Call For Papers

Important Dates

Abstract Submission	6 April 2018	20 April 2018   NEW
Paper Submission	13 April 2018	27 April 2018   NEW
Review Notifications	15 June 2018
Rebuttal Deadline	22 June 2018
Paper Notification	6 July 2018
Camera Ready Copy	27 July 2018	31 July 2018   NEW

We solicit original, unpublished research papers on computing technologies and visual languages for modelling, programming, communicating, and reasoning, which are easier to learn, use or understand by humans than the current state-of-the-art. Papers should focus on efforts to design, formalize, implement, or evaluate those technologies and languages. This includes tools and visual languages intended for general audiences (e.g. professional or novice programmers, or the public) or domain-specific audiences (e.g. people working in business administration, production environments, healthcare, urban design or scientific domains).

This year's special topic is "Building Human-Adaptive Socio-Technical Systems". Systems in which humans are both developers of and intrinsic parts of the system are becoming more common. These Human-Adaptive Socio-Technical Systems adapt to changes in context and the behavior of human users. Example systems include situation-aware human-assistance systems and learning-based cooperative control systems in a variety of application areas including Internet-of- Things applications and Cyber-physical social systems. These kinds of systems require human-centered concepts, languages and methods in two separate contexts: to specify system behavior and to assist in modeling human behavior. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

Supplemental Materials

In addition to papers, authors may optionally submit supplemental materials that support their papers, as long as the total size of the submission (paper+supplemental materials) does not exceed 100MB. Examples of supplemental materials include short digital videos, copies of study instruments, or experimental methodologies. Supplementary material should be briefly described in the paper body. However, since not everyone who reviews your paper may review submitted supplemental materials, your submission must stand on its own without them. The supplemental materials will be distributed at the conference and will appear in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. Videos must be at most 3 minutes in length, and prepared as MP4 files using the H.264 codec. All supplemental materials must adhere to the IEEE preparation instructions.

Papers and supplemental materials must be submitted using the EasyChair system. Please note we follow a double-blind reviewing mechanism for 2018. To facilitate assigning papers to reviewers, we require paper abstracts to be submitted via EasyChair at least one week before the paper submission deadline. The abstract must be no longer than 150 words and must be kept up-to- date such that it exactly matches the abstract in the submitted paper. All accepted papers, whether full or short, should be complete, self-contained, archival contributions. Contributions from full papers are more extensive than those from short papers. Work-in- progress, which has not yet yielded a contribution, should be submitted to the Showpieces category. All submissions will be reviewed by members of the Program Committee. Submission and reviews for the technical program are managed with EasyChair. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to register for VL/HCC 2018 and present the paper at the conference. IEEE reserves the right to exclude a paper from distribution after the conference, including IEEEXplore® Digital Library, if the paper is not presented by the author at the conference. Accepted papers will be distributed at the conference and will be included in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/). The proceedings are an official electronic publication of the IEEE in Computer Science, with an ISBN number. Be sure to use the current IEEE conference paper format IEEE conference paper format.

We follow a light-weight double-blind reviewing process. Thus, submitted papers must not reveal the identities of authors. However, the author names will be known to the program committee in the rebuttal phase. Both authors and reviewers are expected to make every effort to honor the double-blind reviewing process. In case of questions, please contact the Program Chairs. Authors should ensure that the submission can be evaluated without it being obvious who wrote the paper. This means leaving author names off the paper and using terms like "previous research" rather than "our previous research" when describing background. However, do not hide previous work – papers must still reference all relevant research, including that by the current authors, so reviewers can evaluate novelty.  It is important that authors specify all conflicts of interest with potential reviewers during the submission phase. Reviewers should not undertake any investigation that might lead to the revealing of authors identity. If identities are inadvertently revealed, please contact the Program Chairs. The Program Chairs will check all submissions for obvious signs of lack of anonymity and may ask authors to make changes and resubmit the paper within four days of the submission deadline.

Papers are expected to support their claims with appropriate evidence. For example, a paper that claims to improve programmer productivity is expected to demonstrate improved productivity; a paper that claims to be easier to use should demonstrate increased ease of use. However, not all claims necessarily need to be supported with empirical evidence or studies with people. For example, a paper that claims to make something feasible that was clearly infeasible might substantiate its claim through the existence of a functioning prototype. Moreover, there are many alternatives to empirical evidence that may be appropriate for justifying claims, including analytical methods, formal arguments or case studies. Given this criterion, we encourage potential authors to think carefully about what claims their submission makes and what evidence would adequately support these claims. In addition, we expect short papers to have less comprehensive evaluation than long papers.

Papers will be reviewed as follows:

Initial review period: at least three members of the Program Committee or external reviewers will review each paper. At the end of this period, these initial reviews will be released to the authors. 

Author response period: authors will have an opportunity to submit a response based on their initial reviews. Responses should focus on answering reviewers' questions, addressing reviewers' concerns, and clarifying any factual misunderstandings. At this point, the identity of authors will be revealed to the program committee.

Final review period: taking the author response into account, the original reviewers will revise their reviews as they deem appropriate, and the Program Committee will reach a final decision to accept or reject the submitted work.