EAAMO'22 Research 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.

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, multi-agent systems, and social choice theory. We also welcome work in the intersection of other important areas and AI/ML, such as human computer interaction in socio-technical systems or privacy and security.
  • Applied and Quantitative Modeling including proposing and analyzing applied and structural models for novel practical problems in data science, market and mechanism design, operations management (supply chain, service operations), computational social science, and/or economic modeling (structural micro- and macroeconomics, alternative microfoundations, industrial organization).
  • Empirical Studies including 1) empirical analysis of existing social systems, policies, and mechanisms, and other domains such as empirical industrial organization/health/education/labor, using reduced-form econometrics, or applied statistics/machine learning, etc; and 2) empirical impact evaluation, e.g. field experiments or quasi-experimental, of systems which incorporate computational tools such as algorithms, mechanisms, or optimization.
  • 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, economic theory, and theory of machine learning.

Submission Instructions

For the research 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 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 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.

We will allow an archival/non-archival grace period until May 26, 2022 for papers under review to change archival/non-archival status. (Email pc22@eaamo.org to change designation).

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