DAC Workflow

Run the DAC year backward from the deadline. DAC's Research-Manuscript cycle is a single annual deadline in mid-to-late November (DAC 2026: manuscript ~19 November 2025) leading to a July conference (DAC 2026: Long Beach, California, 26-29 July 2026). Unlike the two-cycle software venues, DAC gives you one archival shot per year, so the calendar is unforgiving. Every date below is a DAC 2026 snapshot read on 2026-07-09; reopen the live event pages first (resources/official-source-map.md).

The two-stage submission (do not miss stage one)

DAC splits the research submission into two stages on the Softconf/START system (dac26):

• Stage 1 — Abstract. Register title, full abstract, and all co-authors roughly a week before the manuscript deadline. This stage seeds reviewer assignment and conflict detection; if you skip it, the system will not accept your PDF later.
• Stage 2 — Manuscript. Upload the anonymized 6+1-page PDF by the manuscript deadline. There is no grace period to fix a malformed or non-anonymous PDF after the cutoff.