scanning the papers from the last ACM SIGKDD and IEEE Big Data. This is extremely time consuming and slow.
NIPS provides some conference programs (in pdf) with all the emails. We extracted emails by converting pdf to text and running a regular expression on the resulting string.
JMLR provides its full database in open access, and extracting the list of pdf is very easy from their website. We used a script to download the papers, convert them to pdf, and run the same regular expression as the last point.

Advices:

Again, it is difficult to understand the effectiveness without asking the participants. For example, we expect JMLR and NIPS to share a good amount of audience between them.
Start as soon as possible to manually search for other journal/conferences.
Try to find other open access journals to use the scripts.

Student travel grants

We obtained a small grant from the AIJ:
http://aij.ijcai.org/funding-opportunities-for-promoting-ai-research
See the attachment 'AIJ Funding Proposal' for the proposal.

Advice:

Ask for additional ways of getting grants?

Other
Investigate as soon as possible the use of Meetups (http://www.meetup.com/).

Directory of available files for this webpage

Many thanks to our Sponsors & Exhibitors

Ongoing support : [IEEE, IEEE-CIS] for [CEC, FUZZ, IJCNN]; INNS for IJCNN; [IET, EPS] for CEC

2020 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, Glasgow, Scotland.....19-24 July 2020

2019 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, Budapest, HUNGARY.....14-19 July 2019

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Publicity Planning

Table of Contents :

Introduction :

Simone Scardapane's Publicity Report

Many thanks to our Sponsors & Exhibitors