Face-Off: Facial Recognition Technologies and Humanity in an Era of Big Data.

 

Please join us on April 18th from 9:30am - 3:20pm for Boston University's international symposium Face-Off: Facial Recognition Technologies and Humanity in an Era of Big Data.  Speakers and panels are as follows:

Panel 1: Understanding Facial Recognition

How Does the Face Recognition Technology Work?
Margrit Betke, Boston University

The Biology of Facial Recognition
Mark Frank, University at Buffalo

Panel 2: Ethical Concerns and Practical Benefits

The Risks and Benefits of Facial Recognition? A New Direction Needed
Vanessa Nurock, Epidapo CNRS-UCLA & Université Paris 8

The Ethical Significance of the Face and AI Facial Recognition

Laura Specker Sullivan, Harvard Medical School’s Center for Bioethics

An Industry Perspective on Facial Recognition Technology
Derek Christensen, Accenture

Panel 3: Historical and Contemporary Uses and Abuses

Alphonse Bertillon: Issues in the “Scientific” Identification of Persons by Means of Facial Features at the Turn of the 20th Century
Pierre Piazza, Cergy-Pontoise University

The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America
Clare Garvie and Alvaro Bedoya, the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown

LawJonathan Frankle, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Panel 4: Applications and Perceptions

Emotion, Classification, and Race in Facial Recognition Systems
Luke Stark, Dartmouth College

Public Perceptions and Concerns: A View from Chile
Daniel Halpern, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile

Putting a Face to a Name in Clinical Settings: Recognizing Faces in
Manifestation and Outcomes of Clinician Anonymity
Lora Appel, OpenLab University Health Network, TorontoYork University,
Toronto

For additional details and registration information, please visit the event
website <https://www.mellonphilemerge.com/events/face-off>.  Be sure to
click Read More for full details.  Space is limited, so please be sure to
register!

Contact Sarah Krongard at krongard@bu.edu with any questions.

The Digital Everyday: Exploration or Alienation?

The Centre for Digital Culture at King’s College London is hosting its annual conference on Saturday 6th May. This year's theme is The Digital Everyday: Exploration or Alienation?

This international conference aims at exploring the digital everyday, understood as the transformation of everyday life practices brought about by digital technology. From how we buy, walk around, get a cab, love, break up, go to bed, meet new people and sexual partners to the way we rate services, turn on the fridge, exercise, eat, use social media and apps, Big Data is reshaping some of the most basic activities in our lives. We will also explore a number of overarching dynamics and trends in the digital world that contribute to these transformations, including: processes of digital individualisation and aggregation; the elisions of spatial and temporal barriers; trends towards quantification and datafication; and the dialectic between control and alienation.

We will have keynotes by Judy Wajcman, Susanna Paasonen and Taina Bucher and panels on play, self, labour, love, surveillance and place in the digital world. The draft programme is available at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/ahri/centres/Digicult/CDC-programme-FINAL.pdf.

The conference fee is £15 (£10 for students) and registration is open at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/ahri/eventrecords/2016-2017/Digicult/The-Digital-Everyday-Exploration-or-Alienation.aspx

CFP: ECREA Symposium Digital Democracy: Critical Perspectives in the Age of Big Data

CFP: ECREA Symposium Digital Democracy: Critical Perspectives in the Age of Big Data

10-11 November 2017, Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden

Joint Conference of two ECREA Sections: Communication and Democracy; and Media Industries and Cultural Production

Abstract Deadline 1 June 2017

Keynote speakers

Helen Kennedy (University of Sheffield)

Joseph Turow (University of Pennsylvania)

MikkelFlyverbom (Copenhagen Business School)

The coordinates of democracy, civic engagement and political participation are being fundamentally reconfigured in the context of digital media, Big Data and algorithmic culture, and so too are the media industries. This joint conference of the ECREA Communication and Democracy and Media Industries and Cultural Production Sections provides the opportunity to analyse and assess these changes.

The constant need to measure and capture our behavior and attitudes has consequences for our political agency and subjectivities. What do big data and algorithmic culture mean in the context of democratic participation and engagement? What are the consequences of ubiquitous surveillance, preemptive policing and social bots for our understanding of democracy and exercise of civic rights? How do current discussions of political agency in the digital age compare to previous moments of disruption in terms of the introduction of media technologies?

