Call for Papers: Social Web for Disaster Management
Co-located with WWW 2015. Florence, Italy, May 2015
https://sites.google.com/site/swdmwww15/

SWDM'15 invites submissions in the following workshop topics. Accepted submissions will be published by ACM and included in the ACM Digital Library.

TOPICS
While existing methods for processing social media data focus on providing situational awareness, we strive for next-generation methods and systems that further support disaster management and humanitarian response actions, providing decision-support capabilities based on insights gained from the Social Web. This may include both algorithmic and human-centered techniques to gather, analyze, organize, and visualize Web data and activity around an event in real­ time.
We solicit contributions in all topics related to social media for disaster management, particularly but not limited to:
1. Social Web Data for Disaster Management and Humanitarian Response Professionals: How can we extract actionable insights from user-generated Web feeds to help disaster response professionals make decisions and act? How do we model different global events from a variety of Web sources, and develop a trust model for community contributions to extract credible information? How do we identify and geolocate content sources?
2. Scalable Web­-Based Disaster Management or Humanitarian Response Platforms: What are the requirements of these professionals with respect to social media data? How can remote agents and first responders make use of these data effectively through a variety of devices? What techniques can be used to improve the performance of such systems, when handling vast amounts of data, and to support an increasing number of end ­users and volunteers?


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 of 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.

ORGANIZERS
Carlos Castillo, Qatar Computing Research Institute.
Fernando Diaz, Microsoft Research, USA.
Jie Yin, CSIRO, Australia.
Maja Vukovic, IBM Research, USA.


PROGRAM COMMITTEE
James Caverlee, Texas A&M University, USA.
Richard Mccreadie, University of Glasgow, UK.
Leysia Palen, University of Colorado Boulder, USA.
Hemant Purohit, Kno.e.sis, USA.
Melanie Roberts, IBM, USA.
Takeshi Sakaki, University of Tokyo, Japan.
Kate Starbird, University of Washington, USA.
Kentaro Torisawa, NICT, Japan.
Sarah Vieweg, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar.


IMPORTANT DATES
Abstracts deadline: Jan 17, 2015.
Submission deadline: Jan 24, 2015.
Paper acceptance notification: Feb 22, 2015
Camera-ready hard deadline: Mar 8, 2015
Workshop date: May 18th or May 19th, 2015.


SUBMISSION
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=swdm15

CONTACT
https://sites.google.com/site/swdmwww15/