[EGOV LIST] CfP - WebAndTheCity: 10th ACM International Smart City Workshop – The Web and Smart Cities

[Leonidas Anthopoulos]

(Apologies for cross-posts) 

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CALL FOR PAPERS - DEADLINE EXTENSION 

WebAndTheCity: 10th International Smart City Workshop - The Web and
Smart Cities
In conjunction with The Web Conference (WWW'24): 34th World Wide Web
International Conference, Singapore, May 13, 2024
http://webandthecity.home.blog/ 

Important Dates
* Submissions extended due: Feb 05, 2024 (23:59 Anywhere on Earth (AoE)
time zone)
* Notification of Acceptance: March 4, 2024
* Camera-ready version due: March 11, 2024
* Workshop authors' early registration: March 31, 2024
* Workshop day: May 13, 2024 

Workshop Objective
This is the 10th edition of the workshop series with the label "Web
Applications and Smart Cities" (previous name: AW4City), which started
back in Florence in 2015 and kept on taking place every year in
conjunction with the WWW conference series. . Last year the workshop was
held in Austin, Texas, USA, in conjunction with "The Web Conference
2023". The workshop series aim to investigate the role of the Web and of
Web applications in smart city growth.
This year, the workshop focuses on the new era of the web and web
intelligence in cities and communities. 
In the era of digital twinning and metaverse (so called citiverse for
cities), and under the UN 2030 Agenda for sustainable growth, cities are
being transformed to virtual spaces that generate new types of value and
new experiences to their citizens and enterprises that can enhance
living and offer new opportunities for economic growth. Moreover, AI and
web intelligence generate new types of automated transactions in these
virtual spaces, while they can utilize data spaces and standardization
for optimal data flow. Τhis workshop aims to demonstrate how the web
transforms cities to new virtual environments. 

Theoretical concepts, empirical evidence and selected case studies from
leading scholars and practitioners in the field showing the "big
picture" of smart cities and urban areas will be examined in this
workshop.
WebAndTheCity is timely since SC must deal with emerging social threats.
Nevertheless, communities have not been supported by the SC during
emerging social crises (i.e., access to affordable energy, shelters
etc.), while the SC does not seem to play a central role in circular
economic growth. This skepticism can be added to the existing criticism
that represents an ambiguous urban utopia, which is supported by the
partnership of local governments with big technological vendors.
Articles can deliver ideas for intelligent sensing, crowdsourcing, and
risk analysis with the Web, which can provide a clearer view of SC role
against social emergencies, while innovative applications can strengthen
the community's coherence (e.g., access to affordable energy with smart
energy efficiency; communication about social threats with transparency
etc.).
We target researchers from both industry and academia to join forces in
this exciting area. We intend to discuss the recent and significant
developments in the general areas of smart cities and web applications
and to promote cross-fertilization of techniques. In particular, we aim
at identifying trends and respective applications in smart cities; the
potential impact of smart city in web applications; techniques from
end-to-end solutions' or apps' development that will enable researchers
to understand the dynamic phenomena in smart cities, as well as specify
important directions for the research communities. Standards for web
applications' development in smart cities is interesting for several
areas such as sustainability, crisis management, marketing, security,
and interoperability. To address the above mentioned aspects, we solicit
the following topics (but not limited to):
* Meet the metaverse expectations for cities (new value creation,
immersive experiences for users etc.)
* Explore city digital twinning
* Enhance community living with the web (services, Apps and
intelligence);
* Apps and services that support community engagement in governance,
circularity, climate change adaptation, mobility, sharing,
crowd-sourcing etc.;
* Smart City platforms (e.g. consultation; openness; parking; traffic
management; environment etc.);
* Smart and Self evolving services (e.g. self-threat analysis;
self-responsive government services etc.);
* Practices of Web applications, Apps and AI in smart cities;
* Theoretical foundations on Smart City applications and standards;
* Creative partnerships, creative industries and industry 4.0 in Smart
City with a focus on application development and AI (Internet Economics
and Monetization);
* Pervasive Web for Smart City emerging topics (i.e., user behavior
analytics, energy, water, waste, transportation etc.)
* The role of city stakeholders for smart city applications development
and standardization (i.e., promotion push, start-ups, open data);
* Web Infrastructure and AI service standardization;
* The role of standards on smart city data mining;
* Smart city information quality and evolution in social content;
* Ensuring security and privacy in Smart Environment: the role of web
applications and Apps. 

