CFP: AAAI-2015 Spring Symposium - Structured Data for Humanitarian Tech (#SD4HumTech15)

Dear colleagues,
We are happy to inform you about AAAI-2015 symposium focused on bridging
the gap of using structured data and advanced computing technologies in the
humanitarian space. Here is the call for participation, and we invite both
position papers and technical papers for the same.

Given the expertise and insights this community has contributed to
understanding of emergency and humanitarian response initiatives, we hope
for your valuable participation.
Thanks,
Hemant, Lalana, and Oshani

===================

CALL FOR PAPERS

AAAI 2015 Spring Symposium
Structured Data for Humanitarian Technologies: Perfect fit or Overkill?
March 23–25, 2015 • Palo Alto, California

http://www.knoesis.org/hemant/symposium/aaai2015

Technology is playing an increasingly important role in all aspects of
humanitarian operations including search and rescue, early warning, and
coordination of relief logistics. However, applications that support
humanitarian operations often consume data stored in standalone databases,
or in spreadsheets requiring manual steps for data merging and management.
Moreover, the data structure is driven by schemas developed in isolation as
opposed to ontological structures supported by the community such as
Humanitarian eXchange Language (HXL
<http://hxl.humanitarianresponse.info/ns/index.html>) and Management Of A
Crisis (MOAC <http://observedchange.com/moac/ns/>). Consequently, the
increasingly unorganized and scattered information becomes noise in the
overall system, slowing down decision making processes.

The goal of this symposium is to assess the role of Structured Data (SD)
standards such as Linked Data, which can be quickly reused, integrated and
extended, in the humanitarian space. Using SD would permit effective
integration of and analysis over data generated by multiple parties,
including informal communities i.e. the “crowd”, relief organizations, and
more formally by government agencies. However, there are several important
challenges that prevent its widespread adoption such as the lack of data
sources, lack of mature libraries, and lack of standards across different
humanitarian sectors. This symposium proposes to investigate the role of SD
in the humanitarian relief domain. Is the technology mature enough to
warrant further investigation or do the disadvantages outweigh the utility
of SD for this domain?

The symposium will take place March 23-25, 2015. Stanford University, Palo
Alto, CA, USA <http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Spring/sss15.php> and will
include a mixture of invited talks, paper presentations, panels, system
demonstrations, and discussions. The symposium will include a panel
discussion that will bring together experts in Structured Data standards
with those in Crisis Informatics to debate the role of such standards in
humanitarian technologies. For more information, please see
http://knoesis.org/hemant/symposium/aaai2015

Topics:

We invite position papers (upto 5 pages including references) discussing
these issues as well as technical papers (upto 8 pages including references)
that demonstrate the effective use of Structured Data in the humanitarian
domain or where another comparable technology has been used to address the
reuse and integration issues. We invite papers on various research topics
in the context of extracting, organizing, and using structured data in the
applications for humanitarian relief, including but not limited to the
following:

   -

   Data schemas/ontologies for disaster management
   -

   Data schemas/ontologies for need/offer to assist coordination
   -

   Schemas/ontologies for humanitarian response and recovery operations
   -

   Applications of SD in humanitarian technologies
   -

   Use cases for SD in humanitarian operations at various levels- field,
   regional and headquarters


Submission:

Papers must be prepared in AAAI format
<http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/author.php> and submitted using
the easychair site <https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sd4humtech15>.
All accepted papers will be published in a proceedings issued as a AAAI
technical report. Late breaking ideas are encouraged as the subject of
short papers.

Important Dates:

   -

   October 24, 2014: Submissions due
   -

   November 21, 2014: Author notifications
   -

   December 1, 2014: Accepted camera-ready copy due to AAAI
   -

   March 23-25, 2015: Symposium

General symposium information:

General information on the 2015 AAAI Spring Symposia is available from the AAAI
Website <http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Spring/sss15.php>.  This includes
information about registration, location, transportation, and hotel
accommodations.

Program Committee:

   -

   Ken Anderson (University of Colorado, USA)
   -

   Marcos Borges (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
   -

   Carlos Castillo (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)
   -

   Tina Comes (Center for Integrated Emergency Management, Norway)
   -

   Carsten Keßler (The City University of New York, USA)
   -

   Patrick Meier (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)
   -

   Andrés Monroy-Hernández (Microsoft Research, USA)
   -

   Kate Starbird (University of Washington, USA)
   -

   Bartel van de Walle (Tilburg University, Netherlands)
   -

   Sarah Vieweg (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)
   -

   [TBA …]


Organizers:

   -

   Lalana Kagal (MIT, lkagal@csail.mit.edu)
   -

   Hemant Purohit (Kno.e.sis - Wright State U, hemant@knoesis.org)
   -

   Oshani Seneviratne (MIT, oshani@csail.mit.edu)


==============

-- 
Hemant Purohit
Researcher, Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing
(Kno.e.sis- FB <https://www.facebook.com/Kno.e.sis>) LinkedIn
<https://www.linkedin.com/in/purohithemant> Twitter
<https://www.twitter.com/hemant_pt> G+
<https://plus.google.com/+HemantPurohit>
http://knoesis.wright.edu/researchers/hemant