INternet SCIence (INSCI) 2023 – Call for Papers

“Internet for Survival”: How the effective and democratic evolution of the Internet towards an infrastructure/ecosystem supporting resilience and equality depends on deeply intertwined considerations rooted in technological, social and economic sciences.  

INSCI is a multidisciplinary conference that brings together scholars and practitioners at the intersection of technological, social and economic sciences seeking to learn how the Internet can be used to make our world a better place. Its insights are expected to create a better understanding of this complex socio-technical system we call “Internet”, for instance to inform political decisions on the technological priorities for public funding and to drive a more sustainable and equitable development of the innovation and social ecosystems it supports.

INSCI welcomes fundamental and applied multidisciplinary research, including policy-oriented studies and works offering technological solutions, that investigate the role of Internet for sustainable development, social and economic resilience, collective intelligence, reliable information processing and protection, and, more generally, for a holistic understanding of societal transformations, governance shifts and innovation quests. 

INSCI welcomes works done in interdisciplinary teams that may include computer scientists, sociologists, policy makers, economists, designers and artists, or complex system scholars, among others, preferably uniting expertise from social, economic and technical sciences. This kind of work is expected to close the gap between societal / economic impact and requirements and technological developments, seen as both drivers and consequences of each other.

Thus, INSCI 2023 welcomes submissions to a wide range of topics including but not limited to the following:

TOPICS

Green, Sustainability, and Innovation

  • The challenges of Responsible Research and Innovation on Internet solutions
  • The technological, social and economic benefits of Transnational and Inter-Cultural Projects
  •  Internet solutions supporting Environmental policies related to Climate Change
  • Green Computing in a holistic perspective: trade-offs of computing power, social benefits, economic and environmental impacts (e.g. blockchains)
  • Design, Implementation, and Analysis of Novel Platforms for alternative distributed economic models
  • Distributed environmental awareness: creating a collective consciousness of environmental issues and possible solutions at individual and collective level. Collective intelligence, sensing and action
  • Energy optimisation from from networked production to shared consumption, relying on top-down and bottom-up approaches
  • Networks for circular economy models: conceiving and putting in place platforms and solutions effectively supporting circular and social economy models, collaborative making, art and creativity

Enabling Technologies, Applications and Infrastructures

  • Social implications of Reinforcement Algorithms, Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems
  • Feasibility and social /economic aspects of Algorithms for mediation content
  • Data Sovereignty and inclusion aspects of Cloud, Grid and Cluster Computing
  • Recommender, Adaptive and Context Aware Systems: design, social and inclusion aspects, feasibility and adoption
  • Networking and Wireless Systems as enablers: inclusion, health, privacy and pervasiveness aspects
  • People-driven Internet Technologies and Applications, including Collaborative 
Platforms & Social Search, Open Data and New Interfaces 

Societal Structures

  • How will Internet of Things change Society and interaction models
  • Digital Competences and Participation
  • Virtual Communities and Behavioural Patterns: how are they affected by the technological platforms being used 
  • Knowledge, Education, Technology Enhanced Learning, and Societal Web Impact on Internet Evolution 
  • Offline and Online Human Behaviour with Emphasis on Social Media and Online/ER/VR 
Interactions 

Digital Politics and Governance

  • Internet and Political Participation
  • Online Political Freedoms in Policing and in Effect: Regional and Local Perspectives, technological impacts and requirements
  • Citizen Involvement into Decision-Making: Platforms, Actors, and Experiences
  • Political Discussions Online: Issues and Groups Behind Them, technical and collaborative solutions to moderate them
  •  E-governance Practices of Today’s Authorities across the world
  • Internet regulation: Security vs. Openness

Free Communication Patterns and Democracy

  • Freedom of Speech Online: a Contested Area of Policing
  • Algorithms as New Total Communicative Power
  • Extremist and Radical Talk Online and Policies or socio-Technical solutions to counteract it
  • Universal Internet Freedoms vs. Dark Web
  • Participatory Democracy and Budgeting: citizens’ involvement in democratic processes, for more equal and inclusive resource allocation
  • Cognitive, Psychological Aspects and Incentive Mechanisms for online Engagement, Collaboration and Participation  (smart citizenship, e-literacy, participation skills, decision support and recommendations for informed citizens and collective actions)
  • E-Democracy and E-Participation: risks and opportunities, lessons learnt from currently deployed solutions (e.g. e-voting, Decidim)
  • Reliable online information: collaborative models and processes to produce/qualify online information (e.g. post-truth Practices Online, filter bubble and fact checking), for health (e.g. vaccination), democracy (international decision-making, political campaigns, opinion and sentiment modelling, governmental censure and influence), economy (product labelling, ethical marketing), safety of online ecosystems (children protection, fake news, digital rebels)
  • Crowdsourcing: implications, enablers

