Call for Papers: Web4Good (Sustainable Development and Vulnerable Populations)

We invite contributions to the Special Track on Web4Good of The Web Conference 2024 (formerly known as WWW). The conference will take place in Singapore, from May 13 to 17, 2024.

Today’s web and social media solutions do not sufficiently address societal problems related to environmental sustainability, climate action, and vulnerable populations. Moreover, recent trends point towards new risks such as the massive usage of large language models (LLMs) or GenAI applications. Training these systems is computationally expensive and, therefore, an energy-intensive process that amplifies current climate impacts. Besides, these systems are often trained using biassed and uncontrolled datasets, risking significant impacts to vulnerable populations.

We seek papers in which web and social media technologies are investigated, developed or applied to these topics, particularly among vulnerable or marginalized communities and the fostering of sustainable development and healthy human societies.

The goal of this track is to gather researchers and developers from academia, industry, and civil society to present and debate methods for achieving a Web that is inclusive, non discriminative, sustainable, ethical, open, and that can appropriately address emergent societal challenges towards a Web for Good. To achieve this, we look for contributions that describe research results, tools, design techniques and experiments that are being developed to deal with these topics as well as how to develop new partnerships for the data age (Data Collaboratives) to unlock both data and data science capabilities.

Important Dates

  • Abstract: Thursday, November 2, 2023
  • Paper submission: Thursday, November 9, 2023
  • Notification: February 1, 2024

All submission deadlines are end-of-day in the Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone.

Scope

We welcome any submissions that address the broad goals of this Special Track and look forward to seeing the diverse ways in which authors will approach these themes. We especially encourage submissions in the following areas:

  • Datasets for vulnerable populations

  • Impact of web platforms and algorithms on employment and the future of work

  • Impact of web platforms and algorithms on health-related applications

  • Impact of web platforms and algorithms on humanitarian response

  • Transparency-aware algorithms for online civic engagement

  • Replicability and transferability of models in vulnerable and data-poor contexts

  • Models interpretability in support of better decision making

  • Contribution of web technologies to UN Sustainable Development Goals

  • How to engage data owners and problem owners (e.g. industry and humanitarian agencies) through Web and Social Media data

  • Disaster response and recovery

  • Wildlife protection and protection of natural resources

  • Social bots, hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation on social media that may impact vulnerable populations

  • Contribution of web technologies to UN Sustainable Development Goals

  • Biases and vulnerabilities of large language models (LLMs) and GenAI models and applications that present risks societal problems

Submission Guidelines

Authorship. The ACM has an authorship policy stating who can be considered an author in a submission as well as the use of generative AI tools. Every person named as the author of a paper must have contributed substantially to the work described in the paper and/or to the writing of the paper and must take responsibility for the entire content of a paper.

  • Maximum authorship. The number of submissions allowed per author is limited to 9 (nine) maximum. If more than 9 papers are submitted with the same person listed as an author, the additional papers submitted after the first 9 by submission id, will be desk-rejected.

  • Authorship changes. The full list of authors, including the ordering, must be finalized at the point of submission. There cannot be any addition, removal, or reordering of authors after submission time. The only changes allowed are the correction of spelling mistakes or new affiliation.

Formatting Requirements. Submissions must be written in English, in double-column format, and must adhere to the ACM template and format (also available in Overleaf). Word users may use the Word Interim Template. The recommended setting for LaTeX is:

\documentclass\\sigconf, review\\{acmart}.

For the special tracks, submissions are limited to 8 content pages, which should include all figures and tables, but excluding supplementary material and references. In addition, you can include 2 additional pages of supplementary material. The total number of pages with supplementary material and references must not exceed 12 pages.

Submission Site. Submissions must be made through the EasyChair system at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=thewebconf2024_web4good.

Anonymity. The review process will be double-blind. The submitted document should omit any author names, affiliations, or other identifying information. This may include, but is not restricted to acknowledgments, self-citations, references to prior work by the author(s), and so on. Please use the third-person to identify your own prior work. You may explicitly refer in the paper to organizations that provided datasets, hosted experiments, or deployed solutions and tools.

Originality and Concurrent Submissions. Submissions must present original work-this means that papers under review at or published/accepted to any peer-reviewed conference/journal with published proceedings cannot be submitted. Submissions that have been previously presented orally, as posters or abstracts-only, or in non-archival venues with no formal proceedings, including workshops or PhD symposia without proceedings, are allowed. Authors may submit anonymized work that is already available as a preprint (e.g., on arXiv or SSRN) without citing it. The ACM has a strict policy against plagiarism, misrepresentation, and falsification that applies to all publications.

Ethical Use of Data and Informed Consent. Authors are encouraged to include a section on the ethical use of data and/or informed consent of research subjects in their paper, when appropriate. You and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects (posted in 2021). Please ensure all authors are familiar with these policies.

Please consult the regulations of your institution(s) indicating when a review by an Institutional Ethics Review Board (IRB) is needed. Note that submitting your research for approval by such may not always be sufficient. Even if such research has been approved by your IRB, the program committee might raise additional concerns about the ethical implications of the work and include these concerns in its review.

Submissions that do not follow these guidelines or do not view or print properly, will be desk-rejected.

Publication and Presentation Policies

Publication. Each accepted paper will be included in the Proceedings of the Web Conference 2024. In addition, each paper is required to submit a brief pre-recorded video, which will appear on ACM Digital Library, along with the PDF.

Registration. To be included in the proceedings, every accepted paper must be covered by a distinct conference registration, e.g., two papers require two registrations, even if they have overlapping authors. This registration must be Full Conference (5-day) or Main Conference (3-day) registration, at the standard (non-student) in-person rate, payment of which must be completed by the camera-ready deadline. This registration requirement applies universally, regardless of attendance or presentation mode.

Presentation. Every accepted paper must be presented at the conference. No-show papers may be withdrawn from the proceedings. There will be two forms of presentation:

  • Oral Presentation. Among the accepted papers, a subset will be selected for oral presentation. Generally we expect oral presentations to be in-person, but may allow a few online presentations by authors with significant travel difficulties.

  • Poster Presentation. All papers will be asked to produce a poster on-site. An e-copy will appear on Whova. To facilitate authors in getting their hard-copy posters on-site, the conference offers a local poster printing service for a fee, which you may access at this link. Organizer will bring the posters on-site.

Web4Good Co-Chairs

Contact: TheWebConf24-web4good@ACM.org