percom-submission

name	percom-submission
description	Use when auditing an IEEE PerCom research-track submission for HotCRP readiness, covering the mandatory paper-registration step, the IEEEtran 9+1 two-column page budget, double-blind anonymization, the open-data / human-subjects plan, IEEE Xplore publication, and desk-reject triage before the AoE cutoff.

PerCom Submission

Run this audit before uploading to the PerCom HotCRP site (percom2027.hotcrp.com for the current cycle). PerCom research papers publish in IEEE Xplore and are reviewed double-blind, so the submission must be both anonymous and complete on its own — the bounded rebuttal cannot add new experiments later. Every number below was read from the PerCom 2027 Call for Papers and Dates pages on 2026-07-09 via search renderings of the percom.org URLs (see resources/official-source-map.md); treat them as a one-cycle snapshot and reopen the live call first.

The two-step deadline

PerCom separates paper registration from paper submission, and both are AoE:

• Registration locks in title, abstract, authors, and topic areas about a week early (PerCom 2027: 4 September 2026). Miss it and the system will not accept the PDF later.
• Submission uploads the anonymized PDF (PerCom 2027: 11 September 2026, 23:59 AoE).

Register with the real title and abstract, not a placeholder — the abstract drives TPC bidding, and a registered abstract that diverges from the final paper quietly worsens your reviewer match.

Format and page budget

• IEEEtran, \documentclass[10pt, conference, compsocconf]{IEEEtran}, US-letter, two-column — the IEEE Computer Society conference format. This is the IEEE path, not ACM acmart.
• Page budget (verify per cycle): at most 9 pages of technical content — text, figures, tables, and appendices all count — plus up to 1 additional page for references only. There is no unlimited appendix inside the paper; anything reviewers must read to judge it lives in the 9.
• Margins, font, and column geometry are fixed by the template; editorial compression, not template tampering, is how you recover space. A shrunk font or narrowed margin is a named desk-reject ground at IEEE venues.

Double-blind sweep

PerCom runs double-blind review: authors anonymize in good faith and cite their own prior work in the third person (do not omit it — omission is itself a tell). Because ubicomp papers lean on datasets, testbeds, and deployments, the leak surface is wide:

# Mechanical pass on the submission PDF and any anonymized dataset/artifact archive
pdfinfo paper.pdf | grep -Ei 'author|creator|producer'
pdftotext paper.pdf - | grep -nEi 'github\.com/[a-z0-9-]+|ieee-dataport|zenodo\.org/record|acknowledg|IRB|university' | head
unzip -l artifact.zip | grep -Ei '\.git/|\.DS_Store|/home/|/Users/' | head
grep -rni 'our (lab|testbed|deployment)|@[a-z0-9.]*\.edu' artifact/ --include='*.md' | head

The ubicomp-specific leaks: a testbed or smart-home named after your lab, a photo of the sensor rig showing a building or a face, a dataset link pointing at a personal repository, an IRB protocol number tied to your institution, and a "we deployed in our department" phrasing. Re-host datasets behind an anonymizing link before upload.

Open data and human subjects at submission time

PerCom's community expects a credible data story and, for human-subjects sensing, an ethics story:

• State an open-data plan: what dataset exists, whether/where it will be released after acceptance, and — for anything you cannot share (privacy, IRB limits) — exactly why.
• Provide an anonymized dataset/code link or upload anonymized material for the reviewers.
• State IRB/ethics approval and consent for human-subjects data collection, and the de-identification done — a missing ethics note is a scored weakness, not a neutral omission.

Desk-risk triage

Finding at audit time	Severity	Real fix
Over 9 pages of technical content	Desk-reject-grade	Cut or move to the dataset/artifact; the reference page does not absorb body text
Template altered (10pt/compsocconf changed, margins, shrunk font)	Named desk-reject ground	Recompile clean, recover space editorially
Identity leak in PDF, dataset link, testbed name, or a photo	Anonymity violation	Re-anonymize and re-host; scrub PDF metadata
Own prior work omitted for "anonymity"	Double-blind done wrong	Restore the citation in the third person
Abstract/authors not registered by the earlier date	No submission slot exists	Nothing fixes this post-AoE — calendar it now
No open-data plan, no ethics note for human data	Scored against the paper	Add the plan + IRB/consent statement
Same study under review elsewhere	Dual-submission exposure	Withdraw one venue; verify the current concurrent-submission wording

Final-week order of operations

1. Freeze the body early; references can churn, the argument cannot.
2. Register title/abstract/authors/topics well before the registration cutoff.
3. Build the anonymized dataset/artifact link and place the open-data plan and ethics note in the paper.
4. Run the mechanical anonymity checks on the final PDF and the final archive, not drafts.
5. Fill every HotCRP field — topics that match your evidence, conflicts for every coauthor's institution and recent collaborators — a day early; late conflicts are the classic midnight failure.
6. Re-download the uploaded PDF and read it cold to confirm it is the file you meant.

Reverify each cycle

• The exact dates, the rebuttal window, and the early-rejection wording.
• The page budget and the required IEEEtran options (PerCom 2027 posts 9+1 with compsocconf).
• WiP/demo/industry/workshop deadlines (separate), dual-submission wording, whether a reproducibility track runs, and any AI-disclosure rule — all cycle-volatile.

Output format

[PerCom submission status] ready / blocked / needs work
[Registration] title/abstract/authors/topics locked by the earlier deadline? yes/no
[Format] pages used (body/refs), IEEEtran compsocconf compliance
[Anonymity] clean / leaks: <where>
[Open data + ethics] dataset link present? open-data plan? IRB/consent stated?
[Fix queue] <ordered, with owners and dates before the AoE cutoff>