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.)