[Commlist] CFP: Truth and Trust online

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*** First Conference on Truth and Trust Online ***

Website: https://truthandtrustonline.com/
Deadline for all submissions: 3rd June 2019
Conference: 4th-5th October 2019, London, UK

The mission of the Conference on Truth and Trust Online (TTO) is to 
bring together all parties working on automated approaches to augment 
manual efforts on improving the truthfulness and trustworthiness of 
online communications.

The modern media ecosystem in which the public seeks truthful 
information and trustworthy sources is increasingly dominated by 
large-scale online social media and communication platforms (e.g. 
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) as well as messaging apps, which operate 
alongside traditional news sources. However, online platforms are facing 
significant challenges in this regard, as the majority of the public 
mistrusts the content shared on them and only 50% trust any kind of 
online news (Digital News Report 2018). The quest to improve the online 
media ecosystem remains important and is in need of concerted research. 
Manual efforts cannot scale to the demand, and many proposed automated 
solutions for content moderation and verification, including those 
presented in existing academic venues (e.g. FEVER, RDSM, POC, etc.) are 
detached from real-world needs faced by the users and the operators of 
these platforms.

Research in this area is currently disseminated in two main avenues: 1) 
technical workshops attached to conferences of different communities 
(e.g., WWW, KDD, ICWSM, ACL, NIPS, etc.); 2) hybrid community gatherings 
such as MisinfoCon. The latter brings journalists, social scientists, 
and technical entrepreneurs together, but is more focused on sharing the 
latest findings instead of being a platform for publishing original 
research. The former encourages the presentation of original research, 
but suffers from fragmentation across different academic disciplines. We 
believe it is time to bring the best from both avenues and foster a 
technical community in this space focusing on publishing and 
disseminating original research while also considering real world 
scenarios and impact.

The Conference on Truth and Trust Online (TTO) aims to be an annual 
forum for academia, industry, non-profit organizations and other 
stakeholders to meet and discuss the problems facing social media 
platforms and technical solutions to them. Key to this interaction is 
the openness on behalf of the media platforms about their problems and 
the focus of the academic proposals to address them in an impactful way. 
The intended outcomes of our conference are: a) for academics to learn 
about the real problems that industry is facing and how their proposed 
solutions can be more impactful; b) for industry to improve their 
product safety by brainstorming collective actions together with other 
stakeholders; and c) for the public to gain insights into how their 
concerns on social media safety are being addressed.

We have the following invited speakers (with more to be announced as 
confirmed):
Judy King (BBC)
Preslav Nakov (Qatar Computing Research Institute)
Kate Starbird (University of Washington)

Submissions
We invite submissions on technical solutions for addressing current 
challenges facing social media platforms on the following indicative 
list of topics:

Misinformation
Disinformation
Hate speech
Harassment/bullying
Credibility scores
Hyper-partisanship and bias
Image/video verification
Fake amplification
Fake reviews
Polarization and echo chambers
Transparency in content and source moderation
Privacy requirements

The focus of the conference is on identifying what new problems and 
technical solutions we need to work on, rather than incremental 
solutions to what we are doing already. Therefore papers that only aim 
to raise awareness, or propose improved methods on existing 
tasks/datasets, without showing how these could be used to solve real 
world problems as the one indicated above are explicitly discouraged.

We invite three types of submissions: technical papers, talk proposals 
and dataset proposals:

Technical papers should contain novel, previously unpublished material 
related to the topics of the conference and should be limited to 8 pages 
with unlimited pages for references. The papers accepted will be 
presented either orally in single track sessions or as posters.

Talk proposals should be 2 pages long and describe the content of a 
half-hour long talk giving a tutorial-style overview of academic work on 
a certain topic, or present hands-on experience from addressing the TTO 
challenges in the real world.

Dataset proposals should be 2 pages long and propose the annotation of a 
dataset of publicly available data. A clear analysis of the copyrights, 
respect of privacy and data availability must be given. The size of the 
datasets to be built will depend on the difficulty of the task. The 
selected papers will be invited to refine their proposal to receive 
funding in a separate Request for Proposal.

Key dates

Deadline for all submissions: 3rd of June 2019 (23:59, anywhere on earth)
Notification of acceptance: early July
Registration opens: end of June
Conference: 4th and 5th of October 2019, BMA House, London, UK

Organization

Program Chairs: Maria Liakata (University of Warwick) and Andreas 
Vlachos (University of Cambridge)
Local Organization: Guillaume Bouchard (Facebook), Simon Martin 
(Mumsnet), Marzieh Saeidi (Facebook)
Publications Chair: Kalina Bontcheva (University of Sheffield)
Publicity Chair: Mevan Babakar (Full Fact), David Corney (Full Fact)
Area Chairs: Emiliano De Cristofaro (University College London), Ferenc 
Huszar (Twitter), Sebastian Riedel (Facebook and University College 
London), Cong Yu (Google)
Sponsorship Chairs: Arpit Mittal (Amazon), Miriam Redi (Wikimedia 
Foundation)


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