CNS*04 CALL FOR PAPERS

[Erik De Schutter]

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS:
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: January 19, 2004 midnight; submission open 
December 1, 2003.

Thirteenth Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting CNS*2004
July 18 - July 20, 2004 (workshops: July 21-22, 2004)
Baltimore, USA
http://www.neuroinf.org/CNS.shtml
Info at cp at bbf.uia.ac.be

The annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting will be held at the 
historic Radisson Plaza Lord hotel in Baltimore, MD from July 18th – 
20th, 2004. The main meeting will be followed by two days of workshops 
on July 21st and 22nd. In conjunction, the “2004 Annual Symposium, 
University of Maryland Program in Neuroscience: Computation in the 
Olfactory System” will be held as a satellite symposium to CNS*04 on 
Saturday, July 17th.

NOTICE: NEW PAPER SUBMISSION PROCEDURE!
As in the years before papers presented at the CNS*04 meeting can be 
published as a paper in a special issue of the journal Neurocomputing 
and in a proceedings book.  Authors who would like to see their CNS*04 
presentation published will have to submit a COMPLETE manuscript for 
review during this call (deadline January 19, 2004).  You will also 
have the option to submit instead an extended summary but this cannot 
be included in the journal.  Both types of submissions will be reviewed 
but full manuscripts will get back reviewers' comments and will have to 
be revised with final submission shortly after the meeting. The 
decision of who gets to speak at the conference is independent of the 
type of submission, both full manuscripts and extended summaries 
qualify. More details on the review process can be found below.

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.

PAPER SUBMISSION
The paper submission procedure is again completely electronic this 
year.  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 full manuscript to be published in the journal 
Neurocomputing (max 6 typeset pages) or as an extended summary (1 to 6 
pages).  You will need to submit both types of papers in pdf format  
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.

I All submissions will be acknowledged by email generated by the 
neuroinf.org web robot (may be considered junk mail by a spam filter)

THE REVIEW PROCESS
All submitted papers will be first reviewed by the program committee.  
Submissions 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 
submissions (~ 5%) and this usually based on absence of biological 
relevance (e.g. pure machine learning). We will notify authors of 
meeting acceptance begin March.

The second stage of review involves evaluation by two independent 
reviewers of full manuscripts submitted to the journal Neurocomputing 
(all) and those extended summaries which requested an oral presentation.

Full manuscripts will be reviewed as real journal publications: each 
paper will have an action editor and two independent reviewers. The 
paper may be rejected for publication if it contains no novel content 
or is considered to contain grave errors.  We hope that this will apply 
to a small number of papers only, but we also need to respect a limit 
of maximum 200 published papers which may enforce more strict selection 
criteria.  Paper rejection at this stage does not exclude poster 
presentation at the meeting itself as we assume that these authors will 
benefit from the feedback they can receive at the meeting. Accepted 
papers will receive comments for improvements and corrections from the 
reviewers by e-mail.  Submissions of the revised papers will be due in 
August.

Criteria for selection as an oral presentation include perceived 
quality, the novelty of the research and the diversity and coherence of 
the overall program.  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. For reference, papers 
presented at CNS*02 can be found in volumes 52-54  of Neurocomputing 
(2003).

INVITED SPEAKERS:
Mary Kennedy (California Institute of Technology, USA)
Miguel Nicolelis (Duke University, USA)
TBA

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
The CNS meeting is organized by the Computational Meeting Organization 
(http://www.cnsorg.org) precided by Christiane Linster (Cornell 
University, USA)
Program chair: Erik De Schutter (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
Local organizer: Asaf Keller (University of Maryland School of 
Medicine, USA)
Workshop organizer:  Adrienne Fairhall (Princeton University, USA)
Government liaison: Dennis Glanzman  (NIMH/NIH, USA) and Yuan Liu 
(NINDS/NIH, USA)
Program committee:
   Nicolas Brunel (Universite Paris Rene Descartes, France)
   Alain Destexhe (CNRS Gif-sur-Yvette, France)
   Bill Holmes (Ohio University, USA)
   Hidetoshi Ikeno (Himeji Institute of Technology, Japan)
   Don H. Johnson (Rice University, USA)
   Leslie M. Kay (University of Chicago, USA)
   Barry Richmond (NIMH, USA)
   Eytan Ruppin (Tel Aviv University, Israel)
   Frances Skinner (Toronto Western Research Institute, Canada)