Q: When is the deadline?
A: 11:59pm Friday 20th February 2015 if you live on the east coat of North America (EST), 8:59pm if you live on the west coast of North America (PST), 4:59am on Saturday if you live in the UK (GMT), 5:59am on Saturday if you are in continental Europe (CET).

Q: Will there be further extensions?
A: No.

Q: How does one write a 4-page extended abstract? How many figures, references, etc?
A: This is quite up to you. Best is to include all the components of a journal article (introduction, methods, results, discussion) in abbreviated format. If you are used to writing whole papers for conferences (e.g., NIPS) then our abstract is almost as long as a NIPS paper as our template has narrow margins. On the other hand, if you are used to writing short abstracts (e.g., SfN) you can think of this as an embellished abstract with some results figures (can be preliminary) and references. Anything between 1 and 4 pages is good, so you can also use this as an opportunity to start writing your next journal paper (write the outline as your extended abstract). The quality of submissions so far has been very high, so you definitely want to send in something polished, but other than that don’t worry about this too much (see below). For examples of extended abstracts from the 2013 meeting, download the (20Mb) extended abstract booklet.

Q: Will my abstract be accepted?
A: Obviously we can’t make promises in advance. However, different from conferences such as NIPS, we are not planning to reject many abstracts. We would like to be inclusive and to showcase the wide variety of work relevant to reinforcement learning and decision making. So if you have a scientific result that is relevant to this topic, your abstract has a good chance of being accepted.

Q: Will my extended abstract be made available publicly or can I include preliminary data that I do not want to share widely?
A: Extended abstracts will not be made available to anyone but the reviewers, unless you explicitly request that we make your abstract available online (the short summary will be made available online, in the conference abstract e-booklet). If your abstract is accepted, you will have a chance to edit it based on reviewer comments (these will be aimed at helping you increase the multi-disciplinary reach and relevance of your work), and to ask that the edited version be made available online. Please note, however, that our website is non-archival and abstracts will not be assigned a DOI.