Privacy Policy

Axiom Symposium is an online research conference operated at https://axiomsymposium.org. We refer to it below as "Axiom Symposium", "we" or "the service". This policy applies to students, parents and guardians, judges and administrators who use the site.

Registration details such as your name, email address, school, grade, city, state and country; project information such as title, category, abstract, mentor and coauthor names; and anything you type into forms, including messages to administrators and reasons recorded during administrative actions.

We store your email address, a securely hashed password if you create one, your account role (student, judge or administrator) and the timestamps of account events such as sign-up, email confirmation and sign-in. Roles are assigned on our servers; they cannot be changed from the browser. Judge and administrator accounts are created only by the conference office.

If you choose "Continue with Google", we receive only basic Google account information needed to sign you in: your name, your email address, your Google account identifier and your profile image if Google provides one.

We request only standard sign-in information — the openid, email and profile scopes. We do not request or receive access to Gmail, Google Drive files, Google Calendar or your contacts.

This information is used to authenticate you, to create or match your Axiom Symposium account, to keep your account secure and to provide the service you asked for. Google user data is never sold and is not used for any purpose other than those described here.

Your project title, category, abstract, school and location details, mentor and coauthor disclosures, and draft versions saved while you work. Drafts are stored so you can return to them later.

Your research paper, presentation slides and any optional supplementary file are stored in private storage. They are never publicly downloadable. Authorised viewers reach them only through short-lived private links.

Your recorded presentation is captured in the browser from your camera and microphone and uploaded to private storage. Attempt records, including discarded attempts, are kept so the conference can apply attempt limits fairly and review technical problems.

Your oral research defense is recorded as audio and/or video and stored privately. Records of the session, including which question you were answering and when, are retained for integrity review and administration.

Your presentation and defense recordings are transcribed on our servers. The transcripts, the questions asked and your answers are stored with your project and shown to the judges assigned to it and to administrators.

Judges record scores for each rubric criterion, per-criterion comments, written strengths and areas for improvement, overall feedback, an optional internal note for administrators and any conflict-of-interest declaration. Judges cannot see each other's reviews. Students see feedback only after an administrator releases their results, and judge identities are not shown to students.

We store finalised scores and averages, disagreement flags, award decisions and the record of who released or retracted a result and when. Results are never released automatically.

When results are released we may issue a credential with a unique verification code and a QR code. Anyone holding the exact code can open a public verification page. That page may show the student name, project title, category, conference and year, the award if any, and whether the credential is active, inactive or revoked. Scores, judge feedback, recordings, transcripts and research files never appear on it, and codes cannot be browsed or guessed from a list.

Where a payment is required, payment processing is handled by Stripe. Card details are entered with Stripe and Axiom Symposium does not receive or store full card numbers. We may keep a record that a payment succeeded and which account it relates to. Stripe processes payment and billing information under its own privacy practices.

Our hosting, database and storage providers keep standard technical logs such as IP address, browser type, request times and error details. We also keep an internal audit log of significant administrative actions. This information is used to operate the service, diagnose problems and protect against abuse.

To create and secure accounts; to run the submission, presentation, oral defense and judging workflow; to generate defense questions from your own submitted materials; to calculate and finalise results; to decide and record awards; to generate reports and credentials; to support participants; and to keep the conference honest and functioning.

We rely on third parties to run the service: our application hosting and backend platform (database, authentication and private file storage), a transcription and language-model provider used to transcribe recordings and generate defense questions, an email delivery provider for account and conference emails, and Stripe for payments. Providers receive only what they need to perform their function and are not permitted to use your content for their own purposes. Content sent for transcription or question generation is not used to train third-party models.

We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for advertising. Beyond the service providers above, we share information only with the people the conference requires: judges see the projects assigned to them, administrators see what they need to run the conference, and a parent or guardian may be involved where authorisation is required. We may also disclose information where the law requires it or to protect someone's safety.

The only information that can become public is (a) a project you and an administrator have chosen to publish on the showcase and (b) the limited credential details shown on a verification page opened with an exact code. Everything else — files, recordings, transcripts, scores, judge comments and contact details — stays restricted by our access rules.

We keep conference records — submissions, recordings, transcripts, reviews, results, credentials and audit entries — for as long as needed to run the conference, answer questions about results, and support credential verification. Credential records are kept so that issued verification codes continue to resolve. You may ask us to delete your material as described below.

Accounts are authenticated through our backend platform. Research files and recordings are held in private storage and reached only through short-lived links issued after a server-side permission check. Database access rules restrict every record by role and ownership, and sensitive operations are logged. No system is perfectly secure, but we work to keep access limited to the people who need it.

Axiom Symposium is designed for middle and high school students, so many participants are minors. We collect from them only what the conference needs, and their submissions, recordings and results are private by default.

We have not yet published a minimum age for independent registration. Until we do, parents and guardians should review this policy with their student before the student registers, and may contact the conference office with questions about a minor's account. We do not claim certification or approval under any particular education or children's privacy programme.

Where the conference requires it, a parent or guardian must authorise a student to record a presentation, complete an oral defense, or have work displayed publicly. A parent or guardian may withdraw that authorisation, which removes the student's project from judging and from any public display, and may ask to review or delete the student's information.

You can review and correct your registration details in your account, and you can choose whether to allow your project to be published. You may ask us for a copy of your information, ask us to correct it, or object to a particular use. Where a legal right applies to you, we will honour it.

You, or a parent or guardian on a student's behalf, may ask the conference office to delete your account and your uploaded material. We will delete what we can and explain anything we must keep — for example a record that a credential was issued or revoked, or an audit entry needed to show how a result was decided. Deleting your submission after judging has begun removes the project from the conference.

An AI system reads your own submitted paper, slides, abstract and presentation transcript to generate research-specific defense questions, and is used to transcribe recordings. The AI does not score your work, does not evaluate you and does not decide awards. Human judges perform the formal evaluation and administrators make award decisions.

If we change this policy we will update this page. Where a change materially affects how we handle participant information, we will notify affected accounts.

For privacy questions, data requests, or questions about a minor's account, contact the Axiom Symposium conference office at admin@axiomsymposium.org.

See also our Terms of Service and the Axiom Symposium home page.