Deadline: June 14th, 2021, AoE
Dates: October 5-9, 2021
Submission Link: EasyChair
The inaugural Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO ‘21) will take place on October 5-9, 2021, virtually, on Zoom and Gather.town.
The goal of this event is to highlight work where techniques from algorithms, optimization, and mechanism design, along with insights from the social sciences and humanistic studies, can improve access to opportunity for historically underserved and disadvantaged communities.
The conference aims to foster a multi-disciplinary community, facilitating interactions between academia, industry, and the public and voluntary sectors. To this end, it takes a broad view of how research can contribute to access to opportunity, and welcomes work from along all stages of the research-to-practice pipeline. This also includes work that surfaces novel insights into the workings of social systems. The program will feature keynote presentations from researchers and practitioners as well as contributed presentations in the research and policy & practice tracks.
We solicit submissions in the research track and policy and practice track. Submissions can include research, survey, and position papers as well as problem- and practice-driven submissions by academics from any discipline and practitioners from any sector.
We encourage submissions from across various disciplines and covering domains including civic participation, data economies, discrimination and bias, economic inequality, economic development, education, environment and climate, healthcare, housing, labor markets, and law and policy. Papers will be peer-reviewed by experts in the disciplinary area. The deadline for submissions is June 14th, 2021, AoE.
ACM EAAMO is part of the Mechanism Design for Social Good (MD4SG) initiative, and builds on the MD4SG technical workshop series and tutorials at conferences including ACM EC, ACM COMPASS, ACM FAccT, and WINE.
Submissions will fall in one of two categories:
For all submissions in either track, topics of interest include but are not limited to:
The policy and practice track is dedicated to submissions from researchers and domain experts that emphasize applied work, policy issues, or practical problems. Individuals with any institutional or organizational affiliations can submit to this track, and we especially encourage contributions from individuals in government and non-government organizations and industry. Submissions will fall into one of five focus areas:
Dataset submissions of novel datasets collected and documented for the purpose of fostering new research in different application domains, creating new standards for data collection, transparency, and accountability, and fostering interdisciplinary collaborations. The submission should include the dataset, which will be uploaded as a supplementary file as well as metadata information. The dataset may also be uploaded to external data sharing services, and the conference will provide an additional option for a data portal upon acceptance of the submission. The submission should be accompanied by a document detailing the application domain, potential for use of the data, as well as any known issues, limitations, and ethical considerations for the collection, curation, access, and use. Authors are encouraged to consider questions presented in the Datasheets for Datasets recommendations.
Demonstrations that may be prototyped and/or deployed software systems and mobile platforms. Demo submissions should be accompanied by a description of the system and detailed instructions for using it. The submission should also include a document detailing the particular problem the system seeks to address, importance of this problem, any known limitations or challenges of this or similar systems, societal and ethical considerations for using such a system, as well as potential for future developments.
Position Papers that present a novel framework and perspective or open a new area of debate regarding a particular topic related to the scope of the conference. We particularly encourage submissions from practitioners and policy-makers, as well as researchers working with these communities, to discuss potential avenues of work across academia, industry, the public sector, and non-government organizations. Submissions may also include lessons learned from efforts to bridge research and practice.
Problems Pitches in the form of white papers detailing problems that arise in practice impacting underserved and marginalized communities. The problems should be ones that benefit from a wider attention within the research community. Submissions should provide background information on the problem, summary of any existing methods or approaches for tackling the problem, and discussions on how techniques from algorithms, optimization, or mechanism design can contribute to potential solutions. Submissions are also encouraged to provide a discussion of challenges in providing holistic solutions, share insights from collaborations between academics and practitioners, and/or introduce new methods for addressing the problems.
Survey papers that provide a broad overview of a particular topic of relevance to the conference. The submission should survey relevant work to this area and be presented in a comprehensive and cohesive manner. In addition to research surveys, we also strongly encourage submissions from policymakers and practitioners that survey the state-of-the-art approaches used in a particular application domain and are accessible to both an academic and a non-academic audience.
For the policy and practice track, submissions will have the option to be either archival or non-archival, with preference given to archival papers. Papers in the archival track will be published in conference proceedings in the ACM Digital Library; papers in the non-archival track will not be published as part of the conference (and may be submitted in the future to an archival venue, if not already published). The archival track welcomes submissions that constitute new research papers that have not been published in conference proceedings before, as well as papers under submission in journal publications. The non-archival track also welcomes research papers that have been published no earlier than January 2019. Authors should upload a PDF of their paper to EasyChair. There are no formatting or length requirements for the PDF submission, but accepted archival papers will have a page limit of 10 pages in the camera-ready version at the time of publication. In addition to the PDF, authors are asked to upload a 200-250 word description onto EasyChair summarizing their submission and its relevance to the conference.
Submissions are double-blind: authors should take care to not include the names and affiliations of the authors in the paper, including when referring to previous work. Submitters should list all co-authors on the submitted work in EasyChair but not in the PDF of the submission.
Authors may submit unpublished work, work under review, or work that has been published no earlier than January 2019. If the work is already published, please include a citation on EasyChair.
We will only accept submissions in the English language. MD4SG and EAAMO are committed to building multilingual communities, and we anticipate allowing submissions in other languages at future events.
Submissions will be evaluated on the following criteria:
Papers that are out of scope of the conference as evaluated by these criteria may be desk rejected.
EAAMO’21 will follow a two-phase reviewing system. All submissions will be peer-reviewed by at least 2 reviewers in a double-blind format. The committee reserves the right to not review all the technical details of submissions.
Register here for the conference. The conference will provide financial assistance for registration costs, as well as data plans. All financial assistance applications must be submitted by June 14th, 2021 at 5 PM ET; applications received after this date will not be considered.