DDL Calendar

Inspiration

Every researcher knows the sinking feeling: you open Twitter and discover the deadline for the one conference you were targeting passed yesterday. Top-tier venues like ICML, CVPR, SOSP, and CHI each publish their Call for Papers on their own sites, in their own formats, with their own timezone quirks (AoE? UTC-12? who knows). Keeping track of 185 conferences across 12 research fields by hand is a losing game — and missing a single date can cost you an entire year of work.

We built Conference because we were tired of juggling a dozen browser tabs, a messy spreadsheet, and a mental countdown clock. We wanted one place that answers a simple question: "What's the next deadline I actually care about, and how many days do I have?"

What it does

Conference is a one-stop calendar that surfaces submission deadlines for 185 top-tier venues — ICML, AAAI, CVPR, SOSP, SIGCOMM, CHI, PLDI, and many more — the moment you land on the page.

• 🗓️ Calendar view — every deadline on a monthly grid, color-coded by field
• 📋 List view — upcoming deadlines sorted with live D-day countdowns; past and unconfirmed venues tuck away neatly
• 🔍 Search & filter — search by acronym or full name, filter across 12 domains (Systems, AI, Data, Networking, Security, PL/SE, HCI, Theory, Hardware, AR/VR, Health, and more), and toggle between ✅ Confirmed and 🔮 Predicted dates
• 🏆 Tier badges — instantly see which venues are top / strong ranked
• 📊 Dashboard — deadlines per month for the next 12 months, venue counts by domain, and per-conference accepted-paper trends over the years
• 📅 ICS subscription — subscribe once in Google Calendar (or any client) and your deadlines stay in sync forever
• 🌙 Dark mode — because researchers work late

How we built it

Everything runs on a fully automated, data-driven pipeline with zero backend to maintain:

• A single source of truth (list_conf.csv) defines the 185 venues, their fields, and their tiers.
• A Python build pipeline matches our list against the community-maintained ccfddl/ccf-deadlines dataset to generate conferences.json, then produces the ICS feed automatically.
• A second script pulls per-year accepted-paper counts from DBLP to power the dashboard charts.
• The front end is a lightweight static site (vanilla JS + CSS) hosted free on GitHub Pages — fast, cacheable, and open by design.

Update a CSV, run the scripts, push — the whole site regenerates. No servers, no databases, no cost.

Challenges we ran into

We quickly learned that conference deadlines are gloriously inconsistent. Some venues announce months ahead; others match nothing in any public dataset. Roughly 30 venues (ISSCC, LREC, and friends) simply had no reliable machine-readable source, so we designed a graceful "deadline unconfirmed" state instead of guessing or dropping them.

Timezones were their own adventure — most CFPs use AoE (Anywhere on Earth, UTC-12), and getting the countdowns to reflect that honestly (rather than misleading someone into thinking they have an extra day) took careful handling. Merging a community dataset with our own curated list also meant building a reliable matching layer plus an OVERRIDES mechanism for officially confirmed dates the upstream data hadn't caught yet.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Sensing before it's too late — the D-day countdowns and 12-month dashboard turn scattered CFPs into early, actionable warnings.
• 185 venues, 12 fields, one page — genuinely comprehensive coverage that respects the reality that researchers work across domains.
• Zero-maintenance architecture — a static, open-source, GitHub Pages site that anyone can fork, extend, or self-host in minutes.
• Honest data — we clearly separate ✅ confirmed from 🔮 predicted dates, so users trust what they see and always verify before submitting.

What we learned

Scheduling around AI and systems research events is messier than it looks — deadlines shift, timezones deceive, and no single authority owns the truth. We learned that the most valuable thing we could build wasn't more data, but trustworthy, transparent data: clearly labeling confidence levels, linking back to official sources, and never pretending an estimate is a fact. We also learned how far a thoughtfully-designed static site can go — accessible charts, keyboard navigation, dark mode, and calendar sync, all with no backend.

What's next for Conference

• 📊 A richer dashboard — acceptance-rate trends, historical deadline patterns, and "conferences you might have missed" recommendations
• 🔔 Proactive notifications — email / Slack / push reminders at customizable windows (30 / 14 / 7 / 1 days out)
• 🤝 Community contributions — one-click PRs to add a venue or correct a date, so the calendar improves with every user
• 🌏 Broader coverage — journals, workshops, and regional venues beyond the current 185
• 🧠 Smarter predictions — model next-cycle deadlines from historical patterns with confidence intervals

Try it now → leemgs.github.io/conference — subscribe to the calendar, and never miss a deadline again. ⭐ Star the repo and add your favorite venue!

Built With

• conference