Overview      Click here to submit a new conference site request

The Conference Management Toolkit (CMT) is a conference management service sponsored by Microsoft Research. CMT is capable of handling the complex workflow of an academic conference including:

• Multiple roles such as Program Chair, Reviewer, MetaReviewers (commonly referred to as area chairs) Author, Proceedings Editor
• Abstract and paper submission, supplementary material
• Invitations to and management of reviewers (program committee)
• Management of conflicts of interest
• Reviewer bidding and preferences
• Automatic and manual assignment of papers to reviewers
• Review submission
• Threaded discussions and online Program Committee meeting
• Author notification
• Camera-ready paper submission
• Integration with IEEE eCF service to manage electronic copyrights for IEEE conferences for accepted papers (new!)
• Creation of sessions for accepted papers
• Uploading slide decks for paper presentation
• Interoperation with archival systems

CMT provides rich support to the Program Committee chairs for managing the conference workflow including customization of conference properties e.g., multiple tracks, deadlines, author submission and reviewer forms, double-blind reviewing, allowing authors to mark conflicts of interest with reviewers, use of external reviewers and meta reviewers. CMT also provides filtering, sorting and aggregation functionality as well as emailing capability to authors and reviewers that makes it easy to handle conferences with a large number of reviewers and submissions. CMT's extensive auditing capabilities allow Program Committee Chairs to track accesses to conference data. CMT enables the Program Committee chairs to easily bulk-import data as well as bulk-export conference data and reports in popular formats such as XML and Excel.

CMT is a free and hosted service, and its functionalities are fully accessible through web based interfaces. CMT is built using Microsoft technologies including Windows Server, ASP.Net, Internet Information Server (IIS) and SQL Server. The interfaces support a wide range of browsers on multiple platforms.

Usage

 
In the last two years, CMT has been used for more than 500 conferences, workshops, and various other programs. In the past one year alone, CMT has been used for 250+ conferences including several large ACM and IEEE conferences. Some examples of conferences that have used CMT this past year are:

• Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference
• IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
• IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)
• IEEE Data Compression Conference
• IEEE International Conference on e-Science
• ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD)
• ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD)
• International Conference on International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB)

History

The architect of the Conference Management Toolkit is Surajit Chaudhuri, a Research Area Manager at Microsoft Research. CMT was first developed for ACM SIGKDD 1999. Since then, CMT has undergone several major improvements and extensions and has been used in over 700 conferences to date.

Using CMT

To use CMT for your conference, please use the online conference site request form (click here) to submit a new request. We will get back to you within 2-3 working days.

Support

CMT provides email based support Monday through Friday, 9am to 5pm Pacific Time. Please contact cmt@microsoft.com for support issues. Since CMT is developed, operated and managed by a small team, support is limited. However, we will do our best to respond to issues in a timely manner (usually within 24 hours). We prefer if you can arrange abstract submission, paper submission and reviewer submission deadlines to fall on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday in order to ensure quick response from the CMT team. See the FAQ page for more details about CMT.

User Roles in CMT

There are three key roles in CMT in a typical conference: Chairs (e.g., Program Committee chairs) who customize and control the workflow of the conference, Authors who submit papers, and Reviewers assigned by the Chair to review the submissions. The activities of a user in each of these roles over the lifecycle of a conference are summarized here.