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

[Ioannis Nikolaou]

(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 28, 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