Big data and issues related to algorithmic governance have become a major topic of enquiry in the context of media industries as well. ‘Legacy media’ are trying to respond by integrating new digital services with their existing ones and new data-driven journalistic and media production practices emerge. This presents policy challenges, as, for example, public service media need to adapt to a situation in which data is increasingly commercialized. There are implications too for media workers in this new moment. In this context, we wish to explore issues related to the integration of Big Data and the media industries as well as online production, creativity and digital labour.

During this section conference, we aim to engage with questions concerningdatafication, media industries and (digital) democracy through addressing topics such as (but not limited to):

• Political subjectivities and political agency in the age of Big Data
• Political consequences of storing, processing and organizing of data
• Civic engagement and political participation in times of Big Data
• Surveillance and preemptive policing
• Materiality and environmental issues of Big Data and algorithmic culture
• New actors and discourses in the context of datafication
• Democratic potential of Big Data and algorithmic culture
• Algorithmic taste management in the media industries
• Archives and archiving of cultural production and civic engagement
• Media work and labour in datafied media industries
• Data Journalism

A YECREA workshop for PhD candidates and junior researchers will be organised. Details are going to be announced in early spring 2017.

Submission details

Please submit a 300-word abstract for individual proposals

Panel proposals should include a 300-word panel rationale plus individual 200 word abstracts from a minimum of four speakers.

All abstracts for individual as well as panel proposals should be submitted through: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ecreadigdem2017

Deadline for submission is 1 June 2017. Notifications of acceptance will be issued by 15 August 2017.

Registration and Fees

Early bird registration €50 (until 1 September 2017)

Early bird reduced student fee €30 (until 1 September)

Full fees €75

Reduced student fee €40

OrganisingCommittee:

Göran Bolin, Hanne Bruun, David Hesmondhalgh, Anne Kaun, Maria Michalis, Maria Kyriakidou, Fredrik Stiernstedt, Julie Uldam, Julia Velkova

CFP: ICA 2017 Pre-Conference "Data and the Future of Critical Social Research"

Call for the ICA 2017 Pre-Conference "Data and the Future of Critical Social Research"

Sponsored by the Philosophy, Theory and Critique Division of the International Communication Association
Event date: 25 May 2017, 9:00 AM - 5 PM, San Diego, California, USA
Deadline for proposals: January 15th, 2017 (500 words abstract)
Organisers: Nick Couldry (London School of Economics) and Andreas Hepp (University of Bremen)


What we call media and mediated communication is more and more interwoven with processes of datafication in an environment of continuous and largely automated data-gathering, for example, from our activities online or our mobile phone use. The uses of data collected, aggregated and analysed by systems of computers are today a precondition for everyday life. In short, data are changing social ontology, and as a result the role of 'media' within the constitution of the social. This can be understood as  part of a process of 'deep' mediatization (Couldry and Hepp 2016) - in which the very elements and building-blocks from which social is constructed are based in processes of mediation, accompanied by automated data processing.

In this transformed context, this pre-conference asks: What do such changes mean for critical communications and social research - indeed for critical social theory and informed political action generally? How should we now do critical empirical research into media and communications bearing this deep mediatization in mind? The pre-conference aims both to focus these questions theoretically and to encourage perspectives on what constitutes critical empirical research under such conditions.

Questions on which we welcome either theoretical or empirical contributions include:

• What sort of economic, political and social order is being built through today’s data relations and their underlying linked infrastructures?
• How are the self's relations to institutional power changing through digital traces, data relations and with implications for autonomy and freedom?
• How is the nature of social institutions changing through deep mediatization and the pervasiveness of data relations?
• Are practices of civic and political intervention for social change on balance stimulated or undermined in a datafied environment? 
• What does community and other forms of collectivity come to mean under these new datafied conditions?
• How should we develop our methods for a critical analysis of processes of deep mediatization?
• What kind of social interventions are needed that build from critical analyses of datafication?

Please email a 500 words proposals to Andreas Hepp (andreas.hepp@uni-bremen.de) by January 15th, 2017. Please direct any questions to: Nick Couldry (n.couldry@lse.ac.uk) or Andreas Hepp (andreas.hepp@uni-bremen.de).

CFP: Symposium on Big Data and Human Development

Symposium on Big Data and Human Development

Thursday 15 - Friday 16 Sep 2016

Said Business School, Lecture Theatre 04

Oxford, UK

http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/events/?id=786

To attend, please email your name and affiliation to events@oii.ox.ac.uk. Attending this conference is free of charge. Please note space is limited and registration preference will be given to contributors of selected abstracts.

This workshop aims to move forward the debate about the ways in which big data is used, can be used, and should be used in development.

