BM 2018 - RE-CODING BLACK MIRROR

Black Mirror is a British sci-fi series directed by Charlie Brooker portraying a dystopian future emanating from the wide use of digital advancements. Even though Black Mirror’s episodes do not entirely rely on the widespread availability of existing technology, some of the advancements presented are not from such a distant future. The ethical and social implications emerging from the increasing reliance on digital media (partly depicted in the series) has been a longstanding debate in critical studies underlying issues around privacy, social control, social and individual justice and other key values around Democracy such as freedom of speech. Computer science has picked up on such kind of issues focusing mainly on privacy offering technical solutions such as privacy by design and encryption amongst other tools.
=====FORMAT=====
Re-coding Black Mirror is an one-day workshop which aims at creating dialogue and connections between computer, data and social scientists that are interested in the societal and ethical implications of web technologies. In order to address emerging social phenomena from different perspectives, the workshop employs a novel interactive format, where researchers are invited to create futuristic scenarios as the ones depicted in Black Mirror, exploring the potential societal and ethical concerns of their own research. It will also be a forum for raising opportunities of networking with scholars from different fields to explore novel research problems that can be relevant to both the web and social science communities.
=====TOPICS=====
Given the novelty of the workshop format, we welcome submissions addressing two different issues, as explained in the brief summaries below. Possible submissions are not restricted to those examples, but works addressing those scenarios would be very much welcome too. You can also look at the submissions of the Re-coding Black Mirror 2017 edition [2].
(1) Works showing how the ongoing research in the web community could enable/lead to scenarios similar to the ones presented in Black Mirror episodes.
For example:
* How could advances in natural language processing and social media analysis enable the creation of a bot mimicking the personality of a dead person based on their available information online? (S02E01)
* How could web technologies be used to integrate information about another person from multiple online sources (digital footprinting), providing a mean for stalking or even blackmailing them? (S03E03)
(2) Works showing how the ongoing research in the web community could prevent/minimise risks such as the ones depicted in Black Mirror episodes.
For example:
* How could web technologies be designed to prevent the abuse of user ratings based on the relations between people and information about their network/context? (S03E01)
* How could content and network analysis be used to reduce or counter the spread of hate on social media? (S03E06)
=====SUBMISSION=====
Please submit your contribution to the workshop by February 10th (23:59 Hawaii time) through the easychair system [1], choosing the track "#RCBlackMirror2018: Re-Coding Black Mirror Workshop" under the WWW2018Satellites conference. We accept three categories of submissions:
* Full papers (max 8 pages) on research and applied technologies,
* Short papers (max 4 pages) about visions and positions on forthcoming challenges,
* Abstracts (max 2 pages) on the societal and ethical risks of the aforementioned technologies.
All papers should be formatted using the ACM template (Latex [3] and Word template [4] accepted). We expect each paper to take as a starting point one futuristic scenario, either directly from Black Mirror or of a similar nature, as motivation for the work presented.
=====ORGANISERS=====
* PINELOPI TROULLINOU, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK
* MATHIEU D'AQUIN, Insight Centre for Data Analytics, NUI Galway, Ireland
* ILARIA TIDDI, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK
[1] https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=www2018sat... (New submission -> Track "#RCBlackMirror2018: Re-Coding Black Mirror Workshop")
[2] http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1939/
[3] https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/public...
[4] https://portalparts.acm.org/hippo/acm_windows_word...