NeurIPS'23 Call for Papers & Challenges

We invite researchers to submit their recent work on the topic in the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Recovery (HADR) problems to be featured at our workshop at NeurIPS 2023 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.

1. Call for Papers

We welcome methods from Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Robotics, Natural Language Processing, Information Theory, Decision Theory, Game Theory, Causal Modeling, Applied Statistics, and related fields.

We highly encourage work with clear applications to any of a variety of humanitarian and disaster response issues, including, but not limited to, search and rescue robotics, policy and societal decision making, Earth-observation for natural disaster prevention and response, machine learning for weather and natural disaster forecasts, alert and disinformation management on social media, and in particular this year response to conflicts (e.g. Ukraine-Russia), response to pandemics (e.g. COVID-19), monitoring and response of earthquakes (e.g. Turkey-Syria), and much more.

Paper Submission Format

Paper submissions are to be in the NeurIPS format and will be limited to five pages of content, with unlimited space for references. Papers may contain appendices to highlight additional results, figures, proofs, and other supplementary materials, but the main body of the work should be self-contained.  Other supplementary materials, such as videos or audio clips, may be submitted as supplementary materials.  Reviewers are not required to consider appendices or supplementary materials in their decisions.

All paper submissions must include application context. Discuss how your work relates to concerns in humanitarian assistance and disaster response operations. Please discuss any partnerships with agencies or stakeholders, and explain any concepts that would not be common knowledge to a general machine learning researcher. The intent of this narrative is to increase readability of papers for all workshop participants, from ML experts to domain practitioners of HADR, as well as to help us match your submission to reviewers.

Paper Submission Instructions

Please submit your paper and supplementary material to CMT: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/HADR2023. The submission deadline is September 29, 2023.

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.

Paper Review Criteria

Paper submissions will be reviewed along the following criteria:

• Clarity in the explanation of the problem setting, including (a) how it relates to the HADR application themes, and (b) why an AI-based approach is suitable and ethical in this domain. For all papers this should be addressed at minimum in the "Application Context" narrative, see above.

• Technical merit, including methodology, experimental results, and evaluation procedure

• Relevance of the AI and CV components of the work to the intended HADR problem setting(s)

• Demonstrated evidence of or potential for cross-disciplinary takeaways (where applicable)

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.

2. Call for RescueNet Challenge Submissions

More information regarding the RescueNet Challenge can be found here.