This symposium will also serve as a bridge between methodological knowledge about big data, critical academic research on the topic, and the desires of stakeholders and practitioners to achieve key developmental outcomes and goals.

With keynotes by:

Professor Bitange Ndemo, Former Permanent Secretary of Kenya’s Ministry of Information and Communication, and Lecturer at the University of Nairobi

Professor Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Academic Director of Data-Pop Alliance, and Director of the MIT Human Dynamics Lab

Dr Linnet Taylor, Fellow at the Department of International Development, University of Amsterdam

Organizers:

Mark Graham

Eduardo Lopez

Christopher Dobyns

Call for abstracts

We welcome the submission of abstracts (of max 250 words) for talks, panels, and sessions at the workshop. Submit them to christopher.dobyns@oii.ox.ac.uk by 15 July 2016.

Papers presented in the conference will be considered for an edited volume in big data and human development.

Please contact Mark Graham (mark.graham@oii.ox.ac.uk) with any questions.

The Oxford Human Development and Big Data Incubator is working to stimulate policy-oriented research. Topics that we seek to focus on in our workshop include (but are not limited to):

What ‘big data’ can tell us about human development; how we can facilitate better decision-making and accountability in previously data-sparse environments;

• What presences and absences of data tell us about issues of participation and exclusion among marginalised populations;
• What tools have emerged globally that can maximise citizen ownership of big data, by making data meaningful within the cultures of participation that characterise different localities.
• Research results of projects employing big data in the contexts of development.

Submissions may include:

Talks: Contributors are invited to submit full-length talks (15 min) related to the conference themes

Panels: Contributors are invited to pitch a panel discussion on core conferences themes

Demonstrations: Contributors are invited to submit an idea for a demonstration (which may be facilitated as part of a panel as a stand-alone event)

CFP: Computational Social Science in the Age of Big Data

Call for Book Chapters: Computational Social Science in the Age of Big Data
Deadline: 30 June 2016

1.    Working Title of Book

Computational Social Science in the Age of Big Data. Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications

2.    Publisher

Herbert von Halem Verlag (Cologne, Germany), in Neue Schriften zur Online Forschung of the German Society for Online Research (DGOF); expected publication in 2017.

3.    Editorial Board
Cathleen M. Stuetzer (JGU Mainz, Institute for Sociology)
Martin Welker (HMKW Cologne, Journalism and Communication Science)
Marc Egger, INSIUS Berlin

4.   Description and Purpose of the Book
In the digital age the exponential growth in the amount of data brings out new forms of social science research by using computational techniques to handle and manage big data sources. The book will demonstrate how data analysts both from academia and business analyze large and complex masses of data by taking a multidisciplinary approach. It will uncover cutting-edge analysis techniques and methods for searching and using large data sets within different disciplines like sociology, information science, communication science, health, education, political science, psychology, economics, and other fields. The rapid emergence of computational social science as new discipline shows the potential need to discuss innovative approaches and new techniques to understand our complex social system (Lazer et al. 2009). Data scientists, researchers, as well as professional data analysts from different fields look for theoretical concepts, methodological approaches, instruments, and tools to make large-scale and complex data available for research on human behavior (Alvarez 2016; CioffiRevilla 2010; Conte et al. 2012). The purpose of the book is to summarize the current state of knowledge about meaning, development, and uses of computational social science in the context of big data. The book will bring together the status quo of theoretical background, concepts, methodological approaches, instruments, tools as well as applications and empirical-based research studies. The audience of this book are the academic as well as commercial sector researchers, commercials, students, and teachers who have begun using big data to examine human behavior online.

5.   Submission procedure for chapter proposals and Notification

Each chapter should contain a critical review of literature on the topic of the chapter, summarize and evaluate what is known about it, report research findings, identify important gaps of knowledge as well as make suggestions for future research.

A subset of possible chapter topics include:

• Concepts and Theoretical aspects
• Methodology
• Analytical Instruments & Techniques
• Tools & Applications
• Big Data Analytics
• Business Analytics
• Data Science
• Behavioral Science
• Data Mining
• Data Visualization
• Data Analysis
• Data Sharing
• Data Storage
• Information Retrieval Methods
• Security and Privacy issues
• Case Studies

Submissions should be in German or in English and must include the title, author(s) name, affiliation(s), e-mail address(es), tel/fax numbers, and e-mail address, postal address(es), and abstract on the first page. In the case of multiple authors, all names, addresses, etc. must accompany the submission and a single author must be identified as the primary point of contact.

