Brief report about IEEE ICDM 2022

In this blog post, I will give a brief report about the IEEE ICDM 2022 (International Conference on Data mining), which I have attended. It started on November 28th 2022. I have attended ICDM as a workshop organizer this year and as a co-author.

What is ICDM?

ICDM is a good conference for data mining and machine learning research. I have attended it for several years. You can see for example my reports about ICDM 2021 and ICDM 2020 on this blog. The proceedings are published by IEEE, and the conference was held offline with some online participants (for those who could not attend in person due to the pandemic).

Proceedings and acceptance rate

The proceedings were made available online to authors on the first day of the conference.

For the main proceedings, at ICDM 2022, 885 submissions were received from 54 countries. All papers were reviewed using a triple-blind process. From this, 85 regular papers and 89 short papers were accepted. Thus, the full paper acceptance rate is 9.77% and the overall acceptance rate is 20%.

For the workshop proceedings at ICDM 2022, there were 326 submissions in 15 workshops. And 135 papers (41%) were accepted.

Day 1: Workshops, but some problems

The first day was dedicated to workshops. There were many workshops on a variety of emerging topics. In particular, I co-organized the UDML workshop on utility-driven mining and learning, which is the 5th edition this year, and has been quite successful this year with about 20 submissions, 7 accepted papers, and over 20 participants.

However, on Day 1, I faced problems with the online platform that was adopted for the conference. It is Zoom Events, which can be viewed as a special version of Zoom designed to host events such as conferences with more functionalities than the basic Zoom platform. Zoom events provide a message board and a schedule of all events as well as the possibility to chat with other participants. The problems that I and other participants encountered are as follow.

First, our workshop was supposed to start at 10:00 AM but there was no “start” button to allow us to start our workshop. Thus, hours before, I sent several messages to the organizers on the platform and by e-mail, but we got no answer before the start time of our workshop. There were also a few other workshop organizers that had the same problem and were talking about how to solve the problem in the chat. As we did not receive any answer, for our workshop we decided to create a public Zoom link and send it to authors by e-mail to start the workshop on time. Then, at around 10:40, I received an e-mail telling me that I could start our workshop but we had started it already using our Zoom link, 40 minutes earlier…

Second, multiple authors from our workshop did not receive instructions about how to login to the conference before our workshop started. From 7 papers in our workshop, this affected 5 papers. So before the workshop, I receive multiple messages from authors about how to login. In one case, there was also an author who could not login because he used a different e-mail for his zoom account than for registering to the conference. And all these problems were not solved before our workshop start time. So this is another reason why we had to use a public Zoom link for our workshop.

From these problems, I think there are two lessons to learn: (1) It is better to do a rehearsal in advance with workshop organizers if a new system is used (like it was done for ICDM in Singapore in ICDM 2020, for example) to avoid issues, and (2) it would have been much simpler to just use Zoom public links instead of using Zoom events, because this latter creates problems for logging due to the restriction on e-mails who can log in.

Day 2 – Opening ceremony and …

On the second day, I wanted to attend the opening ceremony and check the keynote talks as this is usually very interesting. However, I did not receive any Zoom Events link for accessing the second day of the conference in my e-mail. So it seems that only the first day of the conference is online. That is unfortunate but I can understand as it is supposed to be an in person conference. So that will be the end of this post about ICDM 2022.

Conclusion

This was a blog post about the ICDM 2022 conference. Hope it has been interesting. Will be looking forward to next year’s ICDM 2023 conference.

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Philippe Fournier-Viger is a full professor working in China and founder of the SPMF open source data mining software.