Mentoring

Important Features of the Program

• The mentorship program encourages early-stage researchers or researchers from other allied fields who wish to submit their work to ISMIR conference to share their advanced stage work-in-progress ISMIR paper submissions with senior members of the ISMIR community to obtain focused reviews and constructive feedback. The topics of the paper are expected to be in alignment with the topics of ISMIR conferences.
• The mentees are expected to apply to the program with a tentative abstract and submit an advanced-stage draft of the paper by the published deadlines (see below Important Dates).
• A mentor will be assigned to each mentee paper in the program and will provide a detailed review and constructive feedback to improve the work and the paper quality for suitability in an ISMIR conference. The mentor will maintain confidentiality of the discussions and the unpublished work as agreed with the mentees. The mentor will be available for up to two cycles of review/feedback on the mentee paper revisions, and up to one discussion meeting (up to an hour).
• Mentee authors will receive one cycle of review, where they submit their draft and mentors provide feedback. Additionally, mentees are encouraged to participate in a second cycle, where they revise their paper based on mentor suggestions and receive a follow-up review. Mentees are expected to provide additional information about their work to facilitate more comprehensive feedback from mentors.
• We strongly encourage participants to revise their drafts based on the mentors' feedback and submit them to ISMIR 2026. Please note that all submissions to ISMIR 2026, including those mentored through this program, will undergo the standard peer-review process without exception. Both mentors and mentees are required to clearly declare conflict of interests when the mentored papers are submitted to the ISMIR conference to facilitate double-blind review process.
• We will be able to support a limited number of papers for mentorship due to capacity constraints. If we receive more requests than we can support, we will prioritize papers considering authors’ needs and/or topics that fall under the special call for papers.

Eligibility

The proposed authors of the papers submitted to the mentoring program must satisfy all the following criteria:

• The authors are planning for a submission to an ISMIR conference on a topic aligned with the ISMIR conference.
• The proposed first author of the paper has no previously published papers in ISMIR conferences.
• None of the proposed co-authors of the paper have ever been meta-reviewers for ISMIR conferences.

Important Dates

(All deadlines are 23:59 AoE)

Topics

The topics of papers to be submitted to the program should be closely aligned with those of ISMIR 2026, including but not limited to the following topics:

• MIR data fundamentals: music signal processing; symbolic music processing; metadata, tags, linked data, and semantic web; lyrics and other textual data; web mining, and natural language processing; multimodality.
• Musical features and properties: melody and motives; harmony, chords and tonality; rhythm, beat, tempo; structure, segmentation, and form; representations of music; representation learning; timbre, instrumentation, and singing voice; musical style and genre; musical affect, emotion and mood; expression and performative aspects of music.
• Analysis tasks: sound source separation; music transcription and annotation; optical music recognition; alignment, synchronization, and score following; music summarization; fingerprinting; automatic classification; indexing and querying; pattern matching and detection; similarity metrics.
• Generative tasks: music and audio synthesis; transformations; interactions; real-time considerations; evaluation metrics; qualitative evaluations; artistically-inspired generative tasks.
• Evaluation, datasets, and reproducibility: evaluation methodology; evaluation metrics; novel datasets and use cases; annotation protocols; reproducibility.
• Responsibility and Ethics in MIR: philosophical and methodological foundations; legal and societal aspects of MIR; ethical issues related to designing and implementing MIR tools and technologies.
• Cognitive and user-centered MIR: perception and cognition; user behavioral and physiological responses; user modeling; human-computer interaction; music interfaces and services; personalization; user-centered evaluation.
• Computational musicology: mathematical music theory; systematic musicology; digital musicology; computational ethnomusicology; computational music theory and musicology.
• Creativity: tools for artists, creative practice involving MIR or generative technology, human-AI co-creativity, creativity and cognition; creativity and learning; computational creativity.
• Applications: digital libraries and archives; music retrieval systems; music recommendation and playlist generation; music and health, well-being and therapy; music training and education; robotics; music composition, performance, and production; music videos, multimodal music systems; gaming, augmented/virtual reality; music heritage and preservation; business and marketing.

Submission Guidelines

Applications to the program must include a tentative title, author list and an abstract (200 words).

The papers submitted to the program should be an advanced-stage draft of the paper. To get maximum benefit out of the mentoring program, please ensure the work is as complete as possible and avoid incomplete submissions lacking sufficient detail. The papers should strictly follow ISMIR conference submission guidelines, outlined in the ISMIR 2026 Call for Papers: https://ismir2026.ismir.net/authors/call-for-papers. Only exception would be that the papers should NOT be anonymized during the mentoring process since the paper mentoring program is not anonymous. Papers should be uploaded to a designated channel, the details of which will be provided. Submitted papers will be shared with the assigned mentor for review. Submissions that deviate from the guidelines will not be accepted for mentorship.

How do I apply?

If you are interested in the program and eligible for it, please apply using this form: https://forms.gle/bW2ChR3d5irk8T8R9

FAQ

Q. How many papers are supported in the program in 2026? Is there a chance that my application for mentorship might not be accommodated?
A. The number of papers we support is limited by our current organisational capacity and availability of mentors. It may be possible that not all applications are accommodated if we receive a large number of requests. However, authors will know regarding acceptance of their applications before submitting papers to the program.

Q. Who will be my mentor if I apply to the program?
A. Invited senior members from the MIR community have been kind enough to volunteer for the program. The mentors and mentees will be matched based on the topic of papers as chosen during submission and introduced to each other. If you believe you could serve as mentor in this program, please fill this form: https://forms.gle/yia5tzMip2iE7mGF7

Q. If I incorporate all feedback from the mentor into my paper, will my paper be accepted for publication in the ISMIR conference? Is there a different review process for the mentored papers?
A. All mentored papers will go through the same review process as all other papers submitted to an ISMIR conference. There is no assurance that a mentored paper will be accepted to the conference.

For any further questions, please write to us at ismir2026-diversity@ismir.net