Call for Proposals - IEEE WIFS 2018

The Technical Committee on Information Forensics and Security (IFS-TC) is inviting proposals for its flagship workshop WIFS, to be held in Fall/Winter2018. The workshop is technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) and the Biometrics Council (BMC). The proposal
should target an audience around 120-160 attendees. Interested groups and individuals are strongly encouraged to approach the members of the IEEE IFS-TC WIFS subcommittee to openly discuss and improve their proposals¹. The proposals should be complete and detailed.

Submitted proposals will be evaluated with respect to the following criteria:

1. Dates and deadlines. The proposal should demonstrate that competing workshops and conferences have been taken into account, with respect to dates an deadlines. In particular, IEEE WIFS should be at least 4 months away from IEEE ICASSP.
2. Location. The proposed location should be convenient to reach and offer modern conference facilities and amenities. No rotation policy is currently enforced but the IFS-TC will work on providing diversity in location (at least the continent) while maintaining the high quality of the workshop.
3. Conference venue. High-speed wireless Internet service should be complimentary at the conference venue and power sockets for laptops are highly desirable. A lead hotel must be identified to facilitate interactions between participants. A quote from that hotel for room rates based on a 50 room block reservation must be provided. The proposal shall also detail alternate nearby hotels, for all budgets, by providing specific references.
4. Organizing committee. The proposal should include a brief biography of the General (co-)Chairs and Technical Program (co-)Chairs to establish their ability to successfully run IEEE WIFS 2016.The Finance Chair, the Local Arrangements Chair, the Publicity Chair, and the Publications Chair should also be appointed in the proposal.
5. IFS-TC representation. Past and current IFS-TC members may be included in the organizing committee of WIFS. In this case, current IFS-TC members will be recused from the TC voting process. The Program Committee (PC) of WIFS must include all elected members currently serving in the IFS-TC. Relevant researchers, who are internationally renowned in their scientific community, may be recruited to be part of the PC of WIFS as a means to further raise the profile of excellence of the workshop and to attract additional submissions.
6. Quality of the technical program. WIFS technical content shall be aligned with the scope of the IFS-TC. Proposals that include plans to address emerging trends or related communities are welcome. Such additions to the scope of the workshop need however to be motivated by elaborating on the relevance of such topics, and by discussing their potential to attract new attendees. The bidders are encouraged to consider including creative program options that supplement traditional paper presentations e.g. panel sessions, plenary presentations, Ph.D. student focused sessions, demos sessions, contests, etc.
7. Promotion. Publicity remains critical to guarantee the success of WIFS. The bidders should therefore detail their strategy to capture submissions from research teams who have not be involved in this workshop in previous editions. This can include targeted advertisement campaigns, ads placement in scientific publications, dedicated accounts on social networks, etc. Past experience clearly indicates, for instance, that posting frequent status updates in a blog-like manner is instrumental to generate enthusiasm for the workshop.
8. Community building. The bidders should detail their plan to attract attendees beyond the scientists presenting their research. SPS and the IFS-TC are is particularly interested in initiatives that (i) facilitate the participation of students and/or (ii) foster links with practitioners from the industry. It may also be relevant to involve the local SPS Chapter to raise local awareness about the workshop. In summary, the bidders are expected to demonstrate efforts to increase the prominence and reputation of IEEE WIFS as a key event for the IFS research community.
9. Workshop logistics. Proposals should demonstrate the ability of the organizers to run the workshop, including the workshop portal (website, registration system), the manuscript management (submission and review system, IEEE Xplore compliant proceedings production), the financial management and the on-site management. It is expected that some of the organizers will have prior experience organizing meetings sponsored by IEEE and thus are familiar with the relevant IEEE policies and procedures.
10. Provisional budget. Per IEEE policy, the provisional budget is required to have a 20% surplus. Although they cannot be part of the provisional budget, particular attention will be given to potential additional revenue streams (such as industrial or governmental financial support) which could be exploited to lower registration costs prior to the event and/or to fund invited speakers, best paper awards, travel scholarships, or other social functions.

Full proposals shall be sent by email no later than Saturday, July 15th 2017 to Luisa Verdoliva, Chair of the IEEE IFS-TC WIFS sub-committee. The selected proposal will be officially announced in December 2017 during the gala dinner of IEEE WIFS 2017 in Rennes, France. Ideally, the call for papers should be distributed during the event and the workshop website should be up and running at the time.

The IEEE IFS-TC WIFS sub-committee
Luisa VERDOLIVA (Chair — verdoliv@unina.it), Roberto CALDELLI (roberto.caldelli@unifi.it), Marc CHAUMONT (marc.chaumont@lirmm.fr), Zekeriya ERKIN (z.erkin@tudelft.nl), Patrick J. FLYNN (flynn@nd.edu), Christian RIESS (christian.riess@fau.de), Walter SCHEIRER (wscheirer@fas.harvard.edu)

¹ Resources for IEEE SPS event organizers: http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/conferences/conference-resources