CNS*2002: Call for papers

[Erik De Schutter]

CALL FOR PAPERS:
APPLICATION DEADLINE: February 8, 2002 midnight GMT

Eleventh Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting CNS*2002
July 21 - July 25, 2002
Chicago, Illinois USA
http://www.neuroinf.org/CNS.shtml
Info at cp at bbf.uia.ac.be

CNS*2002 will be held in Chicago from Sunday, July 21, 2002 to 
Thursday, July 25 in the Congress Plaza Hotel & Convention Center. 
This is a historic hotel located on Lake Michigan in downtown 
Chicago.  General sessions will be Sunday-Wednesday, Thursday will be 
a full day of workshops.  The conference dinner will be Wednesday 
night, followed by the rock-n-roll jam session.

Papers can include experimental, model-based, as well as more 
abstract theoretical approaches to understanding neurobiological 
computation.  We especially encourage papers that mix experimental 
and theoretical studies.  We also accept papers that describe new 
technical approaches to theoretical and experimental issues in 
computational neuroscience or relevant software packages.

The paper submission procedure is new this year: it is at a different 
web site and makes use of a preprint server.  This allows everybody 
to view papers before the actual meeting and to engage in discussions 
about submitted papers.

PAPER SUBMISSION
Papers for the meeting can be submitted ONLY through the web site at 
http://www.neuroinf.org/CNS.shtml.  Papers can be submitted either 
old style (a 100 word abstract followed by a 1000 word summary) or as 
a full paper (max 6 typeset pages).  In both cases the abstract (100 
words max) will be published in the conference program.  Submission 
will occur through a preprint server run by Elsevier, more 
information can be found on the submission web site.  Authors have 
the option of declaring their submission restricted access, not 
making it publicly visible.

All submissions will be acknowledged by email.  It is important to 
note that this notice, as well as all other communication related to 
the paper will be sent to the designated correspondence author only.

THE REVIEW PROCESS
All submitted papers will be first reviewed by the program committee. 
Papers will be judged and accepted for the meeting based on the 
clarity with which the work is described and the biological relevance 
of the research.  For this reason authors should be careful to make 
the connection to biology clear.  We reject only a small fraction of 
the papers (~ 5%) and this usually based on absence of biological 
relevance (e.g. pure artificial neural networks). We expect to notify 
authors of meeting acceptance before end of March.

The second stage of review involves evaluation of each submission by two
independent referees.  The primary objective of this round of review
will be to select papers for oral and featured oral presentation.  In
addition to perceived quality as an oral presentation, the novelty of
the research and the diversity and coherence of the overall program will
be considered.  To ensure diversity, those who have given talks in the
recent past will not be selected and multiple oral presentations from
the same lab will be discouraged. A second objective of the review is to
rank papers for inclusion in the conference proceedings.  All accepted
papers not selected for oral talks as well as papers explicitly
submitted as poster presentations will be included in one of three
evening poster sessions.  Authors will be notified of the presentation
format of their papers by end of April.

CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS
The proceedings volume is published each year as a special supplement 
to the journal Neurocomputing.  In addition the proceedings are 
published in a hardbound edition by Elsevier Press.

Only papers which are made publicly available on the preprint server, 
which are presented at the CNS meeting and which are not longer than 
6 typeset pages will be eligible for inclusion in the proceedings. 
Authors who only submitted a 1000 word symmary will be required to 
submit a full paper to the preprint server.  The proceedings size is 
limited to 1200 pages (about 200 papers).  In case more papers are 
eligible the lowest ranked papers will not be included in the 
proceedings but will remain available on the preprint server. Authors 
will be advised of the status of their papers immediately after the 
CNS meeting.  Submission of final papers will be through the preprint 
server with a deadline early October.

For reference, papers presented at CNS*99 can be found in volumes 
32-33 of Neurocomputing (2000) and those of CNS*00 in volumes 38-40 
(2001).

INVITED SPEAKERS:
Ad Aertsen  (Albert-Ludwigs-University, Germany)
Leah Keshet (University British Columbia, Canada)
Alex Thomson (University College London, UK)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
Program chair: Erik De Schutter (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
Local organizer: Philip Ulinski  (University of Chicago, USA)
Workshop organizer:  Maneesh Sahani (Gatsby Computational 
Neuroscience Unit, UK)
Government Liaison: Dennis Glanzman  (NIMH/NIH, USA)
Program Committee:
    Upinder Bhalla    (National Centre for Biological Sciences, India)
    Avrama Blackwell  (George Mason University, USA)
    Victoria Booth    (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA)
    Alain Destexhe    (CNRS Gif-sur-Yvette, France)
    John Hertz       (Nordita, Denmark)
    David Horn        (University of Tel Aviv, Israel)
    Barry Richmond    (NIMH, USA)
    Steven Schiff     (George Mason University, USA)
    Todd Troyer       (University of Maryland, USA)