Applied Data Science (ADS) Track: Call for Papers (August Cycle)
KDD is the premier Data Science conference, hosting both a Research and an Applied Data Science Track. A paper should either be submitted to the Research Track or the Applied Data Science Track but not both.
KDD has multiple submission cycles per year. KDD 2025 will have two deadlines, one on August 1, 2024 and another on February 1, 2025 (with full paper deadlines a week after the abstract submission deadlines). Likewise, the KDD Proceedings will have two installments. Authors of accepted papers from the August 2024 deadline must opt in for early publication on the rights form in order for their papers to be included in the first installment.
The conference will take place in Toronto, Canada, expected in August 2025.
Important Dates
- Abstract Deadline: Aug 1, 2024
- Paper Deadline: Aug 8, 2024
- Author Rebuttal Period: Oct 4-18, 2024
- Notification: Nov 16, 2024
- Camera-ready:
Dec 19, 2024TBD - Conference: Aug 3-7, 2025
All submission deadlines are end-of-day in the Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone.
Submission Site
We will use OpenReview to manage the submissions and reviewing. Submissions will not be made public on OpenReview during the reviewing period.
All listed authors must have an up-to-date OpenReview profile. Here is information on how to create an OpenReview profile. Note OpenReview’s moderation policy for newly created profiles:
- New profiles created without an institutional email will go through a moderation process that can take up to two weeks.
- New profiles created with an institutional email will be activated automatically.
The OpenReview profile will be used to handle conflict of interest and paper matching. Incomplete OpenReview profile is sufficient ground for desk rejection. To be considered complete, each author profile must be properly attributed with the following mandatory fields: current and past institutional affiliation (going back at least 5 years), homepage, DBLP, ORCID, Advisors and Recent Publications. In addition, other fields such as Google Scholar, LinkedIn, Semantic Scholar, Advisees and Other Relations should be indicated wherever applicable.
Abstracts and papers can be submitted through OpenReview.
Scope: Deployed Applications of Data Science
The KDD’25 Applied Data Science (ADS) track chairs solicit submissions of papers describing designs and implementations of solutions and systems of practical applications in data mining, data analytics, data science, and applied machine learning. The primary emphasis is on papers that either solve or advance the understanding of issues related to deploying data science technologies in the real world. Papers demonstrating significant, verifiable real-world impact as a result of such deployments are encouraged.
Papers should present the problem, its significance to the application domain, the decisions and tradeoffs made when making design choices for the solution, how any challenges in areas like data collection, modeling, and deployment in constrained environments were overcome, and the lessons learned from successes and failures. It is perfectly fine if the underlying machine learning algorithms are not fundamentally groundbreaking. Evidence must be provided that the solution has been deployed by quantifying post-launch performance.
Papers should describe deployed real world applications, and should be aimed at a broad audience of applied data scientists. Application areas include but are not limited to the following:
- Advertising, Marketing, and E-commerce
- Social and professional networks
- Recommendations
- Financial Applications (including fintech, banking, insurance)
- Geospatial Applications (including smart cities, transportation, mapping)Industrial Applications (including medical devices, robotics, sensors)
- Scientific Applications (including computational biology, health, environmental science) Trust and Responsible AI Applications (including policy enforcement, regulatory compliance, ethics, fairness, privacy, and fraud detection)
- Resource Allocation Applications (including Cloud, intranet, and other large system allocation optimizations)
- Applications of Generative AI (including text, code, and media)
In addition to application papers, we also solicit submissions on Data and Benchmarking for Data Science Application Domains (including curation, validation, and release of large-scale data, experiments, and performance benchmarking).
An exception to the deployed production systems requirement may be made for papers describing systems intended to solve real-world problems that were blocked from deployment. These papers should explain the attempts that were made to deploy the system in production and what lessons were learned from the failures that would be broadly applicable and serve as critical learnings for future systems in the same or related domains.
Papers that deviate from the guidelines above (e.g., a research paper, a paper describing an algorithm or system tested solely on academic benchmark data) may be desk-rejected without formal review.
Novelty for an ADS Track submission will not generally focus on novel research contributions, but may instead lie in the choice of application domain, engineering design, usability approach, or business use case.
Submission Guidelines
Deadlines. The submission deadlines are strict and no extensions, regardless of circumstances, will be allowed. Placeholder or dummy abstracts are forbidden.
