Interspeech workflow

INTERSPEECH Workflow

Interspeech runs one cycle per year with an unforgiving rhythm: a winter deadline, a silent spring, a June verdict, and a Northern-autumn conference. This skill is the project-management layer; every date below is the verified 2026 (Sydney) calendar and must be swapped for the live one each cycle.

The 2026 reference clock

Date (2026)	Event	Owner's job
17 Jan	CMT portal opens	metadata drafted, area chosen
25 Feb	Paper deadline	PDF + frozen metadata in
4 Mar	Paper-update close	sanctioned typo/figure pass done
~24 Apr – 1 May	Rebuttal window (reported, 待核实)	response team on call
5 Jun	Notification	triage meeting same week
19 Jun	Camera-ready close	de-anonymized PDF + metadata
15 Jul	Early-bird registration closes	author registration secured
16 Aug	Standard registration closes	stragglers covered
27 Sep – 1 Oct	Conference, Sydney	talk/poster + audio fallback ready

Where the cycle stands today (2026-07-08)

Mid-cycle, post-decision. Accepted teams: camera-ready is behind you; early-bird registration closes in one week — that is the live deadline — then presentation prep, artifact publication (interspeech-camera-ready, interspeech-artifact-evaluation), and travel/visa for Sydney. Rejected or unsubmitted teams: the 2027 cycle (São Paulo, 29 Aug – 2 Sep 2027) is the target; expect a deadline in the same late-winter region but treat the 2027 dates as unpublished until the São Paulo site posts them.

Backward plan from any Interspeech deadline

Offsets that have survived contact with real teams; anchor them to live dates:

• T−10 weeks: claims frozen; corpus/split/licensing decisions final.
• T−6 weeks: main results table filled with some number in every cell — the quality improves later, the design cannot.
• T−4 weeks: draft exists in the official paper kit (not a one-column doc — the 4-page reality only shows in the template).
• T−2 weeks: internal review by one speech scientist and one engineer, mirroring the reviewer mix; significance tests run.
• T−1 week: compression pass (interspeech-writing-style), anonymity sweep, demo page frozen.
• T: submit half a day early; CMT queues at AoE cutoffs.
• T+1 week: proofread the submitted PDF; use the update window for repairs only.

Failure patterns by phase

• Winter: discovering at T−1 that the paper is 5.5 pages — compression is a week of work, not a night (see the compression order in interspeech-writing-style).
• Spring silence: team disbands; nobody owns the rebuttal when it lands. Assign the response owner at submission time.
• June: acceptance euphoria eats the two-week camera-ready window; the registration coupling (no registered author → no proceedings entry) surfaces in August as a crisis.
• September: audio demos that only ever ran on the lab machine meet a conference-hall AV chain. Rehearse playback; carry spectrogram fallbacks.

Parallel-track decisions

• Interspeech vs ICASSP double rhythm: the sibling deadline (typically autumn for ICASSP) means a rejected February idea has a fall retry — decide in June whether reviews point to "fix and ICASSP" or "grow and Interspeech 2027".
• Challenge alignment: many Interspeech papers ride a challenge (CHiME, VoxSRC, ASVspoof…); challenge timelines are their own clocks, published by each organizer, and system-description papers have separate rules — verify per challenge.
• Journal extension: an accepted 4-pager with leftover material has a standard afterlife at TASLP / Computer Speech & Language / Speech Communication; start the extension outline while the reviews are fresh.

Standing owner map

Assign at kickoff, not at crisis:

• Paper owner — format, compression, the submitted PDF, the update-window proofread.
• Evidence owner — experiment matrix, seeds, significance, scoring scripts.
• Compliance owner — anonymity sweep (PDF + demo page + repo), license chain, policy checkboxes.
• Rebuttal watcher — has CMT credentials, watches the reported window, owns the response draft calendar.
• Logistics owner — registration before the tier cutoffs, visa timelines, AV rehearsal for the talk or poster QR codes.

One person can hold two hats; no hat may be unassigned. Every 2026 failure pattern above maps to exactly one vacant hat.

Minimal milestone ledger

[frozen]   claims / corpus / splits ........ T-10w   owner: evidence
[in-kit]   draft in official template ...... T-4w    owner: paper
[reviewed] internal science+eng pass ....... T-2w    owner: paper
[swept]    anonymity + demo page frozen .... T-1w    owner: compliance
[in]       CMT submission confirmed ........ T       owner: paper
[patched]  update-window proofread ......... T+1w    owner: paper
[watched]  rebuttal window covered ......... spring  owner: watcher
[final]    camera-ready + registration ..... June    owner: logistics

Output format

[Phase] pre-deadline / update-window / silent-spring / rebuttal /
        post-decision / conference-run-up / post-conference
[Live deadline] <date + what it gates + source URL>
[Owner map] paper / rebuttal / camera-ready+registration / artifacts / talk
[Backward plan] next three offsets with dates
[Parallel tracks] ICASSP retry? challenge clock? journal extension?
[Risk now] <single most time-critical item>

Verified anchors and the 待核实 list live in resources/official-source-map.md (checked 2026-07-08). ISCA rotates organizing committees per edition — the Sydney team's choices (tracks, rebuttal shape, attachment rules) do not bind São Paulo.