Software Engineering in SocietyICSE 2024

Goals

We are looking for insightful and thought-provoking papers that address the various roles of software engineering in society. We are especially interested in papers addressing issues around connecting different communities such as scientific communities, industry, academia, disciplines across academia, sub-disciplines across software engineering, under-represented communities, and communities across countries and continents at large. We seek contributions that highlight how software engineering can address the opportunities and challenges posed by the rapidly accelerating pace of technological advances that are impacting the economic, political, environmental, social, and technical aspects of society. We would also like to discuss emerging trends in the development of software that is part of larger systems and whose development is tackled within the specific areas listed below. The goal is to investigate the reasons for these trends, to analyze possible novel contributions from the software engineering community, and to identify novel research challenges that these areas pose to software engineering methods and practices.

SEIS Welcomes

• Innovative, inspiring research with a clear impact on software engineering challenges, directions, methods, and tools
• Engagement with a broad spectrum of areas including, but not limited to:
• Diversity and Inclusion
• Diversity and Inclusion (e.g. Intersectional Issues related to gender, race, ethnicity, disability, socioeconomic background, sexual orientation, etc.)., Fostering Inclusion, Allyship, Covering, Privilege, Organizational Culture;
• Designing, Engineering, and Testing Software for Diverse Users;
• Communication and collaboration (e.g., code of conduct, hostile or inappropriate behavior, conflict and resolution, successful and unsuccessful communication or collaboration patterns);
• The impact of COVID-19 on software development, including underrepresented groups within software engineering;
• Opinion pieces on why diversity and inclusion are important for software engineering;
• Experience reports, reviews, visions and roadmaps on diversity and inclusion
• Software Engineering for Sciences, Design, Arts and Engineering
• Medicine and public health (e.g., Health Informatics, software technologies for aging);
• Physical Sciences (e.g., Computational Chemistry, Genomic, Biotechnologies);
• Environmental Sciences (e.g., Sustainability, Urban Planning, Ecology, Climate Change);
• Social Sciences (e.g., Organizational Psychology, Software Fairness, Regulatory Compliance);
• Management (e.g. socio-technical ecosystems, technical debt, social debt);
• Economics (e.g., Electronic payments, Blockchain technologies);
• Law (e.g., combating and investigating crime, impact on the legal system);
• Manufacturing (e.g., Industry 4.0, smart factory);
• Engineering emerging cyber-physical systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles, smart cities);
• Arts (e.g. Digital Art, Performing Arts) and Crafts (e.g. DIY electronics);
• Design (e.g., Value-sensitive Design, history of cultural change, future of cultural changes);
• Interdisciplinary research (e.g. Cognitive Science, Digital Social Innovation);
• Computing and Engineering (e.g., HCI, AI, Data Science, Distributed Computing);
• Society and societal challenges
• Security and Privacy (e.g., security and privacy preserving software development);
• Ethics (e.g., Responsible AI, Whistleblowing, Free Speech, Gatekeepers, Politics);
• Misinformation (e.g. Recognition, Impeding its Spread, Censorship);
• Work emerging from research partnerships with communities, NGOs, cultural institutions, and the public and private sector;
• Research reflections on the long-term implications of digital technology interventions on all aspects in society (e.g., economics, social, political, environmental, technical);
• Sustainability and UN sustainability goals;
• Research directions towards new development models, tools, and methods for specific application environments;
• Research findings supported by empirical studies and experimentation.

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

Scope

We are interested in social, technical, and/or socio-technical research approaches that have been applied to investigate and explain societal problems in depth and/or to address or to support solutions to societal problems. We especially welcome papers studying diversity, inclusion, belonging, and representation. Equally, we are interested in sharing case studies, success stories, failures and lessons learned from working in highly complex problem spaces such as climate change, public health, cyber-security and democracy. We are interested in software engineering tools, processes, architectures, methods, frameworks, and theories that are relevant in these settings. SEIS authors are encouraged to contribute soundly motivated and novel research, both mature and emerging. SEIS welcomes multi- and inter-disciplinary research showcasing how software engineering can contribute to the many dimensions of software embedded in and influencing society.

Requirements

We encourage all submissions to discuss the broader impacts of their work. What impact will this work have, or has already had, on the world and on diversity, inclusion, belonging, and representation? How does the work engage with underrepresented groups to bring new perspectives on research? These impacts should be directly related to the research focus of the paper. In following with the previous two years, all submissions must include an additional section, a Lay Abstract: a 250-word summary of the paper written in plain English, intended to be read not by researchers, but by members of the public, who may have very little understanding of software engineering, software engineering research, or academic jargon. This will help make our work more accessible to the public, an important constituency and focus of our research. The Layl Abstract should come after the Abstract but before the paper’s Introduction section.

