In 2005, the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Committee on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence circulated its first formal call for papers for the 2006 CVPR conference via an email list that had grown from a few hundred subscribers a decade earlier to over 8,000. That single email—a plain-text message with subject lines like “CALL FOR PAPERS: CVPR 2006”—set in motion a chain of decisions that shaped the entire research direction for the coming year. For a mid-2000s academic, parsing a call for papers was as essential as reading a dataset paper: it determined which experiments to run, which collaborations to pursue, and which conference to target.
What a Call for Papers Contained
A typical call for papers (CfP) for a major pattern recognition or speech conference in the mid-2000s followed a remarkably stable template. Organisers knew that researchers needed to evaluate quickly whether their work fit the venue, so the opening lines always listed the conference name, dates, location, and the specific technical areas covered. For example, the 2005 ICASSP call for papers explicitly named “Speech Processing,” “Audio and Electroacoustics,” “Signal Processing for Communications,” and “Multimedia Signal Processing” as its four main tracks, each with a dozen sub-topics. Below that came the hard deadlines: paper submission, notification of acceptance, camera-ready copy, and early registration. Missing any one of these dates meant a year-long wait for the next edition.
The body of a CfP then elaborated on the review process. Most conferences in the mid-2000s already used double-blind reviewing, and the call would specify how to anonymise submissions. Page limits were strict—typically eight pages for IEEE conferences, six for ISCA events—and formatting instructions referenced LaTeX style files downloadable from the conference website. A short section on “Special Sessions” or “Workshops” invited proposals for focused meetings on emerging topics such as low-resource language speech recognition or real-time object tracking.
The Role of Topic Lists
The most influential part of any CfP was the list of topics. Researchers scanned that list to decide whether their current project was “in scope.” For instance, the 2006 International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) call listed 15 tracks, including “Biometrics,” “Document Image Processing,” “Medical Image Analysis,” and “Stereo Reconstruction.” A group working on stereo algorithms would see that track and know that the program committee included experts who could evaluate their contribution. Conversely, a paper on language identification might be redirected to a speech conference. These topic lists also reflected the conference’s strategic priorities. When the 2007 Interspeech call added a dedicated line for “Spoken Language Identification and Language Recognition,” it signalled that the community was ready to accept more work on multilingual and low-resource systems.
- Conference metadata: name, location, dates, and technical sponsors (e.g., IEEE, ISCA, IAPR).
- Submission deadlines: abstract deadline, full paper deadline, notification date, camera-ready date.
- Review model: double-blind, single-blind, or open review (rare in mid-2000s).
- Paper length and formatting: page limits, LaTeX templates, required sections.
- Topic categories: a numbered or bulleted list of research areas.
- Special sessions / workshops: calls for proposals, often with separate deadlines.
- Best paper awards: sometimes announced to incentivise high-quality submissions.
- Contact information: program chair email, conference website URL.
How CfPs Circulated Before Social Media
In the mid-2000s, the primary distribution channel for calls for papers was email. Mailing lists like pam-list (Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence), speech-list (run by the ISCA), and cvnet (Computer Vision) carried dozens of CfPs each month. A researcher subscribing to three lists could receive fifty or more calls during the peak season—usually January–March for spring conferences and July–September for autumn events. The problem was not scarcity, but filtering. Many researchers began to rely on syndication feeds to aggregate CfPs from multiple sources into one inbox. As discussed in the blog’s post on how Atom XML became the academic syndication standard for pattern recognition research, the Atom format allowed conference organisers to publish a feed of upcoming CfPs that researchers could subscribe to with a newsreader. By 2006, the major IEEE conferences offered Atom feeds alongside RSS, and a small ecosystem of aggregator sites (such as WikiCFP, launched in 2005) emerged to collect calls from across computer science.
The Impact on Research Direction
A call for papers did more than announce a deadline—it shaped what researchers worked on. When a conference introduced a new track, it essentially created a temporary market for papers in that area. For example, the 2004 CVPR call added a workshop on “High-Speed Vision,” which encouraged groups to push frame rates beyond the standard 30 fps. A dedicated workshop call for papers on high-speed video object tracking emerged around 2005, whose findings later informed the high-speed object tracking methods described in an earlier blog entry on 120 frames per second: how high-speed video reshaped object tracking in the mid-2000s. Similarly, when the 2005 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) listed “Speech Synthesis for Under-Resourced Languages” as a special session topic, it triggered a wave of submissions on HMM-based synthesis for languages such as Swahili and Tibetan. The CfP itself became a signal of community priorities.
Deadlines and the Review Calendar
The rhythm of the academic year in pattern recognition and speech was dictated by CfP deadlines. A typical timeline looked like this:
| Event | Typical Date (for a June conference) |
|---|---|
| Call for papers issued | October–November (previous year) |
| Abstract registration deadline | January |
| Full paper submission deadline | January–February |
| Notification of acceptance | March–April |
| Camera-ready deadline | April–May |
| Conference dates | June |
Missing the abstract deadline often disqualified the paper entirely, even if the full paper was submitted later. This rigidity meant that researchers had to plan experiments six months in advance. For a PhD student working on stereo reconstruction, the decision to submit to CVPR or ECCV was effectively made in December, based on which call looked more aligned with their current results.
The Language of a Call for Papers
The wording of a CfP carried subtle cues. Phrases like “original contributions are solicited in (but not limited to) the following areas” indicated that the committee was open to borderline topics, while “papers describing novel theoretical advances are especially encouraged” signalled a preference for formal methods over incremental engineering. Some calls explicitly discouraged certain types of work. For instance, the 2006 International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) call stated that “papers focusing solely on OCR of a single font without comparative evaluation will not be considered.” Such language shaped the experimental methodology of submitters.
Another important detail was the “best paper award” announcement. A CfP that promised a US$1,000 prize and a certificate often attracted higher-quality submissions, but it also increased competition. The 2005 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) offered a best student paper award, which incentivised graduate students to polish their work before the deadline.
CfPs for Specialised Communities
Beyond the flagship conferences, niche workshops and symposia issued their own calls. For researchers working on language identification for low-resource languages, the 2006 Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT) call for papers was a rare opportunity to present results that might not fit a larger venue. The SLT 2006 CfP explicitly listed “language identification with limited training data” and “dialect recognition” as key topics. Similarly, the 2007 International Conference on Biometrics (ICB) call included a track on “multimodal biometric fusion,” which pushed teams to combine face, voice, and fingerprint data in a single system. These specialised CfPs often had shorter deadlines and smaller program committees, but they offered higher acceptance rates and more focused feedback.
A Concrete Actionable Step for the Mid-2000s Researcher
For a researcher who wanted to stay organised in 2006, the single most effective tactic was to set up a dedicated email folder for CfPs and to subscribe to the Atom feed of the conference aggregator WikiCFP. That feed, updated daily, listed every new call for papers in computer vision, speech, and pattern recognition. By checking it every Monday morning, a researcher could plan their submission calendar for the next six months. Missing a CfP deadline in the mid-2000s was not just inconvenient—it meant waiting a full year for the next edition of that conference, with no guarantee that the same topics would be in scope. For a PhD student in 2006, that Monday morning check of WikiCFP often determined which conference they'd target for the year.