Authorship. The ACM has an authorship policy stating who can be considered an author in a submission as well as the use of generative AI tools. Every person named as the author of a paper must have contributed substantially to the work described in the paper and/or to the writing of the paper and must take responsibility for the entire content of a paper. Any use of generative AI tools must be disclosed and elaborated in the submission form.
- Maximum authorship. In the research track, the number of submissions allowed per author is limited to 5 (five) maximum. If more than 5 papers are submitted with the same person listed as an author, the additional papers submitted after the first 5 by submission id, will be desk-rejected.
- Authorship changes. The full list of author names, including the ordering, must be finalized by submission deadline. There cannot be any addition, removal, or reordering of authors after the submission deadline. The only changes allowed are the correction of spelling mistakes or new affiliation.
Anonymity. The review process will be double-blind. The submitted document should omit any author names, affiliations, or other identifying information. This may include, but is not restricted to acknowledgments, self-citations, references to prior work by the author(s), and so on. Please use the third-person to refer to your own prior work. You may explicitly refer in the paper to organizations that provided datasets, hosted experiments, or deployed solutions and tools.
Formatting Requirements. Submissions must be in English, in double-column format, and must adhere to the ACM template and format (also available in Overleaf); Word users may use the Word Interim Template. The recommended setting for LaTeX is:
\documentclass[sigconf,anonymous,review]{acmart}
Submissions must be a single PDF file: 8 (eight) content pages as main paper, followed by references and an optional Appendix that has no page limits. The Appendix can contain details on reproducibility, proofs, pseudo-code, etc. The first 8 pages should be self-contained, since reviewers are not required to read past that. Note that different limits will apply to camera-ready (see below).
Originality and Concurrent Submissions. Submissions must present original work—this means that papers under review at or published/accepted to any peer-reviewed conference/journal with published proceedings cannot be submitted. Submissions that have been previously presented orally, as posters or abstracts-only, or in non-archival venues with no formal proceedings, including workshops or PhD symposia without proceedings, are allowed. Authors may submit anonymized work that is already available as a preprint (e.g., on arXiv or SSRN) without citing it. The ACM has a strict policy against plagiarism, misrepresentation, and falsification that applies to all publications.
Resubmission Guidelines. A paper that receives a Resubmit decision during the Feb 2024 submission cycle may submit a revised version to the Aug 2024 deadline. A paper that was rejected during the Feb 2024 deadline could not submit a revision, and could not be re-submitted as a fresh submission to the Aug 2024 deadline. Please also refer to the FAQ for Resubmission.
Resubmission must be indicated upon submission, along with the OpenReview forum id of the previous submission. The resubmission should also include a summary of changes (limited to 5000 characters) in the submission form. The reviewers/AC/SAC will have visibility of the previous submission and reviews. We anticipate that Resubmit papers that address the previously noted concerns appropriately would have a higher acceptance rate than fresh submissions, owing to the former’s selectivity and potential improvements.
Correspondingly, some of the fresh submissions to the Aug 2024 deadline may receive a Resubmit decision for Feb 2025 deadline.
Serving as Reviewer. To ensure that all papers receive a sufficient number of high quality reviewers, every submission must nominate at least one author who is a qualified reviewer (i.e., authors with at least three papers in KDD or other related conferences). Being named as a reviewer in the submission constitutes an acceptance and a commitment to carry out the regular reviewing load responsibly. Only if no qualified reviewer exists in the author list, nominate the best-qualified author for consideration by the PC chairs. Failure to provide a qualified reviewer when one exists in the author list, or failure to carry out the assigned reviewing duty properly, is sufficient ground for desk rejection.
Ethical Use of Data and Informed Consent. Authors are encouraged to include a section on the ethical use of data and/or informed consent of research subjects in their paper, when appropriate. You and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects (posted in 2021). Please ensure all authors are familiar with these policies.
Please consult the regulations of your institution(s) indicating when a review by an Institutional Ethics Review Board (IRB) is needed. Note that submitting your research for approval by such may not always be sufficient. Even if such research has been approved by your IRB, the program committee might raise additional concerns about the ethical implications of the work and include these concerns in its review.
Submissions that do not follow these guidelines or do not view or print properly, will be desk-rejected.
