[EGOV LIST] WebAndTheCity: 11th International Smart City Workshop – Responsible Smart Cities

[ANTHOPOULOS LEONIDAS via eGov-list]

  (Apologies for cross-posts)
 
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CALL FOR PAPERS – DEADLINE EXTENSION
 
WebAndTheCity: 11th International Smart City Workshop – The  
Responsible Web and AI for Smart Cities
In conjunction with The Web Conference (WWW’25): 35th World Wide Web  
International Conference, Sydney, April 28 - May 2, 2025
http://webandthecity.home.blog/    
 
Important Dates


   *   Submissions due: Feb 02, 2025 (23:59 Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone)
   *   Notification of Acceptance: Feb. 14, 2025
   *   Camera-ready version due: Feb. 28, 2025
   *   Workshop authors’ early registration: March 31, 2025
   *   Workshop day: April 28, 2025

   
Workshop Objective
This is the 11th edition of the workshop series with the label “Web  
Applications and Smart Cities” (previous name: AW4City), which started  
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  
Singapore, in conjunction with “The Web Conference 2024”. 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 Responsible web and Responsible  
AI in cities and communities. In the era of digital twinning, AI,  
augmented reality, and the metaverse (so-called citiverse for cities),  
and under the UN 2030 Agenda for sustainable growth and resilience,  
cities are being transformed into virtual spaces that enable service  
automation and value generation to their communities and enterprises.  
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. Ethical issues are  
raised by questions like what happens to property in virtual space?  
Who can decide to allow you to enter or leave these spaces? Who is  
responsible for safety and security in virtual space? Automation must  
preserve human-perceived consequences, fairness, accountability,  
transparency, and ethics. This workshop aims to focus on how the Web  
transforms cities into responsibly intelligent 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’s are being transformed into digital  
ecosystems, where data flows, digital twinning and metaverse create  
local dataspaces and virtual worlds that generate new types of value,  
digital experiences, and transactions. Communities can utilize this  
new form of SC for its prosperity (i.e., new types of business, new  
digital products and services, AI-based service automation etc.),  
economic growth and living.
We target researchers from industry, academia, and government to join  
forces in this exciting area. We intend to discuss the recent and  
significant developments in the general areas of SC and the WWW  
dynamics and to promote cross-fertilization of techniques. To address  
the above-mentioned aspects, we solicit the following topics (but not  
limited to):


   *   Highlight responsible intelligence viewpoints in cities and communities
   *   Meet the intelligence and metaverse expectations for cities  
(human centricity and protection, 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/my/conference?conf=www25companion) selecting  
our workshop WEB AND THE CITY 2025.  
Details of the program 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 proceedings, 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  
(https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template)
   *   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 author’s 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 WWW2025  
conference can be found on https://www2025.thewebconf.org/  
Extended versions of accepted articles are possible to be selected and  
included in a special issue with relevant theme of International  
Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR), ACM DGov or others.
Accepted refereed papers, must be presented at the conference by an  
author who is registered to attend. Please be aware that the WWW  
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/my/conference?conf=www25companion) selecting  
our workshop Web and the City 2025.
Details of the program 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