Percom submission

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>