IPSN Supplementary

Use this when assembling IPSN supplementary material. The governing rule is simple and strict: the paper must be judgeable from the reviewed pages alone. The artifact, appendix, and any dataset support the paper; they do not hold the argument. Reviewers open the artifact at their discretion, so anything the decision depends on lives in the ≤12-page body.

What goes where

If a reviewer would need to open the artifact or a demo to know whether to accept, the paper is mis-partitioned — move that evidence into the body.

The ≤12-page discipline

IPSN's ACM two-column budget (IPSN 2024: ≤12 pages inclusive of figures, tables, and references; successor SenSys: 12/6) is compact and counts everything. Consequences:

• The energy/latency budget, the primary results with ground truth, and the limits section are decision-critical — keep them in the body.
• Long protocol tables, per-node deployment breakdowns, full sensitivity sweeps, and extra sites go to the artifact/appendix with explicit forward references.
• Do not use the artifact to smuggle in a result that would not fit — an argument that only closes with material outside the reviewed pages reads as unreviewable.
• There is no separate reference allowance in the inclusive budget; a bloated bibliography costs body space directly.

Double-blind supplementary rules

[No identity]   no authors, affiliations, acknowledgements, grants, lab-named testbeds, or repo owners
                anywhere in the archive, appendix, board files, or imagery
[Anonymized links] dataset/firmware links point at an anonymizing host, not a personal repo or a DOI
                that resolves to an author
[Clean imagery]  board photos and scope screenshots stripped of lab logos/watermarks; site names generalized
[Clean archive]  no .git history, credentials, caches, or large irrelevant binaries
[Opens clean]    the archive unzips and a README orients a reviewer in one minute on a fresh machine

Demo/poster and dataset paths

• IPSN ran a separate demos/posters track (its own HotCRP historically). A live-hardware demo or a poster is a different deliverable from the paper — do not rely on it to carry the paper's argument. In the merged successor, demos/posters publish in the IEEE proceedings (verify).
• A dataset release can be a first-class contribution, but at submission it must be anonymized; reserve the DOI-issuing archive (Zenodo / IEEE DataPort) for camera-ready.

Appendix architecture (when the template allows in-paper appendices)

• Order appendix sections to mirror the evaluation order; reviewers navigate by claim, not page number.
• Keep each appendix section referenced from the body at least once — orphaned material is invisible under discretionary review.
• Confirm on the current call whether appendices count against the ≤12-page budget or attach separately; this varies and changes the split.

Vignette: splitting a deployment paper

A paper deploying nodes with an on-device estimator: the body keeps the sensing claim, the method, the headline energy/yield/accuracy numbers with ground truth, and a limits subsection; the artifact holds firmware and board files, the raw traces, the surveyed ground truth and calibration, the per-node/per-day breakdowns, and the analysis scripts. Nothing decision-critical lives only in the artifact, because artifact inspection is discretionary and reviewers judge from the pages.

Output format

[Supplement status] ready / needs fixes / not ready
[Partition check] anything decision-critical outside the body? <none / move: what>
[Page budget] body within ≤12 pp inclusive? appendices counted correctly? yes/no
[Anonymity] archive + board files + imagery clean of identity? passed/issues
[Body dependency] <what a reviewer can decide without opening the artifact/demo>