Web4Good: FATES (Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, Ethics, Sustainable Development and Healthy Society)
Track chairs: (www2022-web-for-good@easychair.org)
- Ricardo Baeza-Yates (Northeastern University, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Universidad de Chile)
- Jeanna Matthews (Clarkson University)
- Chiara Renso (ISTI – CNR)
For the last three years, The Web Conference has had a workshop on Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, Ethics and Society (FATES). For this year, we are expanding on those topics in a special track, Web For Good.
Today’s web and social media solutions do not sufficiently address societal problems related to transparency, accountability, discrimination, misinformation, manipulation, environmental sustainability, climate action, and protection of living beings.
We seek papers in which web and social media technologies are investigated, developed or applied to the protection of individual rights, particularly among vulnerable or marginalized communities and the fostering of sustainable development and healthy human societies.
We also seek papers that take a critical look at current web and media technologies including concerns related to fairness, accountability, transparency, ethics, sustainable development and healthy society.
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 fairness and accountability, transparency, societal impact, sustainable development and ethics on the Web.
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:
- Algorithmic fairness and algorithmic bias, particularly on web data
- Fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics in web search and (social) web mining
- Fairness-aware recommender systems and diversity in recommendation
- Human-perceived consequences of surveillance algorithms
- Fake news, social bots, hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation on social media
- Credibility and reputation in social media
- Ethics of opinion mining and opinion formation on the web
- Ethical models/frameworks around web platforms and data
- Innovative methods for studying/analyzing the fairness, accountability, transparency and ethics of web platforms
- Impact of web platforms and algorithms on employment and the future of work
- Transparency and ethics of web-scale data analysis
- Transparency, fairness, and ethics of crowd-sourcing
- Transparency-aware algorithms for online civic engagement
- Ethics, privacy and legal audits on the use and analysis of sensitive data
- Information/knowledge design/visualization for privacy
- Models for ensuring transparency and responsibility of government data
- Privacy-preserving and fairness-aware machine learning on the web
- Transparency and Explainability in ML
- Contribution of web technologies to UN Sustainable Development Goals
Submission guidelines
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.
Authors may also submit short papers (up to 4 pages plus references) and discussion papers (up to 2 pages plus references). Discussion papers will not appear in the proceedings.
The papers must be formatted according to the instructions below.
Submissions will be handled via Easychair, at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=thewebconf2022.
Formatting the submissions
Submissions must adhere to the ACM template and format published in the ACM guidelines at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. Please remember to add Concepts and Keywords. Please use the template in traditional double-column format to prepare your submissions. For example, word users may use Word Interim Template, and latex users may use sample-sigconf template.
For overleaf users, you may want to use https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/association-for-computing-machinery-acm-sig-proceedings-template/bmvfhcdnxfty.
Submissions for review must be in PDF format. They must be self-contained and written in English.
Author identity
The review process will be double-blind. The submitted document should not include any author names, affiliations, or other identifying information. This may include, but is not restricted to: acknowledgements, self-citations, references to prior work by the author(s) etc.
You may explicitly refer in the paper to organisations that provided datasets, hosted experiments, or deployed solutions and tools. In other words, instead of saying that “we analysed the logs of a major search engine”, the authors may name the search engine in question. The reviewers will be informed that naming organisations in papers does not necessarily imply that the authors are currently affiliated with said organisation.
Originality and concurrent submissions
Submissions must present original work — this means that papers published or accepted to any peer-reviewed venue with published proceedings cannot be submitted here; also, authors must appropriately cite their prior work (considering the double-blind review policy). Finally, submissions available only online and/or that have been previously presented orally, as posters, or in venues with no formal proceedings are allowed.
We consider the novelty of papers not only in the strictly technical sense (new algorithms, new technologies) but also novel in terms of the social impact of the application.
Concurrent submissions are not allowed – this means that papers that are currently under review cannot be submitted to this conference; conversely, while the paper is under review here, it should not be submitted elsewhere. The programme committee is working closely with other related venues with similar review timelines to ensure this policy will be enforced.
The ACM has a strict policy against plagiarism, misrepresentation, and falsification that applies to all publications.
Ethical use of data and informed consent
As a published ACM author, you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects.
When appropriate, authors are encouraged to include a section on the ethical use of data and/or informed consent in their paper.
Note that submitting your research for approval by the author(s)’ institutional ethics review body (IRB) may not always be sufficient. Even if such research has been signed off by your IRB, the programme committee might raise additional concerns about the ethical implications of the work and include these concerns in its review.
Publication policy
Accepted papers will require a further revision in order to meet the requirements and page limits of the camera-ready format required by ACM. Instructions for the preparation of the camera-ready versions of the papers will be provided after acceptance.
All accepted papers will be published by ACM in the main volume together with the research track papers and will be available via the ACM Digital Library. To be included in the Proceedings, at least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference and present the paper there.
Important Dates:
- Abstract: November 11, 2021
- Full paper: November 18, 2021
- Acceptance notification: January 13, 2022
No rebuttal is foreseen.
All submission deadlines are end-of-day in the Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone.
You can reach the track chairs at www2022-web-for-good@easychair.org