Reviewing Process
Reviewing. Each submission will receive at least three independent reviews, overseen by an Area Chair (AC). At least one author per submission must commit to be a reviewer, carry the regular load, and submit all their reviews on time. If any author of a submission does not carry out the reviewing task in a proper and timely manner, no author of that submission will see the reviews of that submission during the rebuttal stage.
Any use of generative AI tools during the reviewing process must be disclosed in the review form. In particular, verbatim uploading of any passage from the paper being reviewed to any generative AI tool is forbidden.
Rebuttal. Authors will have the chance to provide a response to each review during the rebuttal period. The ACs will consider the authors’ response to the points raised by the reviewers, as well as discussion among reviewers, to inform acceptance decisions.
Withdrawal. Authors may request to withdraw their submissions only during the rebuttal period. Such requests must be made in written form to the PC Chairs and are completed only upon their acknowledgment.
Decision. A range of factors including technical merit, originality, potential impact, quality of execution, quality of presentation, related work, reproducibility of results, and ethics, will be used by the ACs to make a recommendation. The PC Chairs will make the final decisions.
Transparency. By submitting paper(s) to KDD 2025, the authors agree that the original submission, reviews, meta-reviews, and discussions will be made public in OpenReview for all accepted papers.
Conflict of Interest (COI) Policy
All authors and reviewers must declare conflicts of interest in OpenReview. A domain conflict (entered in Education & Career History) must be declared for employment at the same institution or company, regardless of geography/location, currently or in the last 12 months. A personal conflict should be declared when the following associations exist:
- candidate for employment at the same institution or company
- co-author on book/paper or co-PI on a funded grant/research proposal in the last 24 months
- active collaborator
- family relationship or close personal relationship
- graduate advisee/advisor relationship, regardless of time elapsed since graduation
- deep personal animosity
In general, we expect authors, PC, the organizing committee, and other volunteers to adhere to ACM’s Conflict of Interest Policy as well as the ACM’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.
Any transgression that falls short of ethical standards will be investigated and may face disciplinary actions. Such transgressions include, but are not limited to, falsification, dual submission, collusion, pressuring any member of the program committee. Convicted misconduct may result in a 3-year ban from SIGKDD events for all the authors.
Publication and Presentation Policies
Publication. All accepted papers will be allowed the same maximum page length in the proceedings (12 pages, of which 9 are content pages), which will be published by ACM and will be accessible via the ACM Digital Library. That is, while we allow one more content page for accepted papers, we limit the references and Appendix to only 3 pages. Accepted papers will require a further revision to meet the requirements of the camera-ready format required by ACM. Camera-ready versions of accepted papers can and should include all information to identify authors, and should acknowledge any funding received that directly supported the presented research. The rights retained by authors who transfer copyright to ACM can be found here. Authors of accepted papers from the August 2024 deadline must opt in for early publication on the rights form in order for their papers to be included in the first installment.
Reproducibility. Authors are strongly encouraged to make their code and data publicly available after the review process. We are encouraging the (optional) use of the “Artifacts Available” badge in ACM’s Digital Library. If you release any code, dataset, or similar artifact to accompany your paper, and host it in a publicly available, archival repository for research artifacts that provides a Document Object Identifier (DOI), you are welcome to apply for this badge. A special subcommittee will check the artifacts of all accepted papers for availability and relatedness to the paper after the acceptance notification.
Registration. To be included in the proceedings, every accepted paper must be covered by a distinct conference registration, e.g., two multi-authored papers require two registrations, even if they have overlapping authors. This registration must be Full Conference (5-day) registration, at the standard (non-student) in-person rate, payment of which must be completed by the specified deadline. This registration requirement applies universally, regardless of attendance or presentation mode.
Presentation. Every accepted paper must be presented at the conference. No-show papers may be withdrawn from the proceedings.
Official Publication Date. The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date for KDD 2025 will be confirmed at a later stage. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.
Program Committee Co-Chairs
Email: KDD25-ads-chairs@acm.org
Claudia Perlich (Two Sigma)
WeeHyong Tok (Microsoft)
Andrew Tomkins (Google)
Feb 2025 Deadline – Important Dates
As KDD receives two rounds of submissions per year, the anticipated dates for the next round are as follows.
- Abstract Deadline: Feb 1, 2025
- Paper Deadline: Feb 8, 2025
- Author Rebuttal Period: Apr 4-18, 2025
- Notification: May 16, 2025