As you probably know, the 2014 annual conference of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society NAFIPS’2014 will be held as part of the general IEEE cybernetics conference “Driving Technology’s Future: Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century”, in Boston, Massachusetts, on June 24-26, 2013; see http://21stcenturywiener.org/ for the details about the conference.

NAFIPS’2014 is a track at this super-conference. William Melek, NAFIPS President-Elect, is the General Chair of NAFIPS’2014.

Similarly to the past NAFIPS conferences, submissions are organized in two stages: first, the authors submit a short abstract by January 31, 2014. Authors of submitted abstracts will received useful referees’ feedback, and by using this feedback, authors should submit full papers by March 1, 2014 (reviewing abstracts should also serve the purpose of weeding our abstracts which are not related to fuzzy at all, without the authors of these papers having to write the whole paper first).

As usual, special sessions are very welcome. As in the past, special sessions are very welcome. Please send your requests for special sessions to me at Vladik@utep.edu and to William Melek at william.melek@uwaterloo.ca. Submission of proposals should include a short description of the session, its relevance to NAFIPS, and a list of potential contributors. Focus sessions will be open to all participants. Organizers of special sessions will be responsible for a reviewing process. If a section has two or more organizers, the reviewing of a paper co-authored by one of the organizers can be organized by other session organizers. Please submit papers authored and co-authored by the sole organizers to us, will be glad to also handle other conflict-of-interest cases. Requests for special sessions should be submitted by January 31, 2014.

Detailed instructions for submitting abstracts and full papers are given on the conference website, see http://21stcenturywiener.org/instructions-to-authors-and-students/

To avoid confusion, fuzzy researchers should submit their abstracts, papers and posters ONLY to the NAFIPS Track.

Here are the few points that we would like to emphasize:

Number of papers: Each author is allowed to present a maximum of two papers. If you have more than two papers accepted, you must register accompanying co-author(s) to present the additional papers.

Abstracts must not exceed 500 words over 2 pages (extended abstract). The abstract must give reviewers a clear indication of the objective, scope, and results of the paper. Later the abstract can be easily expanded to the full paper. For information on formatting submissions, authors should refer to the IEEE Author Digital Toolbox http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/authors/authors_journals.html

Final papers (manuscript) must follow the IEEE two-column format with single-spaced, ten-point font in the text. The minimum manuscript length is four (4) and the maximum length is eight (8) pages. Papers longer than eight pages will not be accepted for publication. All figures, tables, references, etc. are included in the page limit. Papers must be submitted in Portable Document Format (PDF) format. For information on formatting final paper submissions, authors should refer to the IEEE Manuscript Templates for Conference Proceedings which has standard IEEE Transactions templates for Microsoft Word or LaTeX formats http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html

We encourage authors to check their final full papers by using the IEEE PDF eXpress system before they are uploaded to the NW21C2014 Submission Site http://www.pdf-express.org/