[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: 17th June 2019
Conference: 4th-5th October 2019, London, UK
Registration: open now!

* Motivation *
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 (Reuters 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 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. 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.

* 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 two types of submissions: technical papers and talk 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.
Each submission will be judged by at least two program committee 
members. We will be accepting submissions online via EasyChair at 
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tto2019. Double submissions are 
allowed, but they should be declared as a footnote on the first page of 
the paper. Technical papers need to follow the provided TTO template 
(https://truthandtrustonline.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/instructions-for-papers-tto2019.zip) 
which is also available in Overleaf. Talk proposals are welcome to also 
use this template although this is not necessary. Proposals that do not 
follow the template should be up to two sides of A4 and use Times New 
Roman Font 11pt. Accepted papers will be published in archival 
proceedings and the authors will be asked to submit to a special journal 
issue. The details of the journal will be announced within three months 
of the conference.

* Key dates *
Deadline for all submissions: (extended to) Monday 17th June 2019 
(23:59, anywhere on earth)
Notification of acceptance: early July
Registration is now open
Conference: 4th and 5th October 2019, BMA House, London, UK

* Participation *
We encourage wide participation from all interested parties and 
stakeholders on online media, including academics, startups and large 
industry, non-profit organizations and governmental institutions. For 
participants requiring financial assistance a separate application form 
will be made available after the notifications are sent.

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