FORC 2024: Call for Papers

The 5th annual Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC) will be held on June 12-14, 2024, at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.

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;
  • fairness in allocation and fair division;
  • 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: Wednesday, February 21, 2024 (anywhere on Earth)
  • Submission deadline: Friday, February 23, 2024 (anywhere on Earth)
  • Author notification: April 3, 2024
  • Symposium: June 12-14, 2024

You can register and submit your paper via the Submission page (on Easychair)

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. Requests for virtual presentations will only be considered under exceptional circumstances.
Authors can choose to submit to the archival or non-archival track:

  • Archival submissions. if accepted, the paper will be presented during the symposium and a 10-page version of the paper will be published in the proceedings. Dual submissions are not allowed. Submissions will be considered for best paper awards.
  • Non-archival submissions. if accepted will be presented during the symposium, but will not appear in the proceedings. A one-page abstract will appear on the symposium website, with a link to a full version that the authors will make publicly available (by the camera-ready deadline). Dual submissions are allowed (see below). Submissions will not be considered for best paper awards.
    The program committee will prioritize the acceptance of archival-track submissions. Non-archival papers are meant to enrich the conference program, and the committee will use a different standard to evaluate these submissions.

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). Non-archival submissions will not be eligible for Best Paper or Best Student Paper awards.

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.
  • Archival and non-archival submissions: Please indicate with a footnote on the title of the paper whether the paper is a submission to the archival 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 to be added above).

  • Registration: 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.
  • Submission: 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 track or the non-archival track.

  • Archival 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 track.
    Requests for exceptions: FORC will endeavor to accommodate the publishing traditions of different fields. Authors of archival-track papers who prefer a different publication format can contact the chair (e.g. if this is needed in order to accommodate subsequent publication in journals that would not consider results that have been published in preliminary form in conference proceedings).
  • 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 any other conference or to a journal (subject to that venue’s dual submission policy).

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

  • Rediet Abebe, Harvard University
  • Moshe Babaioff, Hebrew University
  • Ran Canetti, Boston University
  • Aloni Cohen, University of Chicago
  • Lee Cohen, Stanford University
  • Yuval Dagan, UC Berkeley
  • Ronen Gradwohl, Ariel University
  • Jason Hartline, Northwestern University
  • Christopher Jung, Stanford University
  • Dan Linna, Northwestern University
  • Pasin Manurangsi, Google Research
  • Shay Moran, Technion and Google Research
  • Moni Naor, Weizmann Institute of Science
  • Sofya Raskhodnikova, Boston University
  • Guy Rothblum, Apple (chair)
  • Uri Stemmer, Tel Aviv University
  • Kunal Talwar, Apple
  • Eliad Tsfadia, Georgetown University
  • Jonathan Ullman, Northeastern University
  • Gal Yona, Google
  • Steven Wu, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Tijana Zrnic, Stanford University