For authors

Author kit

Everything you need to turn a result into a paper that clears the IEEE Xplore checks. Read it before you start formatting, not after the first rejection from PDF eXpress — most of what gets papers bounced is decided in the first ten minutes of writing.

SEA 2027 follows standard IEEE conference practice. Where a rule is set by the organisers rather than by IEEE — the page limit, over-length charges, the PDF eXpress conference ID — this page says so and says when it will be published.

IEEE templates Call for papers Tracks and topics

Author deadlines

Submission: 15 January 2027
Notification: 1 March 2027
Camera-ready: 1 April 2027
Author registration: 5 April 2027

All deadlines are 23:59 Anywhere on Earth (UTC−12). Extensions, if any, are announced on this page and by email to registered authors.

Section 01

Before you start

Three things, and none of them takes long. Get all three before you write a word of the paper — an account you cannot log into on deadline day is the most avoidable way to miss it.

An EDAS account

Free, at edas.info. Use an address you actually read — every review notice goes there. Add your ORCID and affiliation while you are in the profile; EDAS reuses them on every paper you touch. Each co-author needs their own EDAS account too, because the author list that reaches IEEE Xplore is the one held in EDAS, not the one typed into your PDF.

The IEEE conference template

Word or LaTeX, from the IEEE templates page or the IEEE Author Center. The same template is preloaded on Overleaf as the IEEE Conference Template. Start from it. Do not rebuild the layout by hand and do not adjust it.

A track

One of the seven technical tracks. Each is reviewed independently by its own committee, so the track you pick decides who reads your paper. Work that spans two tracks is welcome — submit to the closest fit and say so in the cover note.

The clock you are working against

Papers are due 15 January 2027 at 23:59 Anywhere on Earth — which is later than midnight almost everywhere, but not by as much as people assume. Decisions come back 1 March 2027.

Section 02

Format

SEA 2027 uses the standard IEEE conference paper format. Download the template, open it, and replace its text with yours. Everything below describes what the template already does — it is here so you can check your file, not so you can rebuild the layout by hand.

Page size: IEEE publishes both a US Letter (8.5 × 11 in) and an A4 variant of the template. Which one SEA 2027 requires is confirmed here before submissions open — do not assume, and do not mix the two.
Columns: Two columns throughout, roughly 3.5 in wide with a 0.2 in gutter. The title and author block is the one exception — it spans the full width at the top of page 1.
Body type: 10 pt Times New Roman (Times Roman), single-spaced. The abstract and index terms are set bold and italic by the template; leave them as they are.
Headings: First level in Roman numerals and small caps (I. Introduction, II. Related Work). Second level in capital letters (A., B.). Acknowledgment and References are not numbered.
Margins: Set by the template and different between the Letter and A4 variants — which is exactly why you should not touch them. If you have changed a margin, a font size or the column width, EDAS or PDF eXpress will find it.
LaTeX class: Use \documentclass[conference,letterpaper,10pt]{IEEEtran}. Do not use the journal or compsoc options — they produce a layout IEEE will not accept for a conference paper. The bundle ships IEEEtran.cls, a bare conference skeleton, the class documentation and the IEEEtran.bst BibTeX style.
Word: Use the conference template document itself and replace its text. Styles carry the correct sizes and spacing; typing over them by hand does not.

Download from IEEE IEEE Author Center

Do not modify the template

Narrowed margins, a smaller body font, tightened leading, an extra column, a different paper size — every one of these is detected automatically, either by EDAS on upload or by IEEE PDF eXpress before publication. If your paper is a page over, cut the paper. Reformatting it will only cost you the time twice.

Length

Page limit and over-length charges

IEEE conferences set their own page limit — commonly six pages in final form, with a small number of extra pages available at a per-page charge. The limit for SEA 2027, and the charge for any page beyond it, are set by the organisers and are not yet fixed. Write to the shape of your result; the limit will be published well before the submission deadline.

Expected: Before 15 January 2027

Announced here and on the call for papers.

Section 03

Writing the paper

The IEEE conventions below are not house style for its own sake. Most of them exist because Xplore indexes, renders and cross-links millions of papers mechanically, and a paper that breaks them is harder to find and harder to cite for the next twenty years.

Title

Specific and searchable. Avoid abbreviations, acronyms and formulae — spell out anything a reader one field over would not recognise. The template sets the title in title case.

The title in your PDF must match the title recorded in EDAS character for character. A mismatch is caught at the camera-ready inspection and costs you a round trip.

