Connectionists: Call for papers & projects - SoGood 2019 - 4th Workshop on Data Science for Social Good @ ECML PKDD

[Ricard Gavaldà]

CALL FOR PAPERS AND CALL FOR PROJECTS

SoGood 2019 - 4th Workshop on Data Science for Social Good
September 20th, 2019, Wurzburg, Germany
Affiliated with ECML-PKDD 2019, http://www.ecmlpkdd2019.org/

Workshop site: https://sites.google.com/view/ecmlpkddsogood2019/

This is the fourth edition of the workshop; the previous three were held 
jointly with ECML-PKDD 2016, 2017 and 2018.

This edition introduces a novelty: This is a CALL FOR PAPERS and a CALL 
FOR PROJECTS.

********** CALL FOR PAPERS **********

The possibilities of Data Science for contributing to social, common, or 
public good are often not sufficiently perceived by the public at large. 
Data Science applications are already helping in serving people at the 
bottom of the economic pyramid, aiding people with special needs, 
helping international cooperation, and dealing with environmental 
problems, disasters, and climate change. In regular conferences and 
journals, papers on these topics are often scattered among sessions with 
names that hide their common nature (such as "Social networks", 
"Predictive models" or the catch-all term "Applications"). Additionally, 
such forums tend to have a strong bias for papers that are novel in the 
strictly technical sense (new algorithms, new kinds of data analysis, 
new technologies) rather than novel in terms of social impact of the 
application.

This workshop aims to attract papers presenting applications of Data 
Science for Social Good (which may, or may not require new methods), or 
applications that take into account social aspects of Data Science 
methods and techniques. There are numerous application domains, a 
non-exclusive list includes:

* Government transparency and IT against corruption
* Public safety and disaster relief
* Access to food, water and utilities
* Efficiency and sustainability
* Data journalism
* Economic, social and personal development
* Transportation
* Energy
* Smart city services
* Education
* Social services, unemployment and homelessness
* Healthcare
* Ethical issues, fairness and accountability
* Topics aligned with the UN development goals: 
http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/

The major selection criteria will be the novelty of the application and 
its social impact.

We are also interested in applications that have built a successful 
business model and are able to sustain themselves economically. Most 
Social Good applications have been carried out by non-profit and charity 
organisations, conveying the idea that Social Good is a luxury that only 
societies with a surplus can afford. We would like to hear from 
successful projects, which may not be strictly "non-profit" but have 
Social Good as their main focus.

There will be an award for the best paper.

Paper submission:

Authors should submit a PDF version in Springer LNCS style using the 
workshop EasyChair site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sogood2019

The maximum length of papers in 16 pages, consistent with the ECML-PKDD 
conference submissions.

Submitting a paper to the workshop means that if the paper is accepted 
at least one author will attend the workshop and present the paper. 
Papers not presented at the workshop will not be included in the 
proceedings.

Paper publication:

Accepted papers will be published in a volume of the Springer Lecture 
Notes of Artificial Intelligence,
containing the proceedings ECML-PKDD workshops.

********** CALL FOR PROJECTS **********

The need for Data Science often appears in organizations that do not 
have the technical abilities, even though they have pressing data 
problems and interesting data.

The goal of this call for projects is to help put in touch such 
organizations with
researchers who could help in framing the problem in Data Science terms,
and perhaps contribute to its solution.

Typical proposers could be non-academic (e.g. government organisations, 
NGOs) or non-Computer Science academics (e.g. from Health, Psychology, 
Social Sciences).
Projects by organizations that have the capacity to hire data scientists
for the project are not acceptable. Projects that could be solved
by routine application of standard techniques are also not encouraged.

Hence, consider submitting a description of a project, either a 
well-formed oneor just an embryo, if you have access to interesting 
data, a socially relevant problem to solve, and if you do not have 
access to data scientists or the capacity of hiring them.

Project submission:

Authors should submit a PDF version via Easychair, 
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sogood2019.
Springer LNCS style is recommended but not required.

The maximum length of submissions is 3 pages. Project descriptions 
should include

- title and authors (names, affiliations, email),
- what the problem is,
- why it is important,
- what kind of data is available,
- what type of help/collaboration is needed.

Project descriptions will be evaluated by the Program Committee for 
interest and relevance to the workshop. For accepted projects, if the 
authors attendthe workshop, they will have a 5-10 minute slot to present 
the it; otherwise,
they should prepare a recorded talk that we will shown during the workshop.

Project descriptions will not be included in the workshop proceedings,
but will be archived on the workshop's website.

********** INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS **********

Workshop format:

* Full-day workshop
* A keynote talk, speaker to be announced
* Oral presentation of accepted papers
* Oral presentation or video presentation of accepted projects.
* Panel discussion with audience.

Important Dates:

- Workshop paper/project submission deadline: Monday, July 1, 2019
- Workshop paper/project acceptance notification : Friday, July 19, 2019
- Workshop paper camera-ready deadline: Monday, July 26, 2019
- Workshop: Friday September 20th, 2019

Program Committee members:

- Albert Bifet, Telecom ParisTech, France
- Itziar de Lecuona, University of Barcelona, Spain
- Jeremiah Deng, University of Otago, New Zealand
- Cesar Ferri, Technical University of Valencia, Spain
- Geoffrey Holmes, University of Waikato, New Zealand
- Josep-Lluis Larriba-Pey, UPC BarcelonaTech, Spain
- Rita Ribeiro, University of Porto, Portugal
- Alicia Troncoso, University Pablo de Olavide, Spain
- Evgueni Smirnov, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands
- Kristina Yordanova, University of Rostock, Germany

Organizers and contact:

* Ricard Gavalda (UPC BarcelonaTech, Spain), gavalda at cs.upc.edu
* Irena Koprinska (University of Sydney, Australia), 
irena.koprinska at sydney.edu.au
* Joao Gama (University of Porto, Portugal), jgama at fep.up.pt

Workshop site: https://sites.google.com/view/ecmlpkddsogood2019/