Call for Papers

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. We envision bringing together researchers and practitioners from academia and NGOs for an interdisciplinary exchange on addressing challenges in the context of humanitarian mapping and global development. 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? How can social media create awareness of hate speech? Potential topics of interest for this category include the following:

* Computational methods for gaining situational awareness and extracting actionable information

* Techniques for social media 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 streams 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.

Important Dates

Submission deadline for all types of contributions: 23 May, 2022 (new deadline: 6 June, 2022)

Notification of acceptance for contributions: 30 June, 2022

Camera-ready submission: 11 July, 2022