Tracks
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In a comment on "Alignment", Bob Ladd wrote:
I was also curious about "track" in the announcement quoted in the OP. I don't think I've ever been to a conference where you can focus on a specific "track". Is this a tech thing? An AI thing? Or have I just not been paying attention?
The portion of the AAAI-26 page in question [emphasis added]:
AAAI-26 is pleased to announce a special track focused on AI Alignment.
Similar language can be found in the pages for AAAI-25:
AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.
And the same sentence in the page for AAAI-24:
AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.
A similar usage can be found in the announcements for "Special Sessions" at Interspeech 2024 and Interspeech 2025:
Inaugurated for Interspeech 2024, the BLUE SKY track will again be open for submission this year. The Technical Program Chairs would like to encourage authors to consider submitting to this track of highly innovative papers with strong theoretical or conceptual justification in fields or directions that have not yet been explored. Large-scale experimental evaluation will not be required for papers in this track. Incremental work will not be accepted. If you are an 'out-of-the-box' thinker, who gets inspiration from high-risk, strange, unusual or unexpected ideas/directions that go purposefully against the mainstream topics and established research paradigms — please consider submitting a paper on this challenging and competitive track! Who knows you might launch the next scientific revolution in the speech field? Please note that to achieve the objectives of this BLUE SKY track, we will ask the most experienced reviewers (mainly our ISCA Fellow members) to assess the proposals.
Like may similar conferences, IEEE ICASSP 2025 has an "Industry Track". Here's a similar list from ACL 2025.
And back in 2013, the IEEE published a page on "Conference tracks" in the "2013 7th IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (DEST)", which lists tracks A ("foundations of digital ecosystems and complex environment engineering") through K ("Big data ecosystems").
So without further delving, we can conclude that "track" has been widely used for a while to mean a set of conference presentations that are temporally and spatially diffuse, but topically coherent. This is useful for participants finding their way through multiple parallel sessions, and (at least sometimes) it also plays a role in the refereeing of submission.
The cultural orbit of this usage is not clear to me — I don't see it in materials for LSA or MLA meetings, but it's certainly common in conferences like AAAI, Interspeech, IEEE, ACL, and so on. Before thinking about Bob's question, it never occurred to me that it was not a natural and universal usage.
rpsms said,
July 16, 2025 @ 10:06 am
"Tracking" and e.g A-track, honors-track etc. is well established and attested in education.
Charles in Toronto said,
July 16, 2025 @ 12:31 pm
Kind of makes me think of the theatrical use of "track". Let's say you are putting on a musical. You have a bunch of main role cast, minor role cast, swings and alternates. Most of the understudies are people in minor or swing roles. So when a few people are absent you have to fill their roles from the pool of available people.
It's not uncommon that when performing these substitutions, the director also has to rearrange which bit parts a cast member may perform throughout the show. For example maybe when a main cast member fell ill and you promoted a swing into their role, that swing had an important dance solo in one act and an important vocal solo in another, but none of the swings/alternates can perform both of them, so you have to split those parts among different people. In the end each cast member has a "track" they follow, playing various roles pulled out of the script from start to finish.
I wonder if this usage somehow transferred from theatre to conferences? Would not be a far stretch.
DJL said,
July 16, 2025 @ 12:41 pm
I have been to a few CogSci conferences and I’m pretty sure the talk of ‘tracks’ was very common in the conference programmes.
Frans said,
July 16, 2025 @ 4:03 pm
It doesn't strike me as remarkable as per the first comment by rpsms. Unless it means something completely different than a "track" of break-out sessions.
Victor Mair said,
July 16, 2025 @ 4:17 pm
In the Chinese section of my department at Penn (East Asian Languages and Civilizations), we've been saying things like "heritage track" for many years. "Heritage learners" indicate that Chinese is spoken at home, but they probably can't read or write any characters.
cameron said,
July 16, 2025 @ 5:24 pm
I agree with the comments above that this usage is very common in academia, and has been for quite a long time