We invite research contributions to the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics on the Web Track at the 32nd edition of The Web Conference series (formerly known as WWW), to be hosted at Austin, TX, US, on April 30 - May 4, 2023 ( /www2023/)
As part of this research track, we invite a wide range of research studies concerned with the fairness and equity, justice, inclusivity, transparency, accountability, and ethics of web infrastructure, systems, and ecosystems.
We seek research papers in which web technologies, standards and platforms are examined, designed, deployed, evaluated with the goal of making them more fair, accountable, transparent and ethical; in which web technologies, standards and platforms are audited to understand their possible adverse impacts on individuals, groups, and society; as well as papers that interrogate and take a critical look at how foundational aspects of current web technologies, standards and platforms give rise to harms and fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethical risks.
The goal of this track is to gather researchers and developers from academia, industry, and civil society to present and debate methods for achieving a Web that is inclusive, just, ethical, and open. To achieve this, we look for contributions that describe research results, tools, audits, frameworks, design techniques and experiments that are being developed to deal with fairness and equity, accountability, and transparency, broader social impact, and ethics on the Web. Studies of any aspect of a Web technology or application are welcome, including social impacts, user interfaces and experience, algorithms, data collection and processing, engineering process, and policy.
We welcome submissions that address the broad goals of this Research Track, and look forward to seeing the diverse ways in which authors will approach these themes.
As work in this space is intrinsically connected to contested ideas about what it means for the Web to be fair, accountable, transparent, and ethical, we strongly encourage authors to be explicit in their papers about the principles, ideals, assumptions, goals, and/or theoretical frameworks upon which their work relies, along with their motivations and relevant citations. This will help reviewers to better assess the work in the context of its goals, and future authors to understand how findings might translate to their own context.
Authors should consult the conference’s main Research Track CFP to ensure their submissions are aligned with broader conference expectations, scope, and theme: “Web Research with Openness, Fairness and Reproducibility.” The CFP also details submission guidelines, relevant dates, and important policies.
Submissions that are out of scope or unresponsive to the call above will be rejected early during the reviewing process (“desk rejected”) with minimal feedback. In particular, submissions that merely focus on, e.g., a dataset obtained from the Web, without engaging with a specific Web-related scientific research challenge about fairness, accountability, transparency, ethics or without exploring their broader adverse impact, are out of scope of the track and will be rejected early during the reviewing process (“desk-rejected”). For instance, studies examining the transparency or fairness of algorithms for ranking social media feeds is in scope, while studies improving fairness of lending, college admissions, or criminal justice applications or only applying an NLP method to a web corpus without engaging further with Web related artifacts and phenomena is out of scope.
For more details on the scope of research studies published at The Web Conference, please carefully consult the author instructions.
In case you have doubts whether your paper fits the scope of this track, please contact the track chairs: fate-thewebconf2023@easychair.org