Authors and affiliations

Authors run left to right across the block and wrap onto the next line. Never in columns, never grouped by affiliation. Give full given names where you can — initials are harder to index and harder to credit.

Under each name: department, institution, city, country, email. Enter the same people in EDAS, each with their own email address. IEEE Xplore takes the EDAS record, so an author missing there is an author missing from the published paper.

Abstract

One self-contained paragraph of 150 to 250 words. The IEEE Editorial Style Manual caps it at 250.

No citations, no footnotes, no equations, no undefined abbreviations. A reader should finish the abstract knowing what you did, how you tested it and what came out. Paste the same text into EDAS when you register the paper.

Index Terms and the IEEE Taxonomy

Required, not optional. Four to six terms, alphabetical, bold, as the closing paragraph of the abstract block.

Draw them from the controlled vocabulary of the IEEE Thesaurus and IEEE Taxonomy rather than inventing phrases. Xplore indexes on those terms — they are how somebody finds your paper in five years time.

Body structure

The conventional shape holds: introduction, related work, method, results and evaluation, conclusion. Reviewers read in that order and look for those things.

Acknowledgment comes after the conclusion, unnumbered, followed by the unnumbered references. Funding statements go in the acknowledgment or in an unnumbered footnote on page 1.

Equations

Numbered consecutively in parentheses, flush right against the column edge. Punctuate them as parts of the sentence that contains them, and define every symbol the first time it appears.

Set them with the equation editor or with LaTeX maths. Never paste an equation as an image — it loses its embedded fonts and prints badly at any size other than the one you made it.

Figures, tables and colour

Figures and tables sit at the top or the bottom of a column, not in the middle of one. Cite them in the text as “Fig. 1” and “Table I” — tables take Roman numerals. Figure captions go below the figure, table captions above the table.

Vector artwork is preferred. Raster images should be at least 300 dpi at final print size, and any font used inside a figure must be embedded in the figure file.

Colour is free in IEEE Xplore, so use it. But the figure still has to read in greyscale for print — never let colour be the only thing separating two lines or two bars. Add markers, dashes or labels.

References

IEEE citation style. Number references in the order of first citation and cite them in square brackets: [1], [2], [3]. The reference list is in citation order, never alphabetical.

In running text write “the method of [3]” or “as shown in [3]” — not “as shown in Ref. [3]” and not “in reference [3]”. Abbreviate journal and conference names the way IEEE does, and include a DOI wherever you have one.

If you use BibTeX, IEEEtran.bst does all of this for you. Check the output anyway: it can only format what your .bib file actually contains.

Footnotes

Numbered separately from the references and placed at the bottom of the column where they are cited. Do not put footnotes in the abstract.

Index Terms are how your paper gets read

Pick them from the IEEE Thesaurus and Taxonomy, not from your own vocabulary. They are the controlled terms Xplore indexes on, and five minutes spent choosing them well outlasts everything else you will do to the manuscript on deadline day.

Section 04

Producing the PDF

The manuscript is your work; the PDF is a deliverable with a specification. IEEE publishes that specification because Xplore has to render, search and reprint the file long after your laptop is gone.

File format: PDF only, at both the review and the camera-ready stage. It must satisfy the current PDF Specification for IEEE Xplore (Part A, Core Requirements). A source file is never a submission.
Fonts: Every font embedded and subsetted. Type 1 and TrueType are accepted; Type 3 bitmap fonts are rejected outright. Missing embedded fonts is the single most common reason a PDF fails the Xplore check — and the most common cause is a font inside a figure, not in the body text.
PDF version: PDF 1.4 (Acrobat 5) or later, produced by a distiller rather than a screenshot or a print-to-image path.
Not allowed: No password protection, no encryption, no document security of any kind. No bookmarks, annotations, comments, form fields or embedded multimedia. Strip them before you submit.
Page numbers: Your review PDF may carry page numbers, and they help reviewers refer to a passage. Your camera-ready PDF must carry none at all — no page numbers, no headers, no footers. IEEE paginates the proceedings itself, and a stray footer collides with its own.
File size: IEEE conferences commonly cap submissions at 20 MB. The limit enforced for SEA 2027 is shown on the EDAS upload screen. If you are over it, the cause is almost always a raster figure saved at photographic quality — re-export it, do not re-compress the whole PDF.

Check your fonts before you check anything else

Open the file properties in any PDF reader and look at the font list. Every entry should say “Embedded” or “Embedded Subset”. Anything marked Type 3, or anything not embedded at all, will fail the Xplore check — and the offender is usually a label inside a plotted figure, not the body text.

