Call for Participation

The third ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization ( EAAMO ‘23) will take place October 30 - November 1, 2023 at Boston University in Boston, MA, USA.

The event will highlight work along the research-to-practice pipeline aimed at improving access to opportunity for historically underserved and disadvantaged communities, as well as mitigating harms concerning inequitable and unsafe outcomes. In particular, we seek contributions from different fields that offer insights into the intersectional design and impacts of algorithms, optimization, and mechanism design with grounding in the social sciences and humanistic studies.

We solicit submissions in the research track and policy and practice track. Submissions can include research, survey, and position papers as well as problem- and practice-driven submissions by academics and practitioners from any disciplines or sectors alike.

Important Dates

  • Paper Submission Deadline: 10 May 2023, AoE
  • Paper Submission Page: EasyChair
  • Submission Notification: 25 July 2023
  • Event Dates: 30 October - 1 November 2023

The deadline for submissions is May 10, 2023.

Areas of Interest

We invite submissions on topics, methodologies, and approaches including, but not limited to:

  • ethical, economic, legal, philosophical, and societal considerations of algorithmically-driven interventions
  • redistributive mechanisms for improving access to opportunity and equitable outcomes
  • micro- and macroeconomic consequences of inequality and market inefficiencies
  • determinants and causes of harms including inequitable outcomes, market failures, exploitative behavior, and economic inefficiencies
  • machine learning, optimization, and mechanism design for alleviating inefficiencies, inequitable, and unsafe economic and social outcomes
  • uncertainty, safety, privacy, and equity in allocative and representational systems
  • algorithmic, ethical, policy, and societal challenges in computing in resource-constrained settings
  • reliable, trustworthy, and valid inference in societally consequential domains
  • data collection, curation, governance, protection, and sharing efforts for work related to improving access to opportunity
  • algorithmic approaches and tools to encourage participation, empower, and organize communities for the collective good
  • regulation and policy design related to data, privacy, equity, fairness, and access to opportunity

Application areas of interest include: civic participation, data economies, discrimination and bias, digital and economic inequalities, economic development, education, environment and climate, food security, healthcare, housing, infrastructure, labor markets, law and policy, low- and under-resourced computing, social and economic mobility, privacy, public service provision, recommender systems, social work, sustainable development, and transportation. Our list of topics is broad, illustrating how a wide variety of perspectives and disciplinary approaches can triangulate progress on focus areas of shared interest.

Research Track

Submissions to the research track can introduce new theory and applications or can be position papers providing a method-driven literature review, synthesizing perspectives, or highlighting future directions. Submissions will fall into one of five focus areas:

  • AI and Machine Learning including AI for social impact, bias and fairness considerations in statistical reasoning, learning and decision making in economic context, optimization, fair division and allocation in resource-constrained settings, interactions in multi-agent and socio-technical systems, causal analysis of algorithmic interventions and their long-term effects, social choice theory, and work at the intersection with privacy and security.
  • Applied and Quantitative Modeling including proposing and analyzing applied and structural models for novel practical problems in data science, computational social science, industrial organization, market and mechanism design, micro- and macroeconomics, and operations management (e.g., supply chain, service operations).
  • Empirical Studies including 1) empirical analysis of existing social systems, policies, and mechanisms, and other domains such as empirical industrial organization/health/education/labor; and 2) empirical evaluation of systems that incorporate computational tools such as algorithms, mechanisms, or optimization.
  • Research Position Papers that present a novel position, idea, or open a new area of discussion regarding a particular research topic related to the scope of the conference. Submissions will be evaluated based on their novelty and potential to offer new organizing principles for a field, fostering new perspectives and bridges between research and policy/practice.
  • Theory including theoretical analysis in algorithm design, fair division and resource allocation, game theory, market and mechanism design, behavioral models, optimization, operations management, computational social choice, social network analysis, economic theory, and theory of machine learning.

