This is a guide when you are (1) prioritizing papers to read and (2) finding venues to submit. Whether you submit to conference or journals depend on (1) budget - do you have a budget to travel and register for the conference (btw, there are many available scholarships), and (2) do your university prefer journals or conferences? TLDR: Both types of venues (listed below) are good for both Master/Ph.D. students.
Conference
Note: h5-index is related to average citations. h5-index above 30-40 is usually considered very decent.
1. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
h5-index: 203 Website: iclr.cc Focus: Deep Learning
ICLR is one of the fastest-growing artificial intelligence conferences in the world. The International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) is the premier gathering of professionals dedicated to the advancement of the branch of artificial intelligence called representation learning but generally referred to as deep learning. ICLR is globally renowned for presenting and publishing cutting-edge research on all aspects of deep learning used in the fields of artificial intelligence, statistics, and data science, as well as important application areas such as machine vision, computational biology, speech recognition, text understanding, gaming, and robotics. The conference is presided by "Godfathers of AI" Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio.
2. Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
h5-index: 198 Website: nips.cc
The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (abbreviated as NeurIPS and formerly NIPS) is a machine learning and computational neuroscience conference held every December. The conference is currently a double-track meeting (single-track until 2015) that includes invited talks as well as oral and poster presentations of refereed papers, followed by parallel-track workshops. Landmark publications in the past include object detector Faster R-CNN and the Attention Is All You Need paper that introduced the Transformer architecture.
3. International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
h5-index: 171 Website: icml.cc
The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is the premier gathering of professionals dedicated to the advancement of the branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning. ICML is globally renowned for presenting and publishing cutting-edge research on all aspects of machine learning used in closely related areas like artificial intelligence, statistics and data science, as well as important application areas such as machine vision, computational biology, speech recognition, and robotics. ICML is one of the fastest growing artificial intelligence conferences in the world. Participants at ICML span a wide range of backgrounds, from academic and industrial researchers, to entrepreneurs and engineers, to graduate students and postdocs.
4. AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
h5-index: 126 Website: aaai.org
The 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21) will have a diverse technical track, student abstracts, poster sessions, invited speakers, tutorials, workshops, and exhibit and competition programs, all selected according to the highest reviewing standards. AAAI-21 welcomes submissions on mainstream AI topics as well as novel crosscutting work in related areas. Among the highlights this year is the Liquid Time-Constant Networks paper by Hasani et al. (news.mit.edu).
5. Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
h5-index: 135 Website: 2021.aclweb.org Focus: Language Processing
ACL is the premier conference of the field of computational linguistics, covering a broad spectrum of diverse research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. It will be held jointly with the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).
6. ACM International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)
h5-index: 90 Website: kdd.org/kdd2021 Focus: Data Mining
The Special Interest Group for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining of the Association for Computing Machinery hosts the annual premier forum for data mining researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to share ideas, research results and experiences.
Journals
Note: IF (impact factor) is related to a number of citations. IF above 2 is usually considered decent.
1. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
IF: 16.389 Website: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=34 Focus: Deep Learning
The IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) publishes articles on computer vision and image understanding, pattern analysis and recognition, and selected areas of machine intelligence, with special emphasis on machine learning for pattern analysis. Some of the famous researches published here include Faster R-CNN, SegNet, among others.
2. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
IF: 10.451 Website: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=5962385 Focus: Deep Learning
The IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems publishes technical articles that deal with the theory, design, and applications of neural networks and related learning systems. Each published article is vetted by a minimum of two independent reviewers using a single-blind peer-review process. The identities of the reviewers are not known to the authors.
3. Elsevier Pattern Recognition
IF: 7.740 Website: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/pattern-recognition Focus: Deep Learning
The Elsevier Pattern Recognition journal was established five decades ago and covers developments in cognate fields such as computer vision, image processing, text and document analysis, and neural networks. The journal accepts papers making original contributions to the theory, methodology, and application of pattern recognition in any area.
4. Journal of Machine Learning Research
IF: 9.041 Website: https://www.jmlr.org Focus: Deep Learning
The Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) provides an international forum for the electronic and paper publication of high-quality scholarly articles in machine learning. The journal has published various articles and papers by researchers from MIT, Facebook AI, Cornell University, Princeton University, etc.
5. Wiley International Journal of Intelligent Systems
IF: 8.709 Website: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1098111x Focus: Deep Learning
The International Journal of Intelligent Systems covers research on intelligent systems construction. This journal’s editors include brilliant minds from Guangzhou University, Carnegie-Mellon University, Tsinghua University, and more.