IEEE CIS Student and Early Career Mentoring Program

IEEE CIS Student and Early Career Mentoring Program

The IEEE CIS mentoring program will take place in-person at WCCI 2024 in Japan this year. This program represents a unique opportunity for mentees to engage directly with leaders in the field, enriching their research experience and enhancing their career trajectories through three main activities: (1) the Mentor-Mentee Networking (MMN) encourages one-to-one mentor-mentee engagement with an initial focus on providing feedback on the paper presented at WCCI 2024. (2) The Paper Development Workshop (PDW) aims at guiding participants to develop a high-quality manuscript suitable for submission in IEEE CIS flagship journals. (3) The networking event across all mentee and mentor cohorts.

Who is it for?

The program is open to all students and early career researchers who are presenting a paper at WCCI 2024, with priority given to IEEE CIS student members. Participation in the program is free of charge to registered presenters. Successful applicants to the program will be selected based on their paper review scores.

All presenters accepted to the mentoring program will be explicitly notified via email. Applications to participate in the program submitted after the Early Registration Deadline may not be considered.

The WCCI 2024 Mentoring Program Team

For any questions, please contact the conference leads which match your conference publication. For example, email both CEC leads below if your paper is/or will be submitted to CEC 2024.

CEC 2024 Mentoring Program Co-Leads:
Ivan Amaya (Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico: iamaya2@tec.mx
Thambo Nyathi (University of Pretoria, South Africa): t.nyathi@cs.up.ac.za

FUZZ-IEEE 2024 Mentoring Program Co-Leads:
Jose Maria Alonso (CiTIUS-USC, Spain): josemaria.alonso.moral@usc.es
Gabriella Casalino (University of Bari, Italy): gabriella.casalino@uniba.it
Direnc Pekaslan (University of Nottingham, UK): direnc.pekaslan1@nottingham.ac.uk

IJCNN 2024 Mentoring Program, Co-Leads:
Heba El-Fiqi (University of New South Wales Canberra, Australia): h.eliqi@unsw.edu.au
Zenglin Xu (Harbin Institute of Technology, China): xuzenglin@hit.edu.cn
Marcus Liwicki (Luleå University of Technology, Sweden): marcus.liwicki@ltu.se

Mentor-Mentee Networking (MMN)

The program matches eligible presenters (mentees) with senior academics (mentors) from the field in order to provide mentees both with constructive feedback on their WCCI 2024 publication and paper presentation, as well as a community point of contact during the conference. Please be advised of the following:

  • The mentor is encouraged to attend the presentation of the paper (where possible) and to engage with the presenter, for example through contributing constructive questions in the Q&A part.
  • Following the paper’s presentation, mentor and mentee are encouraged to meet up (e.g., in a coffee break) for feedback and potential follow-up discussion (where desired).

Mentees will be contacted via email prior to the conference. Before the conference, mentor and mentee contact details will be shared between them; mentees are expected to drive engagement with their mentors, e.g., sending their accepted conference paper to the mentor in advance of their presentation to allow the mentors to read the paper and provide some feedback. Mentee participants who would like to attend the PDW must submit their draft papers following the guidelines and respecting the deadline specified. Again, to clarify: the PDW is open for application to mentees, but in order to participate, you must apply as outlined.

All mentoring program participants will be invited to an exclusive networking event to support interaction and networking across the mentee and mentor cohorts. The date for the networking event will be confirmed closer to the conference but it is tentatively scheduled for the evening of the second day of the conference.

Paper Development Workshop (PDW) 

The purpose of the PDW is to provide the mentoring program’s participants the opportunity to hear from and engage with the editorial team(s) from the IEEE CIS flagship journals. The focus of the PDW is for potential authors to learn about paper development for publication in top journals and get hands-on feedback on their own papers. At WCCI 2024, the PDW will be run by members (Editors-in-Chief and Associate Editors) of the IEEE IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation (TEC) and IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems (TFS), editorial teams, offering both an overview of the journal and its priorities, as well as small-group, hands-on sessions for participants.

Application to attend the PDW is REQUIRED, i.e., mentees are NOT automatically invited to the PDW. In order to apply, mentoring program participants are required to submit a draft journal paper (which may be based on their accepted conference paper), following these guidelines:

  • All draft papers should follow the IEEE journal paper submission guidelines in format
    and size. Specifically, drafts may of course be shorter and be partially incomplete,
    but they should not exceed the maximum number of pages.
  • As a minimum, all papers should include an abstract as well as draft versions of key
    sections, in particular highlighting contributions, methodology, experiments, results,
    and conclusions. It is acceptable for some sections to be only minimally developed,
    e.g., as bullet points.
  • Participants are encouraged to include clearly highlighted questions and areas for
    discussion in their draft papers.


To apply to the PDW, please register by 24 May 2024 by completing the webform and instructions here. Successful applicants will be notified by 14 June 2024. The PDW will last for two to three hours and is tentatively scheduled for the first day of the conference but the date will be confirmed closer to the conference.