Policy and Practice Track

The policy and practice track is dedicated to submissions from researchers and domain experts that emphasize applied work, policy issues, or practical problems. We encourage submissions from all interested individuals with relevant expertise and experiences, and especially practitioners and members of impacted communities. Submissions will fall into one of five focus areas:

  • Dataset submissions of novel datasets collected and documented for the purpose of fostering new research in different application domains, creating new standards for data collection, transparency, and accountability, and fostering interdisciplinary collaborations. The submission should include the dataset, which will be uploaded as a supplementary file, as well as metadata information. The dataset may also be uploaded to external data sharing services, and the conference will provide an additional option for a data portal upon acceptance of the submission. The submission should be accompanied by a document detailing the application domain, potential for use of the data, as well as any known issues, limitations, and ethical considerations for the collection, curation, access, and use. Authors are encouraged to consider questions presented in the Datasheets for Datasets recommendations.
  • Demonstrations that may be prototyped and/or deployed software systems and mobile platforms. Demo submissions should be accompanied by a description of the system and detailed instructions for using it. The submission should also include a document detailing the particular problem the system seeks to address, importance of this problem, any known limitations or challenges of this or similar systems, societal and ethical considerations for using such a system, as well as potential for future developments.
  • Position Papers that present a novel framework and perspective or open a new area of debate regarding a particular topic related to the scope of the conference. We encourage submissions from all interested individuals including members of affected communities, practitioners, and policy-makers. We welcome submissions discussing potential avenues of work across academia, industry, the public sector, and non-government organizations as well as submissions on lessons learned from efforts to bridge research and practice.
  • Problem Pitches in the form of white papers detailing problems that arise in practice impacting underserved and disadvantaged communities. The problems should be ones that benefit from a wider attention within the EAAMO community. Submissions should provide background information on the problem, summary of any existing methods or approaches for tackling the problem, and discussions on how techniques from algorithms, optimization, or mechanism design can contribute to potential solutions. Submissions are also encouraged to provide a discussion of challenges in providing holistic solutions, share insights from collaborations between academics and practitioners, and/or introduce new methods for addressing the problems.
  • Survey papers that provide a broad overview of a particular topic of relevance to the conference. The submission should survey relevant work to this area and be presented in a comprehensive and cohesive manner. In addition to research surveys, we also strongly encourage submissions from policymakers and practitioners that survey the state-of-the-art approaches used in a particular application domain and are accessible to both an academic and a non-academic audience.

Submission Instructions

Submissions will have the option to be either archival or non-archival. For papers in disciplinary areas where archival conference papers are the norm, preference will be given to archival submissions. Papers in the archival track will be published in conference proceedings in the ACM Digital Library; papers in the non-archival track will not be published as part of the conference and may be submitted in the future to an archival venue, if not already published. The archival track welcomes submissions that constitute new research papers that have not been published in conference proceedings or journals before. The non-archival track welcomes unpublished work, work under simultaneous submission to a journal or non-archival workshop/conference (in compliance with the rules of the other venue), and research papers that have been recently published in a journal (no earlier than January 2022). Authors should upload a PDF of their paper to EasyChair.

There are no formatting or length requirements for the PDF submission, but accepted archival papers will have a page limit of at most 14 pages in the camera-ready version at the time of publication, using the ACM Traditional Camera Ready Submission template. In addition to the PDF, authors are asked to upload a 200-250 word description onto EasyChair summarizing their submission and its relevance to the conference.

Submissions are double-blind: authors should take care to not include the names and affiliations of the authors in the paper, including when referring to previous work. Submitters should list all co-authors on the submitted work in EasyChair but not in the PDF of the submission. Citations to the authors’ own previous work should be written in the third person; e.g., instead of “We previously developed…(Smith, 2019)”, write “Smith (2019) previously developed…”. If this would compromise the clarity of the paper (i.e., it is necessary to identify previous work as belonging to the authors), use an anonymous citation, e.g., (Anonymous, 2019). These can be replaced in the camera-ready version. Additionally, wherever possible, authors should avoid referring to specific institutional details in the paper which could reveal their names or affiliations (for example “our team included officials from a large U.S. city” instead of “our team included officials from New York City”). However, institutional information may be included if it is necessary to the research content of the paper, even if it is suggestive of author affiliations.

Submitted papers should include a discussion of ethical impacts and precautions taken, including disclosure regarding whether the study was approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) if such review is required (e.g., for human subjects research conducted by members of a university).

Archival submissions must be unpublished and not under review at any other venue. Non-archival submissions may be unpublished works or work that has been published in a journal no earlier than January 2022. If the work is already published, please include a citation on EasyChair. Non-archival submissions may also be works currently under review at a journal or non-archival conference / workshop, as long as it is not in violation of the corresponding journal / conference / workshop.

We will only accept submissions in the English language. The conference is committed to building multilingual communities, and aims to allow submissions in other languages at future events.

ACM EAAMO is part of the Mechanism Design for Social Good (MD4SG) initiative, and builds on the MD4SG technical workshop series and tutorials at conferences including ACM EC, ACM COMPASS, ACM FAccT, and WINE.