Submissions must be sent as an e-mail attachment to Cathleen Stuetzer using the e-mail address office@dgof.de and/or cstuetze@uni-mainz.de.

Chapter Proposal Length: max. 3 pages, Format: Adobe PDF

All chapter proposals will be evaluated by a committee of experts before author(s) are being invited to submit the full book chapter. Papers will be selected based on their originality, relevance, and clarity of presentation. Authors should certify that their papers represents substantially new previously unpublished work.

Chapters must not have been published elsewhere. Unpublished conference presentations are acceptable. Published conference presentations (e.g. in a proceedings volume) may be acceptable if the full copyright can be transferred. If submitting a published conference presentation, the author(s) must provide proof that the article's full copyright can be transferred.

6.  Important Dates and Anticipated Deadlines for Chapters
Chapter Proposal Submission Deadline: June 30, 2016
Notification of Chapter Proposal Acceptance/Rejection: August 1, 2016
Final Book Chapter Submission Deadline (Revised Version Due): December 15, 2016
Final Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: April 1, 2017
Final Camera-Ready Version Deadline: June 30, 2017
Publication Date (tentative): Summer 2017
The chapter proposal should be sent via email to office@dgof.de no later than June 30, 2016. These papers will be examined in an academic review process by a committee of experts. A confirmation of receipt of the submission will be sent within three days, and if you do not receive the confirmation please resend the email and/or contact Cathleen Stuetzer (cstuetze@uni-mainz.de).

Notification regarding the status of each proposal will be sent by August 1, 2016 to all those who submitted a chapter proposal. At that time authors whose chapter proposals have been accepted will also be e-mailed guidelines regarding full book chapter preparation.

The final book chapter deadline is December 15, 2016. Following receipt, full chapters will be sent out for double-blind review. The editors will make the final decision regarding final acceptance of each book chapter until April 1, 2017. All chapters with revision requests (if necessary) need to be completed by June 30, 2017.

7.    Inquiries should be directed to

Dr. Cathleen M. Stuetzer

Board Member of the German Society for Online Research (DGOF)
Internet: www.dgof.de, Email (DGOF-Office): office@dgof.de

 ---
 Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Institute for Sociology
 Department of Social Network Research and Sociology of the Family
 Office: Jakob-Welder-Weg 12, Georg Forster-Gebäude
 Room: 03.443 (GFG), D-55099 Mainz, Germany
 Phone: +49 6131 39 29397
 Email: cstuetze@uni-mainz.de

8.    Further information are available here

Website: https://sites.google.com/site/cfpcomputationalsocialsciences

Publisher: http://www.halem-verlag.de/2015/neue-schriften-zur-online-forschung

Additional Information: www.dgof.de

9.    References
Alvarez, R. M. 2016. Computational Social Science: Cambridge University Press.
CioffiRevilla, C. 2010. Computational social science. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics (2), S. 259-271.
Conte, R., N. Gilbert, G. Bonelli, C. Cioffi-Revilla, G. Deffuant, J. Kertesz, V. Loreto, S. Moat, J. P. Nadal, A. Sanchez, A. Nowak, A. Flache, M. San Miguel, und D. Helbing. 2012. Manifesto of computational social science. The European Physical Journal Special Topics (214), S. 325-346.
Lazer, D., A. Pentland, L. Adamic, S. Aral, A. L. Barabasi, D. Brewer, N. Christakis, N. Contractor, J. Fowler, M. Gutmann, T. Jebara, G. King, M. Macy, D. Roy, und M. Van Alstyne. 2009. Life in the network: the coming age of computational social science. Science (New York, N.Y.) (323), S. 721-723.

CFP: Special Issue on Social and Technical Trade-Offs

Big Data / http://www.liebertpub.com/big
Call for Papers: Special Issue on Social and Technical Trade-Offs

Guest Editors:
Solon Barocas / Princeton University
danah boyd / Data & Society and Microsoft Research
Sorelle Friedler / Haverford College and Data & Society
Hanna Wallach / Microsoft Research and UMass Amherst

Deadline for manuscript submission: September 15, 2016

This special issue on Social and Technical Trade-Offs aims to serve two main purposes:

• To highlight exciting and novel work in machine learning, artificial intelligence, data mining, and data science that articulates, examines, challenges, and addresses the technical and social trade-offs involved in the analysis and interpretation of big data.
• To pose practical, grounded, and socially-oriented challenges for researchers in machine learning, artificial intelligence, data mining, and data science to motivate and guide their research.

