CNS*03: FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS (changed deadline)

[Erik De Schutter]

FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS:
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: February 23, 2003 midnight

DEADLINE HAS BEEN EXTENDED BY ONE WEEK:
We can now announce substantial travel grants for students traveling
to the meeting plus reduced registration fees compared to last year.
More info when the registration openslater this year.

Twelfth Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting CNS*2003
July 5 - July 9, 2003
Alicante, Spain
http://www.neuroinf.org/CNS.shtml
Info at cp at bbf.uia.ac.be

CNS*2003 will be held in Alicante from Saturday, July 5, 2003 to
Wednesday, July 9. The main meeting will be July 5 - 7 at the Hotel
Meli=E1 (poster sessions) and at the CAM Cultural Center (oral
presentations).  The main meeting consists of 6 oral sessions (one
each morning and afternoon) and 3 early evening poster
sessions. Workshops will be held at the University Miguel Hern=E1ndez
(Medical School Campus) July 8 - 9. New is that some workshops will be
mini-symposia or tutorials, a list of currently planned workshops can
be found at the website. The conference dinner will take place in the
Santa B=E1rbara castle overlooking the city and the sea on Sunday,
July 6.  For tourist information see http://www.alicanteturismo.com,
more specific practical information will be made available through the
conference website.

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 again completely electronic this
year.  There will not be any meeting announcement through surface
mail, instead you find the meeting poster attached.

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 as a
1000 word summary or as a full paper (max 6 typeset pages).  Full papers
stand a better chance of being accepted for oral presentation.  You
will need to submit the paper in pdf format (if necessary Elsevier can
help in converting your paper to pdf) and the 100 word abstract as
text.  You will also need to select two categories which describe
your paper and which will guide the selection of reviewers. In
addition we encourage you to also submit your paper to the Elsevier
preprint server (http://www.computersciencepreprints.com).
All submissions will be acknowledged by email.

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 machine learning). We will notify authors of
meeting acceptance before end of March.

The second stage of review involves evaluation of submissions which
requested an oral presentation by two independent referees. 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. 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 begin of May.

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 200 papers will be published in the proceedings volume. If more
than 200 papers are submitted (which is likely) the following rules
will apply: each presenting author (who has to register for the
meeting) can publish at most one paper in the proceedings book.  In
case of multi-author papers the same rule applies: one of the authors
is considered presenting author and this person has to register at
the meeting and cannot publish another paper.  If more than 200
presenting authors wish to publish their papers in the proceedings
volume the ranking based on the review process will be used to select
the top 200 papers.  Paper submissions to the conference proceedings
are a process separate from the current call for papers: a new
submission will need to be done in the early fall of 2003 for which
authors will receive detailed instructions.

For reference, papers presented at CNS*99 can be found in volumes
32-33 of Neurocomputing (2000), those of CNS*00 in volumes 38-40
(2001) and those of CNS*01 in volumes 44-46 (2002).

INVITED SPEAKERS:
Yang Dan (University of California Berkeley, USA)
Peter Dayan (Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, London, UK)
Henry Markram  (Brain Mind Institute Lausanne, Switzerland)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
The CNS meeting is organized by the Computational Meeting Organization
Program chair: Erik De Schutter (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
Local organizer: Albert Compte  (University Miguel Hern=E1ndez, Spain)
Workshop organizer:  Maneesh Sahani (University of California, San Francisco, USA)
Government Liaison: Dennis Glanzman  (NIMH/NIH, USA) and Yuan Liu (NINDS/NIH, USA)

Program Committee:
      Upinder Bhalla    (National Centre for Biological Sciences, India)
      Victoria Booth    (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA)
      Alain Destexhe    (CNRS Gif-sur-Yvette, France)
      John Hertz        (Nordita, Denmark)
      Bill Holmes  (Ohio University, USA)
      Hidetoshi Ikeno   (Himeji Institute of Technology, Japan)
      Barry Richmond    (NIMH, USA)
      Eytan Ruppin      (Tel Aviv University)
      Frances Skinner   (University Toronto, Canada)