Submission Types

• Full research paper, up to 10 pages documenting results and findings, where the research presented has followed established research methods;
• Short research paper, up to 4 pages, reporting novel approaches that have not been fully evaluated, which will be presented as a poster;
• Experience report, up to 10 pages, reporting on real-world problems and innovative solutions, or tools;
• Opinion, vision, method, meta-research paper, up to 4 pages, reporting on well-founded arguments to support diversity and inclusion.

For all papers, references may use 2 extra pages beyond the page limits stated above.

Evaluation

The primary criteria for acceptance of a paper submitted to SEIS are the scientific quality of the paper and the extent to which the paper meets the SEIS track goals and scope. The SEIS program committee will undertake the assessment with regard to the following criteria:

• relevance to the Software Engineering community,
• impact to society,
• soundness of the technical contribution,
• originality of the paper,
• appropriate consideration of relevant literature,
• acknowledgment of broader impacts, and
• clarity of presentation.

Each submission will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee.

Evaluation of Different Submission Types

For full research papers, all the above criteria are expected to be met as much as possible and to a high degree. Evaluation of short papers may focus on one of the criteria more to make up for some weaknesses in another. For example, evaluating the “soundness of the contribution” may be limited for papers presenting approaches that have not been fully evaluated, and greater attention may be paid to the “originality” criterion in such cases. For experience reports, “appropriate consideration of relevant literature” will be interpreted as at a level appropriate for an experience report, i.e. not a full or systematic review but due consideration of closely related research and practitioner works. For opinion, vision, method, and meta-research papers, “soundness of the contribution” will be evaluated by considering the soundness of the arguments presented and the feasibility of the new ideas for real-world application, whether in software practice or research.

By submitting to this track, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism (https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/plagiarism) and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ (https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/plagiarism/plagiarism-faq.html). In particular, papers submitted to ICSE 2024 SEIS must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for ICSE 2024. Contravention of this concurrent submission policy will be deemed a serious breach of scientific ethics, and appropriate action will be taken in all such cases. To check for double submission and plagiarism issues, the chairs reserve the right to (1) share the list of submissions with the PC Chairs of other conferences with overlapping review periods and (2) use external plagiarism detection software, under contract to the ACM or IEEE, to detect violations of these policies.

By submitting to this track, authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the ACM (https://www.acm.org/publications/policy-on-authorship), and the authorship policy of the IEEE (https://journals.ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/become-an-ieee-journal-author/publishing-ethics/definition-of-authorship/).

Submissions not accepted for publication in the SEIS Track may be invited to submit a 2-page abstract to the ICSE Poster Track for additional review.

How to Submit

Formatting instructions are available at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template for both LaTeX and Word users. LaTeX users must use the provided acmart.cls and ACM-Reference-Format.bst without modification, enable the conference format in the preamble of the document (i.e., \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}), and use the ACM reference format for the bibliography (i.e., \bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}). The review option adds line numbers, thereby allowing referees to refer to specific lines in their comments.

Note, we use double-anonymous reviewing. Be sure to remove the list of authors from the submitted paper. If citing your own prior work, please do so in the third person to obscure the relationship you have with it. For advice, guidance, and explanation about the double-anonymous review process, see ICSE Research Track’s Q&A page.

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. The collection process has started and will roll out as a requirement throughout 2022. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

All papers must be written in English.

All papers should be made accessible to people with disabilities. See some guidelines from the folks at SIGACCESS here: https://assets21.sigaccess.org/creating_accessible_pdfs.html.

Please submit your paper on HotCRP: https://icse2024-seis.hotcrp.com/

Conference Attendance Expectation

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for and attend the full 3-day technical conference and present the paper. The presentation is expected to be delivered in person, or online if this is impossible due to travel limitations (related to, e.g., health, visa, or COVID-19 prevention).

Important Dates

• SEIS Submissions Deadline: 6 October, 2023
• Submissions close at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth, UTC-12)
• SEIS Acceptance Notification: 7 December 2023
• SEIS Camera Ready: 12 January 2024

Organization and Contact

If there are queries regarding the CFP, please contact the SEIS Co-Chairs:

• Bonita Sharif, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, USA (bsharif@unl.edu)
• Xin Xia, Huawei, China (xin.xia@acm.org)