MobiCom Multi-Deadline Model
Starting from the 25th MobiCom conference in 2019, we will adopt multiple deadlines and add a one-shot review process to enhance the timeliness and quality of the scientific results from the research community.

Submission deadlines: For MobiCom'19, we will adopt the following two paper submission deadlines:

Summer Deadlines:
Abstract and title registration August 3, 2018 9:59 PM
Paper submission August 7, 2018 9:59 PM
Notification of acceptance October 15, 2018
Reviews available to authors October 22, 2018
Camera-ready December 10, 2018

Winter Deadlines:
Abstract and title registration March 8, 2019 9:59 PM
Paper submission March 12, 2019 9:59 PM
Notification of acceptance May 10, 2019
Reviews available to authors May 17, 2019
Camera-ready July 7, 2019

New reviewing process: Each paper will go through the same rigorous reviewing process as in previous MobiCom conferences. We will continue to have in-person PC meetings, and will hold two PC meetings corresponding to the two submission deadlines. Each PC member needs to attend in person at least ONE of the two PC meetings, and join the other through online conferencing.

The review decisions will be one of the following:

Accept: Accepted papers will be presented at the MobiCom conference and appear as part of the proceedings. In the meantime, authors are permitted to talk about these upcoming publications, e.g., listing them on CVs. The publications will also be put on the MobiCom and ACM websites.

Reject: Rejected papers cannot be resubmitted until 12 months have passed since the last MobiCom deadline they were submitted to.

One-Shot-Revision: Papers where a revision is required will be given specific action points and can be resubmitted for the next deadline. For such papers, the reviewers will be required to articulate a maximum of three changes/clarifications that they would like to see. After the resubmission, the same reviewers will evaluate the paper based on whether the authors have properly addressed the reviewers' requests. Unlike in the shepherding process, the requested action points may include running additional experiments that obtain specific results. During this revision period, the paper is still considered under review to MobiCom and therefore cannot be submitted to other conferences unless the authors first withdraw it from consideration. We expect the one-shot revision to be used only for a small fraction of the papers.
Expected benefits and impacts: We expect the multi-deadline model will lead to papers with higher quality, because authors would have more flexibility to submit right after their work is ready, and because of the specific guidance to revise their papers (for the one-shot revision paper). We do not, however, intend in any way to lower MobiCom's high expectations for published results.

On the other hand, the new submission model will lead to higher-quality reviews as well, because spreading the reviewing load across multiple deadlines should make it easier for reviewers to find time in their schedules to complete a quality review; and specific to the one-shot revision paper, the randomness of reviews will be reduced as the same set of reviewers will read and supervise the revision.

We may see a slight increase in the acceptance rate, owing to our ability to use the one-shot-revision process to bring a few papers up to our standard that otherwise would not have reached it. But, since we're applying the same standard for publication as in past years, we do not expect any change in the prestige associated with the conference.