Working with “big data” isn't easy, especially when it involves social data. Researchers and practitioners must make hard choices when cleaning and processing data, grapple with biased data sets and missing data, and evaluate the social and technical trade-offs involved in analysis and interpretation. What are the ethical implications of these choices? What happens when we get it wrong? How can we prioritize reproducibility? What happens when biased data and imperfect methods are combined in unexpected ways? This special issue will examine the trade-offs that emerge from the interconnected nature of the social and technical decision-making that lies at the heart of big data.

We encourage submissions that focus on challenges and questions involving large-scale social data, and that are deployed (or are in the process of being deployed) in the real world.

• Area of focus include (but are not limited to):
• Surveillance and privacy
• Healthcare, medicine, and public health
• Criminal justice and policing
• Education and learning
• Disaster relief
• Urban planning, housing, and infrastructure
• Finance, scoring, and insurance
• Public administration and public policy
• Autonomous experimentation
• Targeted advertising

Example questions that are relevant include (but are not limited to):

• How should we strike a balance between model performance and interpretability?
• How can we formalize social concepts in ways that are amenable to machine learning methods? How do these formalizations influence the choice of machine learning method?
• How does uncertainty and noise inherent to real-world data sets affect the use of these data sets and the use of results obtained from them via machine learning methods?
• How can we incorporate social and ethical considerations into our validation methods and choices? What are the social costs of errors or class imbalance and the distribution of those errors across populations? What are the social implications of prioritizing false positive rates vs. false negative rates?
• When is it appropriate to collect additional data about minority or underrepresented populations? How should we address the need for balanced data sets without imposing a “diversity tax?” How should we weigh the social and financial associated costs and benefits?
• What are the social consequences and tradeoffs involved in feature selection?

We encourage submissions from organizations that may do not typically write research papers. In addition to submissions from universities and corporations, we welcome submissions from government agencies, nonprofit organizations, startups, and foundations.

These submissions might be:

• Papers that describe and evaluate new and/or existing methods that balance social and technical factors in decision-making using or surrounding big data.
• Papers that describe trade-offs that emerged during the design and implementation of big data systems in industry, government, or nonprofit settings.
• Position papers that highlight sociotechnical challenges that need to be overcome in order to make methods that are suited to responsibly solving large-scale social challenges.
• Big Data is a highly innovative, peer-reviewed journal, provides a unique forum for world-class research exploring the challenges and opportunities in collecting, analyzing, and disseminating vast amounts of data, including data science, big data infrastructure and analytics, and pervasive computing.
• Advantages of publishing in Big Data include:
• Big Data is indexed in Thomson Reuters Emerging Sources Citation Index
• Attractive open access options
• Fast and user-friendly electronic submission
• Rapid, high-quality peer review
• Maximum exposure: accessible in 170 countries worldwide

Deadline for manuscript submission: September 15, 2016.  Submit here: http://www.liebertpub.com/manuscript/big

Please address any questions to: bd-tradeoffs@lists.datasociety.net

Big Data is a highly innovative, peer-reviewed journal, provides a unique forum for world-class research exploring the challenges and opportunities in collecting, analyzing, and disseminating vast amounts of data, including data science, big data infrastructure and analytics, and pervasive computing.

Advantages of publishing in Big Data include:

• Big Data is indexed in Thomson Reuters Emerging Sources Citation Index
• Attractive open access options
• Fast and user-friendly electronic submission
• Rapid, high-quality peer review
• Maximum exposure: accessible in 170 countries worldwide

A web version of this call is available at: http://www.datasociety.net/blog/2016/03/10/big-data-cfp-social-technical-trade-offs/

CFP: Information Access and Control in an Age of Big Data

Call for Papers for a Special Issue

Information Access and Control in an Age of Big Data

Submission Deadline for Papers: June 1, 2015

Guest Editors

Edward L. Carter, J.D. LL.M., Associate Professor, Brigham Young University

Laurie Thomas Lee, Ph.D., Professor, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Overview

In a keynote address at a 1996 conference on information policy sponsored by the U.S. government, scholar and analyst William J. Drake said, “The new information infrastructure can and should be designed to balance the needs of all parties with direct stakes in it: large corporate suppliers and users, the public sector, the non-commercial sector, small and large businesses, and individual users.”[1] However, Drake warned that conflicting interests and competing international models of information access and control could impede the achievement of this vision. He suggested that use patterns and government regulation should be monitored and managed as technological advances caused changes in mass communication.

