Conference title: 20 Years of ETHICOMP: A Celebration
De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
Monday to Wednesday, 07.-09. September 2015

www.dmu.ac.uk/ethicomp2015

GENERAL DESCRIPTION

In 1995 the first ETHICOMP conference was held in Leicester, England, organised by Terry Bynum and Simon Rogerson. Its purpose was to provide a forum to discuss ethical issues around computers. Twenty years later we are meeting again in Leicester to continue this conversation. The changes in information and communication technology (ICT) during these 20 years have been dramatic. While computers used to be bulky and easily identifiable machines, we now have small smart devices, the internet quickly developed and has changed significantly, and ICT now pervades all walks of life, from the way we work and communicate to study, undertake childcare and choose partners. As a consequence many of the concerns of 1995 have deepened and many new ones have arisen.

During ETHICOMP 2015, we will review ethical and social issues raised by contemporary computing and look at ways of identifying and addressing them in the future. The conference aims to be practically relevant and bring together the various communities involved in the development, implementation, and use of computing and reflection on these in their various guises. The conference is based on the belief that the ETHICOMP community, together with other associations and groups, needs to work together to enable the benefits of computing to prevail, while rendering its downsides and ethical ambiguities visible and more subject to public debate than is the case today.

To structure the discussion we invite submissions to the following tracks (check website for more detailed description of tracks):

• Researchers’ issues in Computer Ethics / Information Ethics studies (Gonçalo Jorge Morais Costa, Małgorzata Alicja Płotka)
• Social Impacts of Snowden’s Revelations: Worldwide Cross-cultural Analyses (Kiyoshi Murata)
• Digital Do-It-Yourself (DiDIY) (Vincent C. Müller)
• Responsible Research & Innovation in Industry (Catherine Flick)
• ICT and Society: social accountability, professional ethics and the challenges of virtuality and the cloud (Diane Whitehouse)
• Teaching and professional ethics (Malgorzata Plotka, Gonçalo Jorge Morais Costa,)
• Robo-ethics (Kathleen Richardson)
• Open track (topics of relevance that do not fit any of the themes) (Mark Coeckelbergh)
• New ideas on bringing people together / novel formats (Andy Bissett)

Abstracts covering one or several of these perspectives are called for from business, government, computer science, information systems, law, media, anthropology, andragogy, psychology, sociology and philosophy. Interdisciplinary papers and those from new researchers and practitioners are encouraged. A paper might take a conceptual, applied, practical or historical focus. Case studies and reports on lessons learned in practice are welcome. Read more on Call: Ethical issues around computers: 20 Years of ETHICOMP: A Celebration…

Call for Workshop Proposals: Critical Alternatives 2015

Aarhus, Denmark
17 or 18 August, 2015

We hereby invite workshop proposals for Critical Alternatives 2015, (http://www.aarhus2015.org).

The fifth decennial Aarhus conference, Critical Alternatives, aims to set new agendas for theory and practice in computing for quality of human life. Workshops at the conference provide an opportunity to discuss and build communities around specific issues and topics within the field of information technology. This is inherently an interdisciplinary conference, and we invite workshop organisers to consider how different perspectives can help establish constructive and critical discussions of workshop themes. Workshops are intended to foster discussion and exchange. Because focused interaction among participants is important, participants should have informed positions based on prior experience, as expressed in their position papers. Workshops should not be miniature paper presentation sessions, but focus on community building and communal knowledge creation.

Workshops are full-day events held at the start of the conference on 17 or 18 august 2015. Workshop proposals should aim to attract between 10 – 25 participants, and plan for around six working hours, with scheduled morning, lunch and afternoon breaks. There are two groups of people involved in a workshop: the organizers and the participants. Organizers are responsible for the workshop’s topic, logistics, and final outcome. Participants are responsible for the content and discussion. Read more on Call: Workshop Proposals for Critical Alternatives 2015…

Second International Workshop on Multiagent Foundations of Social Computing
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/chopraak/mfsc-2015/index.html

Co-located with AAMAS 2015 (http://www.aamas2015.com/)
4-8 May, 2015, Istanbul, Turkey

Social computing broadly refers to computing-supported approaches that facilitate interactions among people and organizations. Social computing has emerged as an exciting multidisciplinary area of research, driven by the wealth of easily available information and the success of online social networks and social media. Social computing applications are characterized by high interactivity among users, user-generated content, and in cases such as Wikipedia, more open governance structures.

Much of the recent excitement in social computing is driven by data analytics and business models. The aim of this workshop is to promote a deeper conceptual understanding of social computing — e.g., relating to its conceptual bases, information and abstractions, design principles, and platforms. We invite original thought-provoking papers that take an explicitly multiagent approach in addressing these gaps. We encourage well-argued position papers and vision papers. We also invite papers that present novel multiagent abstractions, methodologies, architecture, and techniques for social computing.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• Governance
• Security and privacy
• Models of social interaction
• Social expectations and norms
• Accountability
• Social middleware
• Crowdsourcing
• Collective intelligence
• Social intelligence
• Human computation
• Information models and data analytics
• Provenance
• Social sensing
• Applications such as healthcare and smart cities
• Participatory decision-making
• Argumentation
• Organizations
• Teamwork

Read more on Call: Second International Workshop on Multiagent Foundations of Social Computing…

Call for Papers

HWID2015 working conference on “Interaction Design for Pervasive and Smart Workplaces”

uwl.ac.uk/hwid2015

Venue: University of West London, Brentford Site, Boston Manor Road, TW8 9GA, United Kingdom

Wednesday and Thursday, 25th – 26th of June 2015, in London, United Kingdom

Deadline for submissions: 1st of February 2015.

THEME, SCOPE AND FOCUS:

The HUMAN WORK INTERACTION DESIGN 2015 (HWID 2015) working conference focuses on the integration of work analysis and interaction design methods for pervasive and smart workplaces.

Pervasive and smart technologies have pushed work-place configuration beyond linear logic and physical boundaries. As a result, workers’ experience of and access to technology is increasingly pervasive, and their agency constantly reconfigured. While this in certain areas of work is not new (e.g., technology mediation and decision support in air traffic control), more recent developments in other domains such as healthcare (e.g., Augmented Reality in Computer Aided Surgery) have raised challenging issues for HCI researchers and practitioners. The question now is: how to improve the quality of workers’ experience and outputs?

This working conference focuses on answering this question to support professionals, academia, national labs, and industry engaged in human work analysis and interaction design for the workplace. Conversely, tools, procedures, and professional competences for designing human-centered technologies for pervasive and smart workplaces will be discussed.

We are looking for submissions that provide the HCI field with sound tools, procedures, and professional competencies for designing human-centered technologies for pervasive and smart workplaces. Submissions will include, but are not limited to, one or more of the following topics:

• Learning from participants’ experiences in different work domains when applying work analysis to support the interaction design of pervasive and smart workplaces;
• Exploring how work analysis and interaction design have evolved, have to evolve, and can be made to co-evolve in order to support workers in pervasive and smart workplaces;
• Identify novel ideas, principles, and techniques for how interaction design for pervasive and smart workplaces can ensure high quality usability and user experience for workers;
• Addressing the sociotechnical gap in work analysis and interaction design, specifically the little understood gap between social requirements and technical designs.
• Designing simple interactions for complex work domains. How humans can manage the workers’ user experiences in pervasive and smart workplaces. These include enterprise, scientific and safety critical systems as well as fields such as digital archeology / heritage computing.

Read more on Call: Interaction Design for Pervasive and Smart Workplaces – HWID2015 working conference…