percom-topic-selection

Business

Use when deciding whether a pervasive-computing project belongs at IEEE PerCom or should be routed to ACM UbiComp/IMWUT, MobiCom, MobiSys, SenSys, or IPSN, and when distinguishing PerCom's human-centric ubicomp focus from networked-sensor-systems venues by contribution shape, the human-centricity test, and the IEEE-conference vs. IMWUT-journal model.

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Source SKILL.md: https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills/blob/HEAD/PerCom-Skills/skills/percom-topic-selection/SKILL.md

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PerCom Topic Selection

Decide the venue before drafting. PerCom — the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications — is IEEE's flagship for human-centric ubiquitous computing: activity recognition, context-awareness, wearable and mobile sensing, and smart environments. Its papers are IEEE Xplore proceedings read for a pervasive-computing contribution grounded in real human use. A technically strong paper whose real lesson is about network protocols, low-power hardware, or a pure ML model is respected and then rejected as out of scope.

The routing question that matters most

PerCom overlaps most with ACM UbiComp/IMWUT in topic — both cover HAR, wearables, and smart spaces — so the decisive question is rarely "is this ubicomp?" but "which model and calendar fits this paper now?" UbiComp presents papers published in the IMWUT journal on rolling quarterly deadlines with a revise cycle; PerCom is an IEEE conference with a single annual deadline, a bounded rebuttal, and an in-person-presentation requirement. A strong ubicomp paper is publishable at either — choose by the publication model you want and the nearer honest deadline.

Neighbor-venue routing table

Signal in your project	Better home	Why
Human-centric ubicomp (HAR, context, wearables, smart space), ready now, PerCom deadline nearer	IEEE PerCom	IEEE conference flagship; annual deadline + rebuttal
Same topic, but you want a journal publication and a rolling deadline	ACM UbiComp / IMWUT	Journal model, quarterly submissions, revise cycle
Core is wireless/cellular networking or the mobile network itself	MobiCom / MobiSys	Mobile-networking and mobile-systems centers
Core is a low-power networked-sensor system or sensor-platform design	SenSys	Networked sensor systems, not human-centric ubicomp
Core is information processing in sensor networks / signal-level sensing	IPSN	Sensor-network information processing
Study is a deep dataset/measurement better as an archival journal article	IMWUT / IEEE journals	Journal length and revise cycle

Contribution shapes PerCom rewards

Human activity / context recognition — a recognizer or model for human activity, context, or behavior from mobile/wearable/ambient sensors, evaluated cross-subject on real people (the EMGSense lineage).
Pervasive system / infrastructure — a deployable system for sensing, localization, or smart environments whose insight outlives the specific hardware (the LANDMARC lineage).
Sensing tooling / datasets — a generator, framework, or dataset that unblocks how the community evaluates (the SmartSPEC lineage).
Sensing consequence / privacy — surfacing what ubiquitous sensing makes possible on real devices, for good or ill (the DeepMag side-channel lineage).
Context modeling / device-to-device — treating context as a first-class systems concern with real deployment tradeoffs (the CHITCHAT lineage).

The human-centricity and model-swap tests

Two quick tests sharpen a borderline verdict:

Human-centricity test: is a person — their activity, context, behavior, or environment — the center of the contribution? If the paper is really about the network stack or the sensor hardware with no human at the center, route to MobiCom/MobiSys or SenSys/IPSN.
Model-swap test: if the paper leans on a deep model, ask whether the pervasive-computing lesson survives swapping the model for another. If not, the model is the contribution and an ML venue fits better; PerCom rewards the ubicomp insight, not the architecture.

Evidence maturity, without the ladder cliché

Fit is necessary but not sufficient: the same idea sits at different doors depending on evidence maturity. A recognizer evaluated only within-subject or in-lab needs cross-subject, free-living data before the research track; a system shown only on your own testbed needs a realistic deployment; a study too deep and long for 9 pages may belong in IMWUT first. Submitting a step early earns a polite "promising, but the evaluation is within-subject" and costs a full cycle, because PerCom runs on an annual rhythm.

Cheap reconnaissance before committing

[Scope]   scan the last two PerCom programs (dblp, percom.org) for your subarea
          -> 3+ recent papers = a reviewer pool exists; 0 = opening or mismatch
[Citations] is your bibliography majority ubicomp/mobile/sensing venues (PerCom/UbiComp/IMWUT/
          MobiCom/SenSys)? -> majority non-ubicomp => reviewers read you as a visitor; naturalize first
[Calendar] compare the next PerCom deadline (annual, ~Sep) with IMWUT's rolling quarterly cutoffs
          and MobiCom/SenSys dates -> route to the nearest honest fit, not a year's wait

Decision procedure

[Audience] who acts differently if the claim holds? -> ubicomp researchers/practitioners/users?
[Claim type] recognition / system / tooling-dataset / sensing-consequence / context-modeling
[Human-centricity] is a person at the center? -> yes: PerCom-family; no: MobiCom/SenSys/IPSN
[PerCom vs IMWUT] both fit? -> conference+rebuttal+annual (PerCom) vs journal+rolling (IMWUT)
[Verdict] PerCom research track / neighbor venue / journal-first, with a one-line reason

Run this before the writing skills; a wrong venue decision wastes every later step. When the verdict is PerCom, continue with percom-workflow for the calendar and percom-writing-style for the paper shape.