Call for papers: Social Media Analysis for Humanitarian and Development Challenges at GoodIT 2022

[Muhammad Imran]

Call for Papers
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Social Media Analysis for Humanitarian and Development Challenges (https://www.socialmedia4good.org/)
Special Track at GoodIT (https://cyprusconferences.org/goodit2022/)

Addressing societal, humanitarian, and development challenges posed by large-scale emergencies requires multidisciplinary research to build knowledge, computational methods, and technologies from different disciplines. This track at GoodIT 2022 aims to shape an emerging research area that lies at the intersection of various scientific disciplines, including computational social science, crisis informatics, and humanities. Research contributions, to be included in the archival conference proceedings, can be one of three types:

1. Analysis and modeling papers
This paper category is for cutting-edge work on using data from social media to analyze and model elements of humanitarian and development challenges. Can data from social media be used to improve COVID-19 models? How can social media data be used to help fill data gaps on issues such as poverty or gender inequality? Potential topics of interest for this category include the following:
- Computational methods for extracting situational awareness and actionable information
- Techniques for geospatial and temporal data analysis and geo-location mapping
- Qualitative and quantitative methods for assessing social impact caused by large-scale emergencies
- Time-critical analysis, classification, or mining of social media data for social good
- Novel social media data processing techniques for practical anonymization and privacy-enhancement
- Novel techniques for the aggregation of a combination of text and/or image-based social media data

Evaluation criteria include methodological soundness, novelty of the approach, and performance against other analysis and modeling approaches.

2. Experience reports and systems papers
This paper category is for reports “from the trenches” and for evaluations of real systems. What happens when the rubber meets the road and a humanitarian crisis unfolds in real-time? How can social media analysis fit into the actual workflows of emergency responders? What are the challenges in building and evaluating real-world systems? Potential topics of interest for this category include the following:
- Novel systems with real-world social sensing data applications
- Innovative use of emerging technologies, including AI for humanitarian and social good problems
- Papers reporting challenges in building and evaluating innovative real-world systems
- Real-time social media processing systems for information classification, extraction, or management
- Qualitative and quantitative methods for assessing and responding to social media inputs from community-based and/or individual feedback, particularly from vulnerable/affected populations.

Evaluation criteria include the generalizability of the described findings, recommendations made to other practitioners, and the scale of a real-world deployment.

3. Discussion and vision papers
This paper category is for reflections and path-defining visions. Is any use of social media not in direct violation of the “leave no-one behind” paradigm? Can social media really be used in the most vulnerable, low internet penetration communities? How can we ethically use social media when the traditional notions of “consent” might be unenforceable for Big Data? How can we avoid simply extracting information and, rather, take an approach of centering local voices? Potential topics of interest for this category include the following:
- Ethical and human rights-based approaches to the use of technologies in development or humanitarian settings, applied to social media or other text-based platforms
- Papers discussing localization techniques for the integration of social media, including but not limited to discussions of language, moderation, and accessibility of both the social media platform and its operational use by humanitarian and/or development actors
- Novel applications of social media and other text-based platforms for increasing awareness and advocacy in development/humanitarian issues

Evaluation criteria include relevance to humanitarian and development challenges, consideration of user integration and feedback mechanisms, concepts of ethical and human-rights-based approaches to technologies, especially for AI and other exponential technologies, and the generalizability of the discussion.

Special Issue in EPJ Data Science (https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/)
Selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version to EPJ Data Science (5-yr Impact Factor 4.3). We plan to carry over the reviewers from the conference to the journal to ensure consistency. Further details will be announced in early 2022.

Important Dates
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Submission deadline for all types of contributions: 23 May, 2022
Notification of acceptance for contributions: 20 June, 2022
Camera-ready submission: 11 July, 2022

Submission Details
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Formatting:
Authors prepare their manuscript in the designated single-column format using Word (https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/publications/taps/acm_submission_template.docx) or LaTeX (https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/publications/consolidated-tex-template/acmart-primary.zip) (use the sample-manuscript.tex for submissions). LaTeX users should use \documentclass[manuscript, review]{acmart}. We strongly recommend using the LaTeX template rather than Word (Latex best practices for TAPS: https://www.acm.org/publications/taps/latex-best-practices).

Authors can also use the ACM LaTeX template on the Overleaf platform (https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/acm-conference-proceedings-master-template/pnrfvrrdbfwt).

Length:
Papers must not exceed 11 single-column pages, including figures, tables, and references.

Submission policy:
Papers submitted for consideration should not have been already published elsewhere and should not be under review elsewhere during the duration of consideration. As GoodIT is an ACM venue, you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies (https://www.acm.org/publications/policies), including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects (https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/research-involving-human-participants-and-subjects).

Papers violating the policy or formatting guidelines will be returned without review. All submissions will be reviewed using a single-blind review process. The identity of referees will not be revealed to authors, but authors should keep their names on the submitted papers, on figures, bibliography, etc.

Submission system:
Papers must be submitted in PDF format via the conference submission system at: https://goodit2022.hotcrp.com/. Please choose the "Social Media Analysis for Humanitarian and Development Challenges" track when submitting your paper to this special track.

Track Organizers
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Muhammad Imran, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU (https://mimran.me/)
Rebeca Moreno Jimenez, UNHCR Innovation (https://twitter.com/rebecamoreno)
Ingmar Weber, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU (https://ingmarweber.de/publications/)