Call: Social Media for Emergency Response (SOMMER)

Call for Papers:
Website: https://2022sommer.github.io/
Submissions: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sommer22
Deadline: April 21st, 2022 (AoE)

The International Workshop on Social Media for Emergency Response (SOMMER) will be held in conjunction with the 16th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media 2022 (ICWSM) on June 6th, 2022.

Social media platforms have evolved to play multiple roles in contemporary society - such as primary sources for communication, acting as a proxy for information needs, and also becoming a medium for seeking assistance. One of the interesting roles social media platforms have started being used nowadays for is - emergency response. During emergency events, delivering the right information in a timely manner is crucial, not only for emergency response organizations but also for other social media users in the vicinity. Social media platforms allow people who are actually at ground zero to express their opinions and provide information about the event, thus becoming in most cases, primary sources of information. However, mining social media data to provide insights that can be used by emergency response comes with significant technical challenges, such as real-time information extraction, information ranking, credibility, multimodality, information visualization, data sampling, etc. Tackling these problems requires researchers to take a truly interdisciplinary approach to enable the use-case of using social media data for emergency response holistically. Through this workshop, we want to provide an interdisciplinary forum for researchers from different fields to present and discuss research on this topic from different perspectives.

This workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners in computer and social sciences from both academia and industry to exchange ideas on understanding how social media can be leveraged for emergency response during crisis events.

Two types of submissions for participation in the workshop are accepted:

Short Research Paper should not exceed 4 pages in AAAI format (see author guidelines for ICWSM). These papers, if accepted, will be included in the ICWSM workshop proceedings. The 4-page format will be ideal for dataset related papers i.e. papers that present to the community a new novel dataset that can be useful for this community, or demos i.e. papers explaining tools or novel frameworks that are aimed at easing the use of social media data for emergency response.

Long Research Paper should not exceed 8 pages in AAAI format (see author guidelines for ICWSM). Papers should cover topics described above. These papers will ideally be aimed at presenting novel research. Higher preference will be given to papers having clarity in describing the problem setting, including detailed description of how it fits the theme of the workshop and provides details on how the work can be applied in real-world and hence limitations thereof.

Submitted papers need to be in PDF or latex-zipped files. Alongside the camera-ready PDF’s, you will be required to collect and submit the source files for each paper – all files which were used to create the final output (PDF), be they Word, LaTeX, image files, etc. There is no requirement to anonymize the submissions; Authors may choose to submit anonymously or not. Accepted papers will be published by the AAAI Press; however, authors can choose to opt out of formal proceedings. We welcome prior work published in conferences or journals as long as they are relevant to the theme. Each accepted paper must be presented by a registered author. Submissions not meeting these guidelines risk immediate rejection. For questions about these policies, please contact the chairs.

Topics of interest for the workshop include the following (using text, images, video, and any combination):

All aspects of event detection (where an event happened, its impact, etc.)
Information ranking for emergency response
Tools and techniques for emergency management that use social media
Techniques to identify emerging topics in large-scale disasters, including unexpected events
Tools and techniques to identify aid requests
Emergency event summarization
Techniques in social network analysis that can help identify communities of need or that can be effective at responding (e.g., in fundraising in response to an emergency)
Ontologies specifically for emergency response
Tools and techniques for identifying credible messages during emergency response
Techniques to enable real-time (or instantaneous) information extraction from social media during crisis events
Studies that help identify causality and other relationships between events, particularly in large-scale emergencies
Perspectives from practitioners and academics in any relevant field, on the impact of social media in emergencies and how to better leverage social media data for good
Privacy preserving techniques to extract important information that is relevant to emergency response
Studies or perspectives on human behavior during emergencies, particularly in relation to social media use
Systems that use social media for training in emergency response
Techniques or systems to leverage social media data for disaster prevention or mitigation
Perspectives on policy as it relates to social media and emergency response
Datasets and data collection methods which can be useful to researchers in the field, as it relates to emergency response


Co-organizers:
Hemank Lamba, Dataminr, Inc., USA
Ayan Mukhopadhyay, Vanderbilt University, USA
Alex Jaimes, Dataminr, Inc., USA