FORC 2022: Call For Papers

Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC) 2022 Call for Papers

The 3rd annual Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC) will be held on June 6-8, 2022, at the Harvard Center for Mathematical Sciences and Applications (CMSA).

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 10, 2022 11:59pm AOE (anywhere on Earth)
Submission deadline: February 16, 2022 11:59pm AOE (anywhere on Earth)
Author notification: March 31, 2022

Symposium: June 6-8, 2022

Please register and submit via this EasyChair link: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=forc22

Submission Format

• The proceedings of FORC 2022 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.

 

Presentation of Accepted Papers
The symposium itself will feature a mixture of talks by authors of accepted papers and invited talks. At least one author of each accepted paper should be registered at the symposium in order to present the work. While we encourage in-person participation, we will make virtual accommodations as needed.

Strong COVID precautions (e.g., vaccination proof, testing and masks) will be in place for in-person participation, details forthcoming. While we hope to meet in-person, the Symposium may move to a virtual or hybrid format depending on the feasibility of travel at that time.

 

FORC 2022 PC Committee

Alfredo Viola
Amit Deshpande
Ashia Wilson
Cristobal Guzman
Deeparnab Chakrabarty
Elisa Celis (PC Chair)
Gireeja Ranade
Guy Rothblum
Ingal Talgam-Cohen
Jamie Morgenstern
Kobbi Nissim
Kunal Talwar
Pan Xu
Rachel Cummings
Rasmus Pagh
Ravi Kumar
Ruth Urner
Sampath Kannan
Seth Neel
Shuchi Chawla
Toshihiro Kamishima

 

FORC Steering Committee

Avrim Blum
Cynthia Dwork
Shafi Goldwasser
Sampath Kannan
Jon Kleinberg
Kobbi Nissim
Toni Pitassi
Omer Reingold
Guy Rothblum
Salvatore Ruggieri
Salil Vadhan
Adrian Weller