Call for Papers

Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC) 2023 Call for Papers

The 4th annual Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC) will be held on June 7-9, 2022, at Stanford University in California, USA.

The Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC) is a forum for mathematical research in computation and society writ large. The Symposium aims to catalyze the formation of a community supportive of the application of theoretical computer science, statistics, economics and other relevant analytical fields to problems of pressing and anticipated societal concern.

Topics include, but are not restricted to:

• theoretical approaches to fairness in machine learning, including the investigation of definitions, algorithms, lower bounds, and tradeoffs;
• formal approaches to privacy, including differential privacy;
• computational and mathematical social choice, including apportionment and redistricting;
• economic incentives, including mechanism design for social good;
• metrics and implications of robustness, including formal methods for explainability;
• bias in the formation of, and diffusion in, social networks; and
• mathematical approaches bridging computer science, law, and ethics.

The Program Committee also welcomes mathematically rigorous work on societal problems that have not traditionally received attention in the theoretical computer science literature, including but not limited to domains such as education, sustainability, housing, climate change and labor markets.

Submitted papers should communicate their contributions towards responsible computing, broadly construed; they should clearly motivate the problem, develop and present a mathematically rigorous solution, and illustrate how it addresses the problem at hand while also clearly discussing limitations of the proposed method. Submissions should include proofs of all central claims, and the committee will value writing that clearly conveys what the paper is accomplishing. Authors are encouraged to reflect on relevant ethics guidelines (such as the ACM code of ethics or the DFG guidelines for safeguarding good research practice) in shaping their work, dissemination, and submission.

Important Dates and Information

Paper registration deadline: February 07, 2023 11:59pm AOE (anywhere on Earth)

Submission deadline: February 09, 2023 11:59pm AOE (anywhere on Earth)

Author notification: March 31, 2023

Symposium: June 7-9, 2023

Please register and submit via this EasyChair link: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=forc2023

Presentation of Accepted Papers

The symposium will feature a mixture of talks by authors of accepted papers and invited talks. At least one author of each accepted paper should attend the symposium in order to present the work. We will consider requests for virtual accommodations on a case-by-case basis.

Authors of papers accepted will be given the option to choose whether to convert to a one-page abstract (which will not appear in the proceedings) or publish a 10-page version of their paper in the proceedings. In addition to these archival papers, we will also allow submission of “non-archival” papers that may have appeared at, or are under submission to another conference or journal. These are meant to enrich the conference program, and the committee will use a different standard to evaluate these submissions. These will also be ineligible for best paper awards. Accepted papers in the non-archival track will receive talks at the symposium and will appear as one-page abstracts on the symposium website. They will not appear in the proceedings.

Best Paper Awards

All archival submissions will be considered for the Best Paper award(s). Additionally, archival submissions authored by students will be considered for the Best Student Paper award(s).

Submission Format

The proceedings of FORC 2023 will be published by LIPIcs. We encourage but do not require to use the LIPIcs format. In lieu of that, please use 11 point font and a single-column format.

Author names and affiliations SHOULD appear on the front page. Reviewing for FORC is single-blind, not double-blind.

For non-archival submissions: Please indicate with a footnote on the title of the paper whether the paper is a submission to the archival-option track or the non-archival track. Submissions to the non-archival track should also, if applicable, indicate in this footnote any archival venues (conferences or journals) at which the paper has appeared, a link to the publication, and the date on which it was published.

Beyond these, there are no formatting or length requirements. However, reviewers will only be required to read the first 10 pages of the submission (excluding references); it is the authors’ responsibility that the main results of the paper, their significance and limitations, be clearly stated within the first 10 pages.

Submission Instructions

Submissions will be made via EasyChair link above.

Authors should register their paper with a title, author list, and single-paragraph abstract by the registration deadline. Please make an effort to have a near-final title and abstract; this will ensure your paper is matched with the best reviewers possible for your work.

The paper should be uploaded in .pdf format by the submission deadline.

Dual Submission Policy

Authors must indicate at the time of submission whether they are submitting to the archival-option track or the non-archival track.

For submissions to the archival-option track: Papers that are substantially similar to papers that have been previously published, accepted for publication, have been or would be submitted in parallel to other peer-reviewed conferences with proceedings, may not be submitted. In addition, submissions that are substantially similar to papers that are already accepted or published in a journal at the time of submission may not be submitted to the archival-option track. Accepted papers in the archival-option track will receive talks at the symposium. Authors of papers accepted to the archival-option track will be given the option to choose whether to convert to a one-page abstract (which will not appear in the proceedings) or publish a 10-page version of their paper in the proceedings.

For submissions to the non-archival track: It is permitted to submit papers that have appeared in a peer-reviewed conference or journal since the last FORC deadline. It is also permitted to simultaneously or subsequently submit substantially similar work to another conference or to a journal. Accepted papers in the non-archival track will receive talks at the symposium and will appear as one-page abstracts on the symposium website. They will not appear in the proceedings.

In either track, we welcome the submission of work that is already available without peer review, e.g., technical reports in SSRN, ArXiv, or similar. Authors are also responsible for ensuring that submitting to FORC would not be in violation of other journals’ or conferences’ submission policies.

Program Committee

• Borja Balle, Deepmind
• Amrita Roy Chowdhury, UC San Diego
• Aloni Cohen, University of Chicago
• Edith Cohen, Google and Tel Aviv University
• Rachel Cummings, Columbia University
• Sumegha Garg, Stanford University
• Badih Ghazi, Google
• Parikshit Gopalan, Apple
• Adam Tauman Kalai, Microsoft Research
• Michael P. Kim, UC Berkeley
• Katrina Ligett, Hebrew University
• Yishay Mansour, Tel Aviv University and Google
• Ilya Mironov, Meta
• Kobbi Nissim, Georgetown University
• Chara Podimata, UC Berkeley/MIT
• Jessica Sorrell, University of Pennsylvania
• Adam Smith, Boston University
• Nati Srebro, Toyota Technological Institute, Chicago
• Thomas Steinke, Google
• Kunal Talwar, Apple (chair)