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
Jonathan Smith said,
July 16, 2025 @ 6:50 pm
other stale track news:
millennials or someone: "that tracks" = aligns cough with my observations/intuitions
sports commentator eggcorn: "on track" > "untracked" e.g. "he (streaky shooter) finally got untracked in the 3rd quarter"
Jonathan Smith said,
July 16, 2025 @ 6:52 pm
P.S. had to search for "back untracked" and unsurprisingly, "And then on the boys' side: Can Rockford Christian get back untracked" etc. etc.
Jonathan Smith said,
July 16, 2025 @ 6:59 pm
I think "tracking" in U.S. education is a middle/high school "ability level" thing. Wikipedia's article says it "may be referred to as streaming or phasing in some schools." 'Tis old.
Garrett Wollman said,
July 16, 2025 @ 8:21 pm
Joining the chorus to say that "track" seems perfectly ordinary to me; like Mark it did not occur to me that it would be field-specific. In my career I think I've only ever attended one conference/meeting that was small enough to be "single-track", and I've certainly used the word to describe the structure of conferences (like LSA) even when the formal agenda does not.
So one thing that I think is usually the case with multi-track conferences is that the individual tracks tend to have dedicated spaces: the organizers will have some idea of how popular each track is likely to be, and that makes the room-scheduling problem much simpler if you have, say, one room for "theory papers" and one for "practice & experience", and can join the two for plenaries and keynotes.
Bob Ladd said,
July 17, 2025 @ 12:10 am
Thanks, Mark, and thanks everyone. I'm familiar with the educational usage of track, of course, and I agree it's been around for ages. But in that usage the metaphor of the "track" – going along a specific path or set of paths to a goal – seems transparent (as it does also in the case where specific groups of people follow a special sequence of stages along the track, as in VHM's "heritage track"). That's what I'm missing in the conference use. A special session on a specific topic at a conference doesn't suggest some sort of sequence on the way to a goal.
NB also "fast track" in British airports – you can pay extra to join a special queue to get through security faster. The idea of a route and a destination is clear.
Jason Stokes said,
July 17, 2025 @ 1:07 am
A "track", in conference terms, is a particular set of thematically linked seminars or other events, that represents one "track" or pathway through the program. In the conference program they will typically be organised as one column of the general timetable. Often, all events in a given track will be based in the same room, so a "track" is experienced somewhat like a tv channel. The conference equivalent of channel surfing is to move from track to track as the mood takes you. Therefore I believe "Channel" might have been chosen instead of "Track".
I suspect this terminology might have originated from the science fiction convention scene. Dragon-Con's Trek Trak, for example, a yearly track dedicated to Star Trek, is an institution that has run since 1993.
Bob Ladd said,
July 17, 2025 @ 4:53 am
@Jason Stokes and others: After I posted my reply, I began to suspect that part of the problem is that I have never been to a conference big enough to have "tracks" that make metaphorical sense as a path through a gigantic program. The largest conference I attend with some regularity (ICPhS, International Congress of Phonetic Sciences) meets every four years and typically has attendance numbers one side or the other of one thousand. The last conference I went to, in May (TAI, Tone and Intonation), involved two or three hundred. ICPhS has parallel sessions, but no "tracks"; TAI was all plenary. The kinds of arrangements described by Jason and others make perfect metaphorical sense as "tracks" – but it's just that I'd never experienced that kind of conference structure before. Man lernt nie aus.
JimG said,
July 17, 2025 @ 7:37 am
Conference tracks are old news In my experience, they are a compensatory choice when an organization expands its membership and interests too far for short, focused conferences. Of course, conferences exist because meetings didn't suffice.
It's also my impression that conferences exist because media, especially printed, have unsatisfactory leadtimes and coverage. Media businesses long ago got into conference organizing.
JimG said,
July 17, 2025 @ 7:55 am
Regarding planners' terminology choice:
Media-focused organizers may have preferred the telecommunications metaphor, following radio and TV channeling.
Organizers with an operational or logistical background mindset may have in mind the railroad metaphor, laying down tracks.
My background crossed the fields of journalism and media, and defense, military and aviation.
Viseguy said,
July 17, 2025 @ 12:32 pm
5
I'm not familiar with the usage, and wondered whether it implied that conference participants would be forced/expected to choose one track to the exclusion of others, but @Jason Stokes has answered my question in a way that I regard as reassuring.
Viseguy said,
July 17, 2025 @ 12:34 pm
D/k where the "5" came from….
Frans said,
July 18, 2025 @ 2:38 pm
Seen today: https://gwolf.org/2025/07/about-our-proof-of-concept-llm-tool-for-navigating-debian-s-manpages.html
Philip Taylor said,
July 19, 2025 @ 4:10 pm
"For which of them" ?
Frans said,
July 20, 2025 @ 6:01 am
I assume that's intended to say "for each of them".
Jarek Weckwerth said,
July 20, 2025 @ 2:34 pm
There is one more usage where track has been in circulation for some time, but it's sort-of hidden. Many conference management software solutions (I can think of Easychair and Microsoft CMT off the top of my head) will allow/require you to organize abstract submission and reviewing into tracks if you want special/thematic sessions to be managed by their organizers who are not necessarily part of the main organizing committee. What those things are called in the programme or in official communications may be different (depending on the decisions of the organizers), but the software will call those tracks.