Conference Quality

The overabundance of conferences makes it absolutely necessary to prune and submit selectively. Based on 2007 Australian Ranking of ICT Conferences based on data collected over five years and Computer Science Conference Ranking which employs the Estimated Impact of Conference (EIC), I have listed only the places relevant to robotics and/or machine learning. Based on | [1], [2], [3], I have tried to distill all available ranking information.

ConferenceEICAustralian RankingAcceptance Rate in YearCite ScholarCiteSeer Rank (2008)
AAAI: American Association for AI National Conference0.99A+24.2% in 20083.1399
NIPS: Neural Information Processing Systems0.98A+24% in 20062.6945
KDD: Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining0.97A+23% in 20067.05119
IJCAI: Intl Joint Conf on AI0.96A+18% in 20052.6661
ICML: Intl Conf on Machine Learning0.95A+27% in 20086.0938
UAI: Conference on Uncertainty in AI0.91A+32% in 2006139
AAMAS: Intl Conf on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems0.76A+36% in 20083.12361
ECML: European Conf on Machine Learning0.76A19.70% in 2005134
ICPR: Intl Conf on Pattern Recognition0.76A62.8% in 20060.81
ECAI: European Conf on AI0.76A26% in 20061.38531
ICDM: IEEE International Conference on Data Mining0.73A+19% in 20072.3423
PKDD: Principles of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery0.62A 393
ICRA: IEEE Intl Conf on Robotics and Automation0.60B38% in 20061.48372
ICONIP: Intl Conf on Neural Information Processing0.56A33% in 2006
R:SS: Robotics: Science & Systems0.53A+17% in 201048
SDM: SIAM Intl Conference on Data Mining0.51A16% in 2006370
IROS: International Conference on Intelligent Robot Systems<0.5B58.2% in 20100.79

The CiteSeerX Rank of 100 or smaller is common for top conferences.

Another ranking of top conferences in CS.

Note that Microsoft also supplies interesting data on some of these venues.

Unfortunately, these statistics are NOT as solid as the ones of the jounal impact factors. However, a robotics or machine learning conference which is not on this list will most likely not be considered "refereed publications" when you apply for jobs.

An engine that may become helpful in the future is http://citescholar.org/. Unfortunately, they are still missing top conferences such as R:SS.