Submission
We welcome full research papers, research in progress, and discussion
papers. Full papers should be up to 12 pages long (maximum 8 pages for
the main paper content + maximum 2 pages for appendixes + maximum 2
pages for references).
Discussion papers may be short (up to 6 pages), but should clearly and
distinctly address one or more issues pertinent to Smart City research
including research methods and quality as well as focus of studies.
Papers should be designed to support in-depth discussions of one of
these issues during the workshop. Although it is a half-day event, the
workshop papers will be clustered and each session will discuss a small
set of papers focusing on similar or related issues.
Accepted refereed papers, must be presented at the conference by an
author who is registered to attend. Please be aware that The Web
Conference's organizers will require at least one registration per paper
published in either the main Proceedings or in the Companion volume. At
the time of submission of the final camera-ready copy, authors will have
to indicate the already registered person for that publication. We
strongly encourage at least one author of every paper to register by the
early-bird deadline so that session chairs can make plans for its
presentation.
Please submit your papers via the Easychair
(https://easychair.org/conferences/submissions?a=31988213) 
Details of the programme will be made available online.
Although it is a half-day event, the workshop papers will be clustered
and each session will discuss a small set of papers focusing on similar
or related issues.
Submission Guidelines
The accepted papers will be included in the companion volume of The Web
Conference's proceeding, which will be published by ACM and included in
the ACM Digital Library. 

All submitted papers must be:
written in English;
contain author names, affiliations, and email addresses;
be formatted according to the ACM SIG Proceedings template
(www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template) with a font size no
smaller than 9pt;
be in PDF (make sure that the PDF can be viewed on any platform), and
formatted for US Letter size. Files in Postscript (ps) or any other
format will not be accepted. Authors should submit a .doc/.docx too to
the workshop's chairs.
Occupy no more than 12 pages (maximum 8 pages for the main paper content
+ maximum 2 pages for appendixes + maximum 2 pages for references)
It is the authors responsibility to ensure that their submissions adhere
strictly to the required format.
Submissions that do not comply with the above guidelines may be rejected
without review.
All submissions must be entered into the reviewing system and they will
follow a blind peer-review process by the workshop co-chairs and at
least one external reviewer. More details regarding WWW2023 conference
can be found on https://www2023.thewebconf.org/ 
Extended version of accepted articles are possible to be selected and
included in a special issue with relevant theme of MDPI Sustainability
(like
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/special_issues/WebIntelligence_SmartMobility),
International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR), ACM
DGov or IET Smart Cities.
Accepted refereed papers, must be presented at the conference by an
author who is registered to attend. Please be aware that the WWW 2023
organizers will require at least one registration per paper published in
either the main Proceedings or in the Companion volume. At the time of
submission of the final camera-ready copy, authors will have to indicate
the already registered person for that publication. We strongly
encourage at least one author of every paper to register by the
early-bird deadline so that session chairs can make plans for its
presentation.
Please submit your papers via Easychair
(https://easychair.org/conferences/submissions?a=31988213)
Details of the programme will be made available online. 

For any questions, please contact the Workshop chairs:
* Leonidas ANTHOPOULOS, Professor, University of Thessaly, Greece,
lanthopo at uth.gr
* Marijn JANSSEN, Professor, Delft University of Technology, The
Netherlands, M.F.W.H.A.Janssen at tudelft.nl
* Vishanth WEERAKKODY, Professor, University of Bradford, United
Kingdom, v.weerakkody at bradford.ac.uk 

Program Committee Members (tentative)
* Toru Ishida, Department of Social Informatics, Hong Kong Baptist
University, Hong Kong
* Soon Ae Choon, Professor, City of University of New York, U.S.A.
* Carl Erik Moe, Professor, University of Agder, Norway
* Sofia Toufic Shwayri, Independent Scholar, U.S.A.
* Nicolas Douay, MCF Paris 7 / UMR Géographie-Cités / LabEx DynamiTe
* Beth Coleman, University of Waterloo, Director of City as Platform
* Markus Rittenbruch, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
* Alois Paulin, HVF Ludwigsburg, Germany
* Zohreh Pourzolfaghar, Maynooth University, Ireland
* Kristina Lemmer, University of Lunenburg, Germany