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

[Ioannis Nikolaou 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=webandthecity2025).
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=webandthecity2025).
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