Social Web for Disaster Management 2016

Event Notification Type: 
Call for Papers
Abbreviated Title: 
SWDM 2016
Location: 
Friday, 28 October 2016
State: 
Indiana
Country: 
USA
Contact Email: 
City: 
Indianapolis
Contact: 
Carlos Castillo, Eurecat, Spain
Fernando Diaz, Microsoft Research, USA
Yu-Ru Lin, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Jie Yin, CSIRO, Australia
Submission Deadline: 
Thursday, 1 September 2016

The proliferation of social media platforms together with the wide adoption of smartphone devices has transformed how we communicate and share news. During large-scale emergencies, such as natural disasters or armed attacks, victims, responders, and volunteers increasingly use social media to post situation updates and to request and offer help. The use of social media for emergency and disaster response has been a prominent application of information and knowledge management techniques in recent years.

There are a number of challenges associated with near-real-time processing of vast volumes of information in a way that makes sense for people directly affected, for volunteer organizations, and for official emergency response agencies. As massive amount of messages posted by users are transformed into semi-structured records via information extraction and natural language processing techniques, there is a growing need for developing advanced techniques to aggregate this large-scale data to gain an understanding of the "big picture" of an emergency, and to detect and predict how a disaster could develop.

This workshop seeks to provide a platform for the exchange of ideas, identification of important problems, and discovery of possible synergies. It will enable interesting discussions and encourage collaboration between various disciplines, and information and knowledge management approaches is the core of this workshop.

Call for Papers

SWDM'16 invites submissions in the following workshop topics. Each submission will be evaluated by at least two program committee members.

Submission Topics

The focal point of this workshop is disaster-related information and knowledge management challenges and solutions. For instance: How can we extract credible information from heterogeneous, fragmented, biased sources? How can we build scalable systems, accommodating increasingly large volumes of social media data, and supporting a growing number of users? How can we derive actionable insights and infer general crisis parameters to better support decision-making?

This workshop welcomes submissions on various research topics within the contexts of crisis informatics for emergency and disaster management, including but not limited to the following:

• Applications and algorithms of data mining and machine learning for crisis data
• Data management and aggregation for crisis data
• Extraction of actionable insights and general crisis parameters
• Event detection methods
• Trust and credibility models for community contributions
• Geo-tagging of contents and sources
• Understanding the requirements of disaster response professionals
• Studying how remote agents can make sense of web data
• Improving performance of aggregation and summarization systems
• Designing novel crowdsourcing platforms for disaster management
• Scaling up collaboration to large numbers of end users and volunteers
• Datasets for studying crisis informatics
• Evaluation of emergency management and disaster response systems

Submission Types

The workshop accepts the following types of submissions:
1. Papers including research results, position papers, and practice and experience reports, having 5-6 pages (regular), or 2-4 pages (short).

2. Demo proposals describing a prototype or system, up to a maximum of 2 pages.

Research papers and position papers (regular and short) should be clearly positioned with respect to previous work, and convey clearly the importance of the contribution for the disaster management and/or humanitarian response community. Research papers should describe the methodology used and the obtained results in as much detail as possible, including a comparison with state­-of­-the­-art methods when appropriate.

Practice and experience reports (regular and short) should describe insights obtained in a real­-world scenario of interaction between social media and disaster management and/or humanitarian response efforts.

Demo proposals should describe the system of prototype that will be demonstrated to attendees, including intended users, and the relevance for the disaster management and/or emergency response community. The demonstrated systems can go from a functional prototype to a completed application.

Papers should be formatted using ACM SIG templates/guidelines. Note that unlike previous years, accepted submissions will not be published in a formal proceedings volume. Instead, authors of accepted papers will be asked to provide a link to a publicly-accessible archive of their paper, e.g. in arxiv-cs.

Submission Site

Submissions can be provided through https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=swdm2016.

Important Dates
• Submission deadline: 1 September 2016
• Notifications: 27 September 2016
• Camera-ready: 1 October 2016
• Workshop: 28 October 2016

Registration

Please note that, as a requirement from CIKM organizers, at least one registration per paper is required. At the time of submission of the final camera-ready copy, authors will have to indicate the already registered person for that paper.

Workshop Organizers

• Carlos Castillo, Eurecat, Spain.
• Fernando Diaz, Microsoft Research, USA.
• Yu-Ru Lin, University of Pittsburgh, USA.
• Jie Yin, CSIRO, Australia.

Series co-founder/advisor:

• Maja Vukovic, IBM Research, USA.

Contact us: swdm2016-organizers [at] googlegroups.com