Filename

Filename convention

EDAS accepts the file under whatever name you give it, but conferences normally ask for a specific pattern — usually the paper ID, ASCII only, no spaces. The pattern for SEA 2027 will be published with the submission link.

Expected: With the EDAS submission link

Section 05

IEEE PDF eXpress

IEEE PDF eXpress is the tool IEEE funds for authors. It either checks a PDF you made against the Xplore specification, or converts your Word or LaTeX source into a compliant PDF for you. It is free to authors at conferences in the IEEE Conference Publications Program.

It is mandatory at the camera-ready stage, and not optional in practice at any stage: a PDF that does not pass cannot be loaded into IEEE Xplore, so a paper that skips this step cannot be published however good it is.

PDF eXpress conference ID

IEEE issues a numeric conference ID once the publication agreement is executed. You need it to create your PDF eXpress account — the site will not let you register without it. It will be published on this page and emailed to the authors of accepted papers.

Expected: Before the camera-ready deadline, 1 April 2027

The workflow

Go to ieee-pdf-express.org and choose “First time logging in?”. Enter the SEA 2027 conference ID, your email address and a password. You will get a confirmation email.
Click Submit New Title and enter the title of your paper.
Choose PDF Check to have a PDF you produced yourself verified, or Conversion to upload your Word or (La)TeX source and have IEEE build the PDF for you.
Wait for the emailed report. A check comes back as pass or fail with the reason; a conversion comes back as a file. Download the file the site gives you — that is the one to submit, not your own.
If it fails, fix the source and use Try Again on the same title. Do not click Submit New Title a second time: the checks and conversions per title are capped, and a duplicate title confuses the conference record.
Once the PDF passes and your IEEE copyright form is complete, click Approve to release the file to the conference editor.

PDF eXpress does not submit your paper

It only produces or verifies the file. You still upload that file to EDAS. The two systems are separate, and approving in one does nothing in the other. Problems with the tool itself go to pdfsupport@ieee.org, not to the conference — IEEE’s own guide covers the common failures.

Section 06

Submitting through EDAS

SEA 2027 uses EDAS, the conference management system behind most IEEE conferences. It holds the paper record, runs the review, collects the copyright form and links your registration to your paper. Its documentation is dry but complete.

Submission link

The EDAS page for SEA 2027 opens when the conference record and its seven tracks are registered. Until then there is no link to give you — submitting to the wrong EDAS conference is a real and irreversible mistake, so wait for the one published here.

Expected: Ahead of the submission window

The link will be posted here and on the call for papers.

Step by step

Create a free EDAS account at edas.info if you do not already have one. One account, one email address, for life — do not open a second.
Open the SEA 2027 submission page and choose the track your paper belongs to. One track per paper.
Register the paper: title, abstract, topics and the full author list. Add each co-author by the email address on their EDAS account. This is the author record IEEE will publish.
Upload the PDF. EDAS runs automatic checks on page size, page count, fonts and margins as the file lands, and flags anything that fails. Fix and re-upload — you can replace the file as often as you like until the deadline closes.
Check for the confirmation email. If it did not arrive, the submission is not registered. Log back in and look at the paper record rather than assuming.

Anywhere on Earth, not your time zone

The deadline is 15 January 2027, 23:59 AoE (UTC−12) — the same instant as 16 January 2027 at 14:59 in Jordan. Work back from that in your own time zone rather than from the printed date. Uploading in the final hour is a bet on EDAS being unloaded at exactly the moment every other author is doing the same thing.

Section 07

Review process

Every paper is peer reviewed by members of the technical programme committee of the track it was submitted to. Reviewers score the work and write a report; the track chair reads the reports together and recommends a decision to the Technical Program Chair.

Decisions and the full reviewer reports are returned through EDAS on 1 March 2027. There are three outcomes.

Accept: The paper is in the programme. Prepare the camera-ready version, act on the reviewers’ comments, and make sure one author registers by the author registration deadline.
Accept with revision: Conditional. Specific changes are required before the camera-ready version is accepted, and the track chair checks that you made them. The camera-ready deadline does not move.
Reject: The paper does not go forward at SEA 2027. The full reviewer reports are still returned to you, and they are the most useful thing you will get out of the process.

Originality screening

IEEE screens conference submissions with CrossCheck, an iThenticate-based similarity check against published literature and the open web. Plagiarism and self-plagiarism are misconduct under the IEEE Publication Services and Products Board Operations Manual, and sanctions run from rejection to a multi-year publishing ban recorded in Xplore.

