What is Anywhere on Earth (AoE)?

Anywhere on Earth (AoE) is the timezone UTC-12 — the last place on the planet where a given calendar date is still current. When a call for papers says a deadline is "July 28, 23:59 AoE", it means: you have not missed it as long as it is still July 28 somewhere on Earth.

In practice, AoE is the most forgiving reading of a date. July 28, 23:59 AoE equals July 29, 11:59 UTC — which is July 29, 07:59 in New York, 13:59 in Berlin, and 19:59 in Beijing.

Why conferences use it

Program committees adopted AoE so nobody has to argue about timezones: whatever your longitude, the printed date is the date. NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, ACL, CHI, and most other major venues state their submission deadlines in AoE.

The two mistakes to avoid

First, do not treat AoE as your local midnight — if you live east of UTC-12 (almost everyone), you have more time than the date suggests. Second, do not rely on that extra margin: submission servers can slow to a crawl in the final hour, and some venues close their submission portals according to their own local clock.

Every deadline on FlowFocus stores its original AoE (or local) wall time and shows a live countdown, so you never do this conversion by hand. Deadlines in the calendar feeds are converted to UTC for your calendar app.