Mentor-Mentee Networking (MMN)

The aim of this event is to put students/young researchers in contact with senior academics. The program matches eligible presenters (mentees) with senior academics (mentors) from the field in order to provide mentees both with constructive feedback on their IEEE IJCNN 2023 publication and paper presentation, as well as a community point of contact during the conference. During the conference:

•the mentor is encouraged to attend the presentation of the paper (where possible) and to engage with the presenter for example through contributing constructive questions in the Q&A part.
•following the paper’s presentation, mentor and mentee are encouraged to meet up (e.g., in a coffee break) for feedback and potential follow-on discussion (where desired).

All mentoring program participants will be invited to an exclusive networking event to support interaction and networking across the mentee and mentor cohorts. The date for this event will be announced shortly.

To apply to the PDW, please register by 18 May 2023 by completing the webform and instructions here.

You can register for the conference here. (Registration is required to participate)

Paper Development Workshop(PDW)

The purpose of the PDW is to provide the mentoring program’s participants the opportunity to hear from and engage with the editorial team(s) from the IEEE CIS flagship journals. The focus of the PDW is for potential authors to learn about paper development for publication in top journals and get hands-on feedback on their own papers. The PDW will be run by members (Editors-in-Chief and Associate Editors) IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS) for IEEE IJCNN. The editorial team will offer both an overview of the journal and its priorities, as well as small-group, hands-on sessions for participants. The PDW will last for three hours.

Application to attend the PDW is REQUIRED, i.e. mentees are NOT automatically invited to the PDW. In order to apply, mentoring program participants are required to submit a draft journal paper (which may be based on their accepted conference paper), following these guidelines:
• All draft papers should follow the IEEE journal paper submission guidelines in format and size. Specifically, drafts may of course be shorter and be partially incomplete, but they should not exceed the maximum number of pages.

• As a minimum, all papers should include an abstract as well as draft versions of key sections, in particular highlighting contributions, methodology, experiments, results and conclusions. It is acceptable for some sections to be only minimally developed, e.g. as bullet points.
• Participants are encouraged to include clearly highlighted questions and areas for discussion in their draft papers.
To apply to the PDW, please register by 18 May 2023 by completing the webform and instructions here.
Note that successful applicants will be notified by 2 June 2023.
Note that IEEE CIS members will be given priority access to the PDW, and in the event of over-subscription, reviewer scores of the applicants’ accepted conference papers will be considered.

Who is it for?

The program is provisionally open to all students and early career researchers who are presenting a paper at IEEE IJCNN 2023, with priority given to IEEE CIS student members. Students and early career researchers who are first authors of an accepted paper which they will present, will automatically be assigned a mentor.

Note:
•there is no formal restriction on who qualifies as an ‘early career researcher’;
•participation in the program is free of charge to registered presenters;
•depending on demand, the number of mentees accepted to the program will have to be limited. In this situation, IEEE CIS student members will be given priority and successful applicants to the program will be selected based on their paper review scores.

All presenters accepted to the mentoring program will be explicitly notified via email. Applications to participate in the program submitted after the Early Registration Deadline may not be considered.

How does it work?

Successfully mentees will be contacted via email prior to the conference. Before the conference, mentor and mentee contact details will be shared between them. Mentees are expected to drive engagement with their mentors, e.g. sending their accepted conference paper to the mentor in advance of their presentation so as to allow the mentors to read the paper and provide some feedback.

Mentee participants who would like to attend the PDW must submit their draft papers following the guidelines and respecting the deadline above.  Again to clarify: the PDW is open for application to mentees, but in order to participate, you must apply as outlined above and be selected

If you have any queries regarding either the MMN or the PDW please feel free to contact the Mentoring Program team:

To apply to the PDW, please register by 18 May 2023 by completing the webform and instructions here.

Benjamin Paassen (DFKI, Germany): [email protected]
Nelishia Pillay (University of Pretoria, South Africa: [email protected]