[Air-L] WORKSHOPS AT INSCI'2018 - consider submitting!

Fri Jul 13 06:57:08 PDT 2018

Dear colleagues,

Please consider submitting to workshops organized in conjunction with 
INSCI’2018 in St.Petersburg, Russia, on October 26, 2018.

A volume of joint post-proceedings for the workshops will be published 
by Springer International Publishing. The book series for our 
proceedings is Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).

For submission instructions, see insci2018.org/workshops
The early-bird participation fee without publication is 40 euro 
(regular – 60 euro), with publication – 100 euro (regular – 120 euro). 
This includes participation in the INSCI two-day conference and the 
workshop session.

(1) Detecting Social Problems in Online Content: An Interdisciplinary 
Workshop

Organizers:
Olessia Koltsova, National Research University - Higher School of 
Economics, Svetlana Bodrunova, St.Petersburg State University

The workshop is dedicated to discussing the newest approaches to 
detecting a broad range of social issues in online content, from 
inequalities expressed in texts (hate speech, prejudice, divisive / 
uncivil messages, political bias and racism etc.), to social 
polarization based on user views and sentiment, to detection of 
harmful behavior (dark personality traits, behavioral disorders, 
decease denialism, stigmatization of social groups etc.). With 
proliferation of social media, such content is increasingly impactful, 
while its detection at scale presents a huge methodological challenge. 
The workshop participants will share their research experience by 
reflecting both on advantages and limitations of new automated and 
mixed research methods of text analysis they have used for processing 
user-generated content.

Submission instructions:
Please submit your position papers (2 to 4 pages, to be published on 
the workshop webpage) and papers based on empirical studies (6 to 12 
pages, to be published in the post-proceedings) by September 25, 2018. 
Camera-ready papers due: November 10, 2018.

(2) CONVERSATIONS 2018: An International Workshop on Chatbot Research 
and Design

Organizers:
Asbjørn Følstad (SINTEF, Norway)
Symeon Papadopoulos (Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, 
Greece)
Ole-Christoffer Granmo (University of Agder, Norway)
Effie L.-C. Law (University of Leicester, UK)
Ewa Luger (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Petter Bae Brandtzæg (SINTEF, Norway)

WORKSHOP MOTIVATION:
Chatbots enable users to interact with digital services in natural 
language, through text or voice dialogue. To realize the potential of 
chatbots in areas such as customer support, health and fitness, 
education, information services, research is needed in a number of 
interconnected fields. This workshop contributes to this endeavour by 
providing a cross-disciplinary arena of knowledge exchanges for 
researchers interested in chatbots and conversational user interfaces.

KEY CHALLENGES
The participants of the previous edition of this workshop, 
CONVERSATIONS 2017, identified four clusters of research challenges: 
(1) democratizing chatbots, (2) chatbot user experience, (3) context 
aware chatbots, and (4) natural language capabilities. We encourage 
contributions for this year's edition of the workshop to address the 
research challenges of one or more of these clusters.

WORKSHOP WEBPAGE: https://conversations2018.wordpress.com/

Submission instructions:
Please submit your position papers (3 to 6 pages, Springer LNCS 
format, to be published on the workshop webpage) or full papers 
presenting empirical studies or theoretical advances (6 to 12 pages, 
Springer LNCS format, to be published in the post-proceedings) by 
September 1, 2018.

(3) The Future of Decentralized Governance: A Workshop on Encryption, 
Blockchains, and Personal Data
Organizer: Harry Halpin, INRIA (France)

Currently, there is a generalized crisis in governance as traditional 
governance encounters the Internet. On the Internet, there has been 
revelations of US mass surveillance and massive abuse of personal 
data. The traditional governance bodies of the Internet from the ITU 
to W3C seem hard-pressed by Silicon Valley companies, which has lead 
to widespread disillusionment. At the same time, the European Union's 
General Data Protection Directive is attempting to enforce European 
rights, but purely through legal rather than technical means. Yet 
there have been new technologies based on encryption, such as 
blockchain technologies, that claim to be able to revolutionize 
governance. But, at the same time, there are numerous perils, such as 
the rise of opaque AI decision-making systems and consolidation of 
power in the hands of a few technologists, rather than a rapid 
democratization of technology.

Given these technical and political developments, new and improved 
models that take into account citizen involvement and improve 
meaningful participation need to be developed, along with fundamental 
Internet rights that can both be adopted by national governments, 
supra-national bodies, corporations, and cities. These principles will 
likely have to do with the guarantee of privacy, data protection, and 
other fundamental rights that are especially impacted by the Internet. 
This workshop will discuss the issues of decentralization, 
self-sovereignty, and net rights. In particular, this session will 
explore the understanding of the current national and international 
governance processes (both strengths and weaknesses, with a particular 
focus on the case of Russia) and new decentralized participatory 
practices based on crowdsourcing and citizen involvement.

Confirmed participants:
- Ksenia Ermoshina (CNRS): Sociology of the Russian Internet
- Moxie Marlinspike (Signal): Inventor of end-to-end encryption app 
Signal
- Ben Laurie (DeepMind): AI and security expert
- Yuk Hui (Leuphana University): Philosophy of technology
- Primavera Di Fillippi (CNRS): Blockchain and the Law

The workshop welcomes submissions of short abstracts (up to 300 
words). Several invited talk, an invited panel, and an open discussion 
are planned for this workshop.
INSCI program committee also encourages submissions of short papers (5 
to 8 pages) and full papers (9 to 12 pages) dedicated to the workshop 
themes by September 25, 2018. Camera-ready papers will be due November 
10, 2018.

(4) Internet as an issue: an international workshop on government and 
media narratives

Organizers: Polina Kolozaridi, Leonid Yuldashev, Center for Insternet 
and Society, Moscow, Russia

There are plenty of stereotypes about Internet in Russia. The state is 
usually observed as an enemy of Internet development; society and 
media are often determined in an occasional way. We try to explore the 
variety of approaches, systematise and clarify how Internet becomes an 
issue for regulation and discussion, what we know about it and who is 
constructing it.

Basing on several approaches, we will try to analyse both structures 
and content of policies and other discourses connected with those. 
Using social imaginaries studies (Flichy 2004; Mansell 2013) we are 
analysing how policies, media and knowledge about the internet changed 
depending on actors and time. We also consider the structure of 
policy-makers and stakeholders. We stay on mild social constructivist 
positions encompassing knowledge and discourses as well as trying to 
understand the infrastructure. The panel will consist of case studies 
and more broad approaches, so we encourage participation of all 
scholars who deal with each of them.

The workshop welcomes submissions of short abstracts (up to 300 
words). Several invited talk, an invited panel, and an open discussion 
are planned for this workshop.

INSCI program committee also encourages submissions of short papers (5 
to 8 pages) and full papers (9 to 12 pages) dedicated to the workshop 
themes by September 25, 2018. Camera-ready papers will be due November 
10, 2018.

--
Svetlana S. Bodrunova, Prof., D.Polit.Sci.
Head, Center for International Media Research
School of Journalism and Mass Communications,
St.Petersburg State University

+7 921 933 02 14
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