Software Engineering in Society (SEIS)ICSE 2025

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 help with the opportunities and challenges posed by the rapidly accelerating pace of technological advances, including data-driven technologies and LLMs, 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 data-driven technologies and LLMs on equity, diversity and inclusion;
• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Submission instructions and policies

• Submissions must conform to the IEEE conference proceedings template, specified in the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines (title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt type, LaTeX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf options).
• 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 2025 SEIS must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for ICSE 2025. 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 ACMhttps://www.acm.org/publications/policies/new-acm-policy-on-authorship ), and the authorship policy of the IEEE (https://journals.ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/become-an-ieee-journal-author/publishing-ethics/ethical-requirements/Ethical Requirements ).
• 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.
• 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 ICSE2025 Q&A page (https://conf.researchr.org/info/icse-2025/submitting-to-icse2025%3A-q%26a).
• 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. 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.

Submissions that meet the above requirements can be made via the SEIS submission site. Any submission that does not comply with these requirements may be desk rejected without further review.

SEIS Submission site: https://icse2025-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. We are assuming that the conference will be in-person, and if it is virtual or hybrid, virtual presentations may be possible. These matters will be discussed with the authors closer to the date of the conference.

Important Dates

• Submissions Deadline: October 10th, 2024 - Submissions close at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth, UTC-12)
• Acceptance notification: December 15th, 2024
• Camera ready: January 10th, 2025

Contact

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