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

[ZIOZIAS CHRISTOS]

(Apologies for cross-posts)

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CALL FOR PAPERS

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 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