Sustainable Network Economy

  • Legal, economic, technological and innovation hurdles related to Intellectual Property and the Digital Commons 
  • New Collaborative Markets Analytics 
  • Economic Power of Online Platforms: Expropriation of Digital Labour, Open Data solutions and their applicability
  • Digital Corporations: World Leaders and Regional Alternatives
  • Analogous Elites, Technological Precariat
  • Digital Professions and Reshaping of Online Labour Markets
  • New decentralised economic models: enabling and sustaining a distributed ecosystem of platforms and solutions intrinsically respectful of privacy, self-disclosure and digital sovereignty
  • The consumer perspective: unlawful profiling, discrimination and lock-in, automated contracts and warranties

Global Access Opportunities

  • Internet Resilience: Defining/Comparing non-disconnection Technologies, Monitoring Approaches and Internet Governance Models ensuring resiliency and citizens’ empowerment and sovereignty
  • Global and Local Faces of Today’s Digital Divide
  • Comparing existing and future Open Distance Education and Life-long Learning Environments on online/Virtual Reality Platforms, Practices Around the World
  • Global Media Online: Translation and Language Divide
  • Empowerment of Disabled with New Body Extensions
  • Post-human and Tech-human Individuals and Societies

Data Sharing and Protection

  • Data Openness vs. User Protection: tech and social aspects of open data policies
  • Limits of Privacy and Anonymization, their dependance on technological solutions and intended applications
  • Clouds, Big Data and Data Protection Regulation vs. knowledge sharing and open innovation
  • Global Tech Powers and Alternative Solutions based on decentralisation
  • Open Science and Access to Scientific Production: technological enablers, platform governance, economic and innovation aspects

IMPORTANT DATES

  •       Submission of Papers: May 1, 2023 (AoE)
  •       Notification of Decision: July 1, 2023
  •       Camera-Ready Submission: July 15, 2023
  •       Author Registration Deadline: July 15. 2023

PAPER REQUIREMENTS

All submitted papers must:

  • Describe original results that have not been accepted or submitted for publication elsewhere
  • Be written in English and be submitted in PDF format
  • Contain author names, affiliations, and email addresses
  • Be formatted according to the Springer’s LNCS format Proceedings template. Information about the Springer LNCS format: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html 
  • Contain three to seven keywords characterizing the paper, to be indicated at the end of the abstract
  • Be submitted via the conference system in EasyChair

Full paper submissions should not exceed 15 pages (including all text, figures, references and appendices). We encourage a length of 12 pages for full papers. The Program Committee reserves the right to accept a submission as a short paper. Submissions not conforming to the LNCS format, exceeding the submission page limits or being obviously out of the scope of the conference, will be rejected without review.

SELECTION

  •       All submissions will be evaluated by at least three members of the international Program Committee, with a mix of social, economic and technological expertise
  •       The review process will be single-blind
  •       Selection will be based on:
  1. Degree of interdisciplinarity (between social, economic and/or technical sciences).
  2. Novelty and technical merit.
  3. Relevance of the generated insights for the future Internet development.

CAMERA-READY

Camera-ready submissions should be corrected by following the remarks of the reviewers and submitted using the same submission link in zip format including

  •       The camera-ready version of the authors’ work in pdf format
  •       The camera-ready version of the authors’ work in editable sources format
  •       The Consent to Publish signed in ink and scanned to image file

PUBLICATION

Accepted papers will be presented at INSCI2023 and published in the conference proceedings volume, which will be published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). Authors of selected best papers from the conference will be contacted in order to consider submission of an expanded version of their papers for publication in a special issue to be organised with an accredited journal (under negotiation).

Authors of selected best papers from the conference will be contacted in order to consider submission of an expanded version of their papers for publication in a special issue to be organised with the international journal Future Internet, published by MDPI (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/futureinternet).