Call for Papers

We invite submissions for the 2020 Artificial Intelligence and Humanitarian and Disaster Relief Workshop.  The goal of this workshop is to bring together the AI and HADR communities to highlight existing and start future work at the intersection of these two fields.

Topics

We welcome submissions on the topic of AI applied to HADR problems. Relevant subfields of AI include, but are not limited to:

• Machine Learning

• Computer Vision

• Robotics

• Natural Language Processing

• Information Theory

• Decision Theory

• Game Theory

• Causal Modeling

• Applied Statistics

• Data Sets/Knowledge Bases

Relevant problems in HADR include, but are not limited to:

• Search and rescue robotics

• Computer vision for damage assessment

• Motion planning in obstructed roads

• Disinformation management on social media

Formatting Instructions

Submissions will be limited to five pages of content and one page of references in the NeurIPS 2020 format.  Papers may contain appendices after the sixth page to highlight additional results, figures, proofs, and other supplementary materials, but the main body of the work should be self-contained and reviewers are not required to consider appendices in their decisions.  Further, other supplementary materials, such as videos or audio clips, may be submitted as supplementary materials.  Again, reviewers are not required to consider these supplementary materials in their decisions.

Submission Instructions

The deadline for submission is October 9th, 2020 at 11:59PM Pacific Time. Submissions must be made on the hosted CMT instance at https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/AIHADRW2020.

All submissions will undergo double-blind review; Thus, please ensure that your submission is anonymized when submitted, including removing names, affiliations, contact information, and ensuring that references to your own previous work are in the third person.

Review Criteria

Submissions will be judged on:

• Their technical merit

• The clarity in conveying the importance of the work, methodology, and experimental results (if applicable)

• The relevance to the goal of the workshop.

Each submission will be reviewed by at least one member each from the AI and HADR communities to ensure both technical merit and impact are both considered.

Accepted Papers

Authors of accepted papers will be notified on October 23rd, 2020.  Upon notification, we ask that authors of accepted papers deanonymize their works, make any final changes, host their paper on the web (for instance, on arXiv), and then submit a link to where the paper is hosted to the workshop organizers by December 1st, 2020.  The workshop website will then be updated with links to accepted papers.

Note that accepted papers will not be formally published. This means that:

• Authors can retain full copyright of their works

• Work contained in accepted papers are not precluded to be published in other research venues

• Submitted papers are allowed to have significant overlap with previously published or currently submitted work (in this case, please indicate overlapping works).

Some or all of accepted papers will be selected for oral presentations during the workshop.  Because the workshop is entirely virtual this year, these oral presentations will be presented in video form.  The authors will record a video of themselves giving their presentation and submit it to the program committee by November 7th, 2020.  More specific video submission instructions will be provided in the near future.