EAAMO'21 Research Track

Call for participation

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.

Submission Types

Submissions will fall in one of two categories:

• Research Track
• Policy and Practice Track

For all submissions in either track, topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• market and mechanism design challenges in resource-constrained settings
• redistributive mechanisms to improve access to opportunity
• improving social service delivery and evaluation
• allocating health insurance funds and managing access to healthcare
• equitable provision of healthcare across communities
• economic inequality and intergenerational mobility
• mitigating unequal economic outcomes in on- and off-line labor markets
• detecting existence or causes of exploitative market behavior in labor markets
• improving diversity and equity using algorithmic approaches
• market regulations for data and privacy
• evaluating the impacts of teachers, schools, or education policy
• improving allocation of educational resources
• measuring and evaluating progress to achieve sustainable development goals
• reducing inefficiencies in smallholder farms and under-resourced supply chains
• algorithmic proposals to encourage civic participation
• evaluating fairness in electoral representation
• informing climate change and policy design
• designing equitable transportation systems
• tackling infrastructural challenges impacting marginalized communities
• ethical considerations when using interventions informed by algorithm and mechanism design in public sector settings

Research Track

Submissions to the research track can introduce new theory or applications or can be position papers synthesizing existing work and perspectives or highlighting future directions. Submissions will fall into one of five focus areas:

• AI and Machine Learning including AI for social impact, statistical reasoning and probabilistic inference, data science, bias and fairness considerations, fair division and resource allocation, human computer interaction in socio-technical systems, multi-agent systems, privacy and security, and social choice theory.
• Applied and Quantitative Modeling including proposing and analyzing applied models for novel practical problems in AI for social impact, data science, market and mechanism design, applied microeconomic theory, supply chain management, computational social science, heterogeneous-agents macroeconomic models, and multi-agent systems.
• Empirical Studies including empirical analysis of real-world policies, systems, and mechanisms, measurement studies, applied microeconomics, empirical industrial organization, experimental studies and methods, field studies, applied machine learning, causal inference, and computational social science.
• Research Position Papers that focus on a particular research topic or domain and bring a novel conception of the discussed topic. These submissions will aim to present a novel position, idea, or open a new area of discussion regarding a particular research topic related to the scope of the conference. Submissions will be evaluated based on their novelty and potential to offer new organizing principles for a field, fostering new perspectives and bridges between research and policy/practice.
• Theory including theoretical analysis in algorithm design, fair division and resource allocation, game theory, market and mechanism design, behavioral models, optimization, operations management, computational social choice, social network analysis, and theory of machine learning.

Submission Instructions

For the research 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.

Reviewing

Submissions will be evaluated on the following criteria:

• Quality of submission as measured by accuracy and clarity of exposition.
• Relevance to the goal of the conference.
• Novelty of domain: we particularly encourage work that explores novel applications or uses novel approaches to study existing application domains.
• Submissions will also be evaluated based on either:
  • Potential for interdisciplinary follow-up work. We welcome submissions with the potential to spark interdisciplinary collaborations,
  • Presentation of domain-specific knowledge. We especially welcome practitioners with interest or experience in translating between practical problems and academic research approaches.

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.

Important Information

• Paper Submission Deadline: 14 June 2021, AoE
• Paper Submission Page: EasyChair
• Financial Assistance Application Deadline: 14 June 2021 at 5 PM ET (9 PM GMT)
• Notification: 12 15 August 2021
• Event Date: 5-9 October 2021