Most top conferences are double blind, meaning that reviewers cannot see who authors are and vice-versa. So in theory it does not matter if you are professional

Most top conferences are double blind, meaning that reviewers cannot see who authors are and vice-versa. So in theory it does not matter if you are professional researcher or not. However in practice, its almost trivial to identify a paper written by amature vs someone who has gone through the graduate studies. So if you want to get published your priority should be to avoid these mistakes. Here are some of things to remember: * Read a lot of papers with a related work. Unless you have read and understood at least half a dozen of these, you are likely not ready to publish new work. * Learn technical terminology and make sure how to use it precisely. * Identify lose, unverifiable statements. Precision and clarity is super important. * Know the history of the work. Make sure you note folks who came before you. Describe how your approach differs from others and/or builds on other. Failing to cite is one of the top reasons for rejection even for professional researchers. * Get some theoretical grounding of your approach. Formalize your hunches and intuition in math equations that can be manipulated. * Design experiments that shows your approach delivers better result than other under conditions you claim. * Study the layout of other papers, their style and emulate them. Pay attention to how figures, data tables are describes, conclusions are made, claims are stated etc. I often say that the primary job of researcher is to read papers and stay up to date and secondary job is to make new discoveries. The way developers are supposed to spend major chunk of their time to write code, researchers are supposed to read papers. So familiarizing current state of the art and knowing what has been done before, understanding pro and cons, internalizing techniques, learning related math skills etc must be your absolute top priority for the area you want to contribute. If you have never published before, writing academic paper is a major chore. It can easily take up 2-3 weeks of your time in ironing out details after you have good results. However publishing paper is also satisfying. You add the knowledge pool of humanity, your contribution can be built upon by others, you get noted as "first people who did X" and so on. However don't expect to build career as researcher - that strictly requires PhD. On a side note, there are bunch of non-academic or semi-academic conferences which have less rigorous demands. So you can try to publish there as well. I've seen lot of developers publish system design related papers at places like KDD.