Given the impact of Big Data and technological advances in the nearly 20 years since Drake’s comment, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly proposes to publish a special issue on “Information Access and Control in an Age of Big Data.” The editorial team of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly believes this research has the potential to make an important contribution to the literature appraising the current state of information and communication technology, consumer and audience behavior, and policy and law, as well as to provide a platform for development of future research in journalism and mass communication.

Papers

We invite contributions to a special issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly that will address access to and control of information in an age of Big Data. We encourage submissions that approach this topic from an inclusive range of fields and research methodologies within journalism and mass communication and also from other disciplines, with a focus on the implications of the topic to media and society. Papers may offer insights about technological, behavioral, policy, legal and other issues. Possible topics might include, among others, the so-called right to be forgotten on the Internet; social media and privacy; the implications of Big Data for journalism and mass communication; government and corporate surveillance; technology solutions to protect confidentiality in reporter-source relationships; access by news media and other individuals to digital records of government and other institutions; the response of journalism, public relations and advertising to challenges and opportunities in the current environment; search engine optimization and reputation management; intellectual property and freedom of expression; data protection; and the right of publicity. This special issue lends itself to research from a variety of cultural and international perspectives, and therefore papers with international and intercultural approaches are particularly encouraged. We welcome both qualitative and quantitative approaches to the topic.

Details of Paper Content, Length, and Due Date

Papers will undergo blind peer review. Those selected for publication will then enter the editorial publication process, resulting in publication online in January 2016 and in print in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly in summer 2016. The deadline for full paper submissions is June 1, 2015 at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jmcq.

Authors are requested to submit manuscripts in APA Style, 6th Edition. Manuscripts in other citation styles will be considered in initial review. Other manuscript submission details for Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly are available at http://www.sagepub.com/journals/Journal202061/manuscriptSubmission.

Further Information

For questions regarding this special issue, please contact the guest editors:

            Edward L. Carter, Brigham Young University, ed_carter@byu.edu

            Laurie Thomas Lee, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, llee1@unl.edu

CFP: Call for participants: Digital Placemaking Workshop at ICWSM (Oxford, UK)

Digital Placemaking: Augmenting Physical Places with Contextual Social Data

May 26, 2015  

Oxford, UK

More information available here <http://digitalplacemaking.apps-1and1.com/> or below.

People have embraced social media as a means to express their experiences within and knowledge about particular places, and researchers have continued to analyze these digital traces in order to better understand social activities within particular places. Geo-tagged social media data such as photos, tweets, check-ins, audio, video, and status updates have proliferated and reveal individual and collective senses of place and local insights into interactions between people and place. However, these digital traces alone cannot reveal a holistic sense of place and placemaking.

One of the key goals of the workshop is to create a hands on experience and encourage participants from a variety of backgrounds to discover, share, and interact with experimental techniques of data gathering and urban sensing. The Digital Placemaking Workshop fosters discussions covering topics such as (but not limited to):

• Use of social media to engage communities in placemaking activities and participatory design
• Mobilizing and exhibiting place and placemaking efforts through social media
• Improving understandings of place and space through mining social media
• Pervasive applications for local user interaction and data collection
• Methodological advances in contextual understandings of social media outputs across space & place
• Use of social media to inform design and planning practices
• Role of social media in expressing or altering a sense of place or aiding in the understanding of everyday functionalities of regions, spaces and places
• Enabling citizen, artist, government, and NGO initiatives through social media
• Visualizations and interfaces to enable exploration and sharing of local data and experiences
• Privacy and ethical concerns in citizen engagement

We accept two types of submissions: (1) original research or work-in-progress and (2) project idea around digital placemaking that might be developed as part of this workshop.

Paper submission deadline: March 13, 2015

All contributions must be submitted as PDF files. Submissions will be evaluated by the organizers and Program Committee. The workshop accepts novel research or work-in-progress papers (no longer than 4 pages) or position papers (no longer than 2 pages). All papers must be submitted by the deadlines provided below and formatted in AAAI two-column, camera-ready style (see the author instructions page). All submitted papers will be reviewed and judged on originality, technical correctness, relevance, and quality of presentation by the Program Committee. All accepted submissions must be presented during the workshop.

Please submit papers through EasyChair:
*https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=digitalplacemaking20
<https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=digitalplacemaking20> *

*Organizers:*
Germaine Halegoua, University of Kansas
Raz Schwartz, Facebook Research
Ed Manley, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London