EpiMine 2021 - Call for Papers
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Workshop on Mining and Policy-Making for Epidemic Surveillance
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held in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2021)
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IMPORTANT DATES
Paper submission deadline: September 3, 2021
Acceptance notification: September 24, 2021
Camera-ready deadline: October 1, 2021
Workshop: December 7, 2021

CONTEXT & OBJECTIVES
Epidemics like COVID-19 are triggered by factors such as changes in the ecology of the host population, genetic changes in an established virus, or a novel pathogen and result in a substantial burden for the world in terms of health risks and unnecessary deaths, economical risks, and global financial turmoil.
The need for effective prevention measures and mitigation strategies is highly urgent. It is essential to capture, understand and monitor the effects of mitigation strategies, as they are perceived and influenced by social media discussions and initiatives.
These measures mostly involve lockdowns at different granularities, durations, and frequencies. Moreover, social media plays a detrimental role during pandemics by monitoring and reflecting the opinion and sentiment of the population.
This workshop will focus on knowledge discovery, mining, and understanding of mitigation strategies and measures during a pandemic to facilitate effective and timely policy- and decision making.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

TOPICS
- Understanding the effects of lockdowns
- Movement tracing under lockdowns
- Effects of lockdowns on social media usage
- Understanding the role of social media during lockdowns
- Moving from the physical to the virtual world during lockdowns
- Mining and understanding epidemics
- Reinforcement learning for prevention and mitigation of pandemics

SUBMISSION & PUBLICATION
Authors are required to follow the IEEE ICDM author guidelines (https://icdm2021.auckland.ac.nz/cfp/).
Authors are invited to submit original papers, which have not been published elsewhere and which are not currently under consideration for another journal, conference or workshop.

Paper submissions should be limited to a maximum of 10 (8 + 2 extra chargeable) pages, in the IEEE 2-column format (https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html), including the bibliography and any possible appendices. Submissions longer than 10 pages will be rejected without review. All submissions will be triple-blind reviewed by the Program Committee on the basis of technical quality, relevance to scope of the conference, originality, significance, and clarity.

Manuscripts are to be submitted via CyberChair (https://wi-lab.com/cyberchair/2021/icdm21/index.php/). Each submitted paper will be evaluated by three PC members with respect to its novelty, significance, technical soundness, presentation, and experiments.

We are currently negotiating a journal special issue on the topic area of EpiMine. Details, including procedure and deadlines will be posted at the EpiMine website.

Detailed information on the submission procedure are available at the workshop web page: https://kmd.ovgu.de/epimine21.html.

INVITED SPEAKERS
- Martin Atzmueller, Osnabrück University, Germany
- Muhammad Imran, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar

PROGRAM COMMITEE
[TBA]

CONTACT & ORGANIZERS
All inquires should be sent to epimine_team@iti.cs.uni-magdeburg.de

Organization Team:
- Myra Spiliopoulou, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Germany
- Panagiotis Papapetrou, Stockholm University, Sweden
- Uli Niemann, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Germany
- Maria Bampa, Stockholm University, Sweden