Communities around the world are rapidly changing and constantly evolving, with ever new technologies offering great promise for improved health and well-being, safety and security, accessibility and inclusivity, and economic growth. At the same time, the challenges lying at the complex intersection of technology and society have led to a steady increase of interest in highly interdisciplinary approaches that can both benefit from and help advance data science. This special session will bring together researchers, industry experts, practitioners, and potential citizen scientists who are interested in cultivating specialized and important aspects of data science and analytics in the context of smart and connected communities. The goal is to share recent advances, real-life use cases, and challenges and opportunities in this socially-important application domain.

We welcome submissions which demonstrate a strong interplay between data science and advanced analytics techniques and smart and connected communities applications, with emphasis to the following five broad themes:
- Environmental systems
- Health, well-being and pandemics
- Safety and crime prevention
- Social and human services
- Transportation


TOPICS OF INTEREST

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Advanced analytic methods for social good and government 2.0 applications
- Accountable data processing infrastructures and methods
- Applications, such as health and aging, predictive maintenance, smart transportation, and policing
- Data-driven planning and emergency preparedness, including preparing communities to withstand pandemics in the future
- Data mining and machine learning to mitigate bias, promote fairness, and improve diversity
- Evaluation and visualization methods
- Humans in the data science loop
- Semantic inference over semistructured (e.g., SeeClickFix) or unstructured text, audio or video content (e.g., social media)
- Spatio-temporal data analytics for smart and connected communities
- Surveys and critical reviews of the progress of the DSAA community towards enabling smart and connected communities


IMPORTANT DATES

Paper Submission: May 23, 2021
Paper Notification: July 25, 2021
Paper Camera Ready Due: August 8, 2021


ORGANIZERS

Charalampos Chelmis, University at Albany, SUNY, USA
Ajitesh Srivastava, University of Southern California, USA
Qi Wang, Northeastern University, USA
Yasin Yilmaz, University of South Florida, USA
Daphney-Stavroula Zois, University at Albany, SUNY, USA