TL;DR (aka "Executive summary"):

Submit to highly-rated conferences in the telecommunications/data networking disciplines. You need Centre Director approval to travel. If you did not register your conference paper in the CAIA Submissions register prior to paper being submitted, Centre Director will not approve your travel. If your research output or conference is outside the telecommunications/data networking disciplines you will need your own funds (government, industry, consulting or personal).

Longer version:

All CAIA travel to conferences requires Centre Director authorisation - both to approve any time away from Swinburne, and to approve the expenditure of funds. This applies to CAIA post-graduate students, research-only staff and CAIA-affiliated academic staff travelling for research purposes.

With respect to conference travel approvals, Centre Director will evaluate your application based on its source of funding. We generally view funding as coming from one of two categories: Faculty funds (from annual budgets provided for student and staff travel), and external project funds (e.g. ARC grants, industry grants, etc)

If funded from external grants:

With respect to external project funds, Centre Director will approve conference travel that uses external project funds if the project's "owner" (e.g. Chief Investigator in the case of ARC grants, or similar person for industry grants) assures that the expenditure appropriately supports their project's academic and business goals.

If Faculty funds are desired:

We have limited Faculty funds each year to support our group's research activities in Data Networking and Telecommunications. This imposes an upper bound on the number of conferences we can support using Faculty funds, regardless of the rank of the conferences.

Approval or non-approval of travel using Faculty funds will consider the following guidelines:
  • Did you register the paper with our Research Centre Coordinator support (Barbara Gillespie in 2014) for the CAIA Submissions register at the time you submitted it to the conference for review? If not, no approval
  • Based on 2010 ARC ERA rankings or reasonable evidence of equivalence:
    • "A" ranked conferences are acceptable both domestically and internationally. As a rule we should be targeting such conferences
    • "B" ranked conferences are okay domestically, or if you have external project funds to support international travel
    • "C" ranked conferences are generally to be avoided (i.e., find your own funding). However, conference travel to a C ranked conference might be approved if it is domestic _and_ publishing the paper in that conference is part of an agreed strategy to ensure timely publication and getting our work 'on the record' in IEEE Xplore or ACM Digital Library, etc. You'll need a good reason to convince me your work cannot wait to be refined and published in a more highly ranked conference. (In addition, research-active academic staff will not receive support for submitting first-authored papers to C ranked conferences.)
    • Unranked conferences -- discuss the business rationale with Centre Director first. There may be staff-development reasons for your attendance to be funded
  • Priority will be given (in this order) to presenting at conferences whose research outputs could be primarily categorised under the following ARC Field of Research (FoR) codes:
  • If proposed travel relates to primarily to presenting research outputs outside the 0805, 08 and 1005 FoR you will need to use external funds (such as government or industry grants) regardless of other merits
Consequently, if you're intending to develop a paper for any conference please discuss travel and registration funding with the Centre Director before submission. Otherwise, even if your paper is accepted you may end up funding the trip yourself (or having to withdraw the paper).

(Note: In 2012 ERA no longer publishes conference rankings. The 2010 rankings should be used as a guide. I am open to evidence that e.g. a previously B-ranked conference should now be considered an A-ranked conference.)