EAAMO'22 Policy and Practice Track

Call for participation

Deadline: April 20th, 2022, AoE

Dates: October 6-9, 2022

Submission Link: EasyChair

The second Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO ‘22) will take place on October 6-9, 2022, in Washington DC, USA.

The goal of this event is to highlight work aimed at improving access to opportunity for historically underserved and disadvantaged communities using techniques from algorithms, optimization, and mechanism design, and methods from the social sciences and humanistic studies.

The conference bridges academic researchers of different fields and methodological tools who nonetheless share interests in areas related to access to opportunity. To this end, it takes a broad view and welcomes work from along all stages of the research-to-practice pipeline. Our call for papers therefore invites participation from various disciplines and subareas which design solutions or insights for real-world problems faced in domain areas.

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, health, social work, housing, labor markets, and law and policy. Papers will be peer-reviewed by experts in the disciplinary area. The deadline for submissions is April 20th, 2022, 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:

For all submissions in either track, methodologies, techniques, and approaches used can include but are not limited to:

  • redistributive mechanisms and optimization to improve access to opportunity
  • mechanism design and optimization challenges in resource-constrained settings
  • improving diversity and equity in allocative or representational systems using algorithmic approaches
  • algorithmic or inferential insights for improving social service delivery and evaluation
  • ethical considerations when using interventions informed by algorithms or mechanism design in public sector settings
  • inference, uncertainty, and algorithms in allocation systems
  • audit studies of, and methods for, auditing inequities in societally important deployed systems
  • reliable, trustworthy, and valid inference in societally consequential domains
  • empirical studies of these above topics
  • critical analysis (survey and position papers and other research papers)

These submissions can be on topics including, but not limited to:

  • equitable provision of healthcare across communities
  • health inequality, its social determinants, and micro- and macroeconomic consequences
  • improving the provision of services in public, community, and global health
  • inequality and COVID response
  • 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
  • inequality in educational achievement and its determinants
  • measuring and evaluating progress to achieve sustainable development goals
  • reducing inefficiencies in smallholder farms and under-resourced supply chains
  • applied machine learning (NLP, vision) specialized to low-resource situations and other challenges
  • algorithmic proposals to encourage civic participation
  • methods for participatory approaches to inference
  • evaluating fairness in electoral representation
  • informing policy design for climate change
  • economic consequences of climate change and policy considerations
  • designing equitable transportation systems
  • tackling infrastructural challenges impacting marginalized communities

Our list of topics is broad in order to illustrate how a wide variety of perspectives and disciplinary approaches can triangulate progress on focus areas of shared interest.

Policy and Practice Track

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.

Submission Instructions

For the policy and practice track, submissions will have the option to be either archival or non-archival. For papers in disciplinary areas where archival conference papers are the norm, preference will be given to archival submissions. 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 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 papers that have been published no earlier than January 2020. 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 at most 14 pages in the camera-ready version at the time of publication, using the ACM Traditional Camera Ready Submission template. 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. Where possible, citations to the authors own previous work should be written in the third person; e.g., instead of “We previously developed…(Smith, 2019)”, write “Smith (2019) previously developed…”. If this would compromise the clarity of the paper (i.e., it is necessary to identify previous work as belonging to the authors), use an anonymous citation, e.g., (Anonymous, 2019). These can be replaced in the camera-ready version. Additionally, where possible, authors should avoid referring to specific institutional details in the paper which could reveal their names or affiliations (for example “our team included officials from a large U.S. city” instead of “our team included officials from New York City”). However, institutional information may be included if it is necessary to the research content of the paper, even if it is suggestive of author affiliations.

Submitted papers should include a statement that the study was approved by an Institutional Review Board if such review is required (e.g., for human subjects research conducted by members of a university).

Authors may submit unpublished work, work under review, or work that has been published no earlier than January 2020. 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’22 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.

After the review process, papers may be either accepted as is, rejected, or accepted conditional on a specific set of revisions being made. If revisions are requested, the authors will have a period of approximately 3 weeks, indicated in the dates below, to carry out the revisions. During this period, a designated “shepherd” will be assigned to each paper and will be available to confer with the authors on the revisions. The paper will then be accepted if the area and program chairs believe that the updated paper satisfies the request for revisions.

Submissions which are not accepted as a full paper may be accepted for poster presentation instead. Posters will be presented to the community during the conference poster sessions but are not accompanied by an archival publication.

Financial Assistance

The conference will provide financial assistance for registration and travel costs, as well as data plans if the conference is converted to a virtual format, as funds are available.

Please apply for financial assistance here by May 26, 2022.

Important Information

  • Paper Submission Deadline: 20 April 2022, AoE
  • Paper Submission Page: EasyChair
  • Notification: 18 July 2022
  • Event Date: 6-9 October 2022