[ecoop-info] CFP: VL/HCC 2018 - IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing

[Rui Pereira]

IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC 2018)
1-4 October, 2018 - Lisbon, Portugalhttp://vlhcc.org
IMPORTANT DATES
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- Abstract Submission:  6 April 2018
- Paper Submission: 13 April 2018
- Review Notifications: 15 June 2018
- Rebuttal Deadline: 22 June 2018
- Paper Notification: 6 July 2018
- Camera Ready copy: 27 July 2018
- Conference: 1–4  October 2018
SCOPE AND TOPICS
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We solicit original, unpublished research papers on computing
technologies and visual languages for modelling, programming,
communicating, and reasoning, which are easier to learn, use or
understand by humans than the current state-of-the-art. Papers should
focus on efforts to design, formalize, implement, or evaluate those
technologies and languages. This includes tools and visual languages
intended for general audiences (e.g. professional or novice
programmers, or the public) or domain-specific audiences (e.g. people
working in business administration, production environments,
healthcare, urban design or scientific domains).
This year's special topic is "Building Human-Adaptive Socio-Technical
Systems". Systems in which humans are both developers of and intrinsic
parts of the system are becoming more common. These Human-Adaptive
Socio-Technical Systems adapt to changes in context and the behavior
of human users. Example systems include situation-aware
human-assistance systems and learning-based cooperative control
systems in a variety of application areas including Internet-of-Things
applications and Cyber-physical social systems. These kinds of systems
require human-centered concepts, languages and methods in two separate
contexts:  to specify system behavior and to assist in modeling human
behavior.
Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Novel visual languages
- Design, evaluation, and theory of visual languages
- End-user development, adaptation, and programming
- Domain-specific languages
- Visual modeling of  socio-technical systems
- Visual modeling of human behavior
- Visual modeling of digital twins of humans
- Interdisciplinary approaches (e.g. psychology, sociology) to human aspects
- Human aspects and psychology of software development and language design
- New representations and user interfaces for explaining system’s behavior
- Computational thinking and computer science education
- Problem solving through programming and play
- Debugging and program understanding
- Crowd Sourcing design and development work
- Software visualization
- Technologies and infrastructures for end user development
- Technology acceptance and adoption studies
- Evaluation of end user development technologies
PAPER SUBMISSIONS
-----------------
We invite two kinds of papers:
- full-length research papers, up to 8 pages - plus unlimited
additional pages containing only references
- short research papers, up to 4 pages - plus unlimited additional
pages containing only references
Supplemental Materials: In addition to papers, authors may optionally
submit supplemental materials that support their papers. Examples of
supplemental materials include short digital videos, copies of study
instruments, or experimental methodologies. Supplementary material
should be briefly described in the paper body. However, since not
everyone who reviews your paper may review submitted supplemental
materials, your submission must stand on its own without the
supplemental materials. The supplemental materials will be distributed
at the conference and will appear in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.
Videos must be at most 3 minutes in length, at most 100 MB in size,
and prepared as MP4 files using the H.264 codec. All supplemental
materials must adhere to the IEEE preparation instructions:
https://www.ieee.org/documents/MMdocumentation.pdf.
Papers and supplemental materials must be submitted using the
EasyChair system: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vlhcc2018
* Please note that we will follow a double-blind reviewing mechanism for 2018. *
To facilitate assigning papers to reviewers, we require paper
abstracts to be submitted via EasyChair at least one week before the
paper submission deadline. The abstract must be no longer than 150
words and must be kept up-to-date such that it exactly matches the
abstract in the submitted paper.
All accepted papers, whether full or short, should be complete,
self-contained, archival contributions. Contributions from full papers
are more extensive than those from short papers. Work-in-progress,
which has not yet yielded a contribution, should be submitted to the
Showpieces category. All submissions will be reviewed by members of
the Program Committee. Submission and reviews for the technical
program are managed with EasyChair. At least one author of each
accepted paper is required to register for VL/HCC 2018 and present the
paper at the conference. IEEE reserves the right to exclude a paper
from distribution after the conference, including IEEEXplore® Digital
Library, if the paper is not presented by the author at the
conference.
Accepted papers will be distributed at the conference and will be
included in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library
(http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/). The proceedings are an official
electronic publication of the IEEE in Computer Science, with an ISBN
number. Be sure to use the current IEEE conference paper format:
http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html.
DOUBLE BLIND REVIEWING
----------------------
We follow a light-weight double-blind reviewing process. Thus,
submitted papers must not reveal the identities of authors. However,
the author names will be known to the program committee in the
rebuttal phase.
Both authors and reviewers are expected to make every effort to honor
the double-blind reviewing process. In case of questions, please
contact the Program Chairs.
Authors should ensure that the submission can be evaluated without it
being obvious who wrote the paper. This means leaving author names off
the paper and using terms like “previous research” rather than “our
previous research” when describing background. However, do not hide
previous work – papers must still reference all relevant research,
including that by the current authors, so reviewers can evaluate
novelty.  It is important that authors specify all conflicts of
interest with potential reviewers during the submission phase.
Reviewers should not undertake any investigation that might lead to
the revealing of authors identity. If identities are inadvertently
revealed, please contact the Program Chairs.
The Program Chairs will check all submissions for obvious signs of
lack of anonymity and may ask authors to make changes and resubmit the
paper within four days of the submission deadline.
EVALUATION AND JUSTIFICATION
----------------------------
Papers are expected to support their claims with appropriate evidence.
For example, a paper that claims to improve programmer productivity is
expected to demonstrate improved productivity; a paper that claims to
be easier to use should demonstrate increased ease of use. However,
not all claims necessarily need to be supported with empirical
evidence or studies with people. For example, a paper that claims to
make something feasible that was clearly infeasible might substantiate
its claim through the existence of a functioning prototype. Moreover,
there are many alternatives to empirical evidence that may be
appropriate for justifying claims, including analytical methods,
formal arguments or case studies. Given this criterion,we encourage
potential authors to think carefully about what claims their
submission makes and what evidence would adequately support these
claims. In addition, we expect short papers to have less comprehensive
evaluation than long papers.
REVIEWING PROCESS
-----------------
Papers will be reviewed as follows:
- Initial review period: at least three members of the Program
Committee or external reviewers will review each paper. At the end of
this period, these initial reviews will be released to the authors.
- Author response period: authors will have an opportunity to submit a
response based on their initial reviews. Responses should focus on
answering reviewers' questions, addressing reviewers' concerns, and
clarifying any factual misunderstandings. At this point, the identity
of authors will be revealed to the program committee.
- Final review period: taking the author response into account, the
original reviewers will revise their reviews as they deem appropriate,
and the Program Committee will reach a final decision to accept or
reject the submitted work.