Submitting the same work to more than one venue at the same time is prohibited. Your paper must be original, not under review elsewhere, and must cite your own closely related published work rather than reusing it silently.

Review model

Single-blind or double-blind review

Whether reviewers see author names is a decision for the Technical Program Chair, and it changes how you prepare the manuscript — a double-blind submission needs author names, affiliations, acknowledgements and self-citations anonymised. Do not anonymise until this is confirmed.

Expected: With the opening of submissions

Section 08

Camera-ready and copyright

The camera-ready version is due 1 April 2027. It is the file that goes to IEEE Xplore, so this is the last point at which anything can be fixed — after it, the paper is out of your hands.

What you upload

A revised manuscript that acts on the reviewers’ comments, still inside the page limit, with page numbers, headers and footers removed.
The IEEE copyright notice line in place at the bottom left of the first column of page 1. The exact string differs for standard, US Government, Crown and EU Government cases; the copyright form gives you the right one. Add it to the source, then regenerate the PDF.
A PDF that has passed IEEE PDF eXpress and been approved from inside the tool.
A completed IEEE electronic Copyright Form, signed through EDAS.

The IEEE electronic Copyright Form

IEEE cannot publish a paper without a signed publication agreement. The electronic Copyright Form is completed only at the camera-ready stage, from a “Submit IEEE Copyright Form” link inside the EDAS paper record. It hands you to the IEEE eCF site, where a short wizard establishes your status — standard transfer, US or Crown government employee, or open access — and presents the correct agreement for electronic signature.

The final inspection is literal

The title and the author list in your PDF must match the EDAS record exactly — same spelling, same order, same accents. A discrepancy is a rejected camera-ready, and at that stage there is very little room in the calendar to fix it.

Section 09

Registration and presentation

At least one author of every accepted paper must complete a full author registration by 5 April 2027. This is not administrative housekeeping: a paper without a registered author is dropped from the programme and is not submitted to IEEE Xplore, however it was reviewed.

It must be the full author rate, not a student rate and not an attendee rate. Fees and categories are on the registration page.

Presenting

Every session is streamed. Authors unable to travel may present remotely. A remote presentation counts as a presentation — travel is not a condition of publication.

No-show policy

An accepted paper that appears in the final programme but is not presented, by an author or a qualified proxy, is not published in IEEE Xplore. Copyright still rests with IEEE and the paper may still appear in the proceedings given to attendees. Exceptions are made only at the discretion of the Technical Program Chair, for circumstances genuinely beyond the authors’ control.

Papers per registration, extra-page and additional-paper charges

How many papers one full author registration covers, the fee for each additional paper, and the per-page charge for going over the limit are all set by the organisers alongside the registration fees. They are not yet fixed.

Expected: With the registration fee schedule

Published on the registration page.

Section 10

Checklist

Run this before you upload. The last five items apply only to the camera-ready version, and they are the ones that most often go wrong, because by then the paper feels finished.

Written in the IEEE conference template, Confirmed page size, with nothing about the layout changed.
Two columns, 10 pt Times, title and author block spanning both columns.
Abstract is one paragraph of 150–250 words with no citations, equations or undefined abbreviations.
Four to six Index Terms, alphabetical, taken from the IEEE Thesaurus.
Every author in the PDF also exists in EDAS, with the same spelling and the same order.
Title in the PDF matches the title in EDAS exactly.
Figures readable in greyscale, at least 300 dpi or vector, with fonts embedded.
Tables numbered in Roman numerals, captions above; figure captions below.
References numbered in citation order, in square brackets, IEEE style.
All fonts embedded and subsetted; no Type 3 fonts anywhere in the file.
No encryption, password, bookmarks, annotations or form fields in the PDF.
File under the size limit shown on the EDAS upload screen.
Paper is original, not under review anywhere else, and prior related work of your own is cited.
Submitted before the deadline in Anywhere on Earth, not in your own time zone.
Camera-ready only: passed IEEE PDF eXpress and approved from within the tool.
Camera-ready only: page numbers, headers and footers removed.
Camera-ready only: IEEE copyright notice in place at the bottom left of page 1.
Camera-ready only: IEEE electronic Copyright Form signed in EDAS.
Camera-ready only: one author registered at the full author rate.

Something here unclear or missing?

Write to info@ieeesea.net. Questions about this page are useful — they usually mean it is wrong.