Ten venues that move careers:

  1. NeurIPS: ML flagship. Abstract May 4, paper May 6, 2026 (AOE).
  2. ICML: ML flagship. Abstract late January 2026; conference July 6-12, Seoul.
  3. ICLR: representation learning. Fall submission window for the 2027 cycle.
  4. CVPR: vision flagship. Paper Nov 13, 2025; conference June 3-7, 2026, Denver. 25.4% acceptance in the 2026 cycle.
  5. ACL: NLP flagship.
  6. AAAI: broad AI. Conference Jan 20-27, 2026, Singapore.
  7. KDD: data mining.
  8. SIGIR: information retrieval.
  9. WWW (The Web Conf): web research.
  10. EMNLP: NLP, fall conference.

Check each venue's dual-submission and arXiv policy before posting preprints. Sources: IEEE, ACM All are CORE A* or equivalent top tier. Looking for the best research paper publishers? In CS, these venues outrank journals. Pick by fit, not fame: a great systems paper dies at NeurIPS and thrives at OSDI. Read three years of proceedings in your subfield before choosing; the venue chooses you as much as you choose it.

Conference rankings like the CORE A* list are the fastest way to judge venue prestige in computer science.