SoGood 2018 - 3rd Workshop on Data Science for Social Good

The possibilities of Data Science for contributing to social, common, or public good are often not sufficiently perceived by the public at large. Data Science applications are already helping in serving people at the bottom of the economic pyramid, aiding people with special needs, helping international cooperation, and dealing with environmental problems, disasters, and climate change. In regular conferences and journals, papers on these topics are often scattered among sessions with names that hide their common nature (such as "Social networks", "Predictive models" or the catch-all term "Applications"). Additionally, such forums tend to have a strong bias for papers that are novel in the strictly technical sense (new algorithms, new kinds of data analysis, new technologies) rather than novel in terms of social impact of the application.
This workshop aims to attract papers presenting applications of Data Science to Social Good (which may, or may not require new methods), or applications that take into account social aspects of Data Science methods and techniques. There are numerous application domains, a non-exclusive list includes:
* Government transparency and IT against corruption
* Public safety and disaster relief
* Access to food, water and utilities
* Efficiency and sustainability
* Data journalism
* Economic, social and personal development
* Transportation
* Energy
* Smart city services
* Education
* Social services, unemployment and homelessness
* Healthcare
* Ethical issues, fairness and accountability
* Topics aligned with the UN development goals: http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainab...
The major selection criteria will be the novelty of the application and its social impact.
We are also interested in applications that have built a successful business model and are able to sustain themselves economically. Most Social Good applications have been carried out by non-profit and charity organisations, conveying the idea that Social Good is a luxury that only societies with a surplus can afford. We would like to hear from successful projects, which may not be strictly "non-profit" but have Social Good as their main focus.
Workshop format:
* A keynote talk by Prof. Nitesh Chawla, University of Notre Dame
* Oral presentation of accepted papers
* Panel discussion and brainstorming with audience: Creating a permanent structure for research on Data Science for Social Good in Europe.
There will be an award for the best paper.
Paper submission:
Authors should submit a PDF version in Springer LNCS style using the workshop EasyChair site:https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sogood2018
The maximum length of papers in 16 pages, consistent with the ECML-PKDD conference submissions.
Submitting a paper to the workshop means that if the paper is accepted at least one author will attend the workshop and present the paper. Papers not presented at the workshop will not be included in the proceedings.
Paper publication:
The proceedings of the workshop will be published either by Springer as ECML-PKDD Workshop proceedings (currently in negotiation with Springer for all ECML-PKDD workshops) or by CEUR in their workshop proceedings series (http://ceur-ws.org/).
Selected workshop papers will be invited for extension and submission to a special journal issue. We are currently exploring this option for the journal Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, https://link.springer.com/journal/10618.
In addition, selected papers on the topic "Government Transparency and IT against Corruption" will be invited for presentation at an event on "Information Technologies for Good Government" to be held in Valencia, Spain, in October/November 2018, supported by Generalitat Valenciana.
Important Dates:
* Submission deadline: Monday, July 16, 2018
* Acceptance notification: Monday, July 23, 2018
* Camera-ready deadline: Monday, August 10th, 2018
* Workshop: September 14th, 2018
PC members:
* Albert Bifet, Telecom ParisTech, France
* Carlos Castillo, Eurecat, Spain
* Michelangelo Ceci, University of Bari, Italy
* Nitesh Chawla, University of Notre Dame, USA
* Itziar de Lecuona, University of Barcelona, Spain
* Jeremiah Deng, University of Otago, New Zealand
* Finale Doshi-Velez, Harvard University, USA
* Cesar Ferri, UPV Valencia, Spain
* Joao Gama, University of Porto, Portugal
* Geoffrey Holmes, University of Waikato, New Zealand
* Josep-Lluis Larriba, UPC BarcelonaTech, Spain
* Yann-Ael Le Borgne, Universite Libre Bruxelles, Belgium
* Rahul Nair, IBM Research, USA
* Alexandra Olteanu, IBM Research, USA
* Evgueni Smirnov, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands
* Carlos Soares, University of Porto, Portugal
* Alicia Troncoso, University Pablo de Olavide, Spain
* Tong Wang, University of Iowa, USA
Organizers and contact:
* Ricard Gavalda (UPC BarcelonaTech), gavalda-AT-cs.upc.edu
* Irena Koprinska (University of Sydney), irena.koprinska-AT-sydney.edu.au
* Stefan Kramer (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz), kramer-AT-informatik.uni-mainz.de
Workshop site: https://sites.google.com/site/ecmlpkddsogood2018/