Call for Papers

The Sixth International Workshop on
Big Food, Nutrition, and Sustainable Development Data Management and Analysis
https://cs.ijs.si/bfndma/2025/bfndma.html

(BFNDMA 2025)
Macau, China, Dec 8-11, 2025
(in conjunction with IEEE Big Data 2025, https://bigdataieee.org/BigData2025/)


SCOPE AND OBJECTIVES
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According to the Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR) from 2023, moving towards (1) sustainable food systems and (2) healthy nutrition, diets and consumption practices are among the key transformations required to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Such food systems and nutrition practices are in the direct focus of SDG2 (zero hunger) and SDG3 (good health and well-being). However, they are indirectly related to SDG13 (climate action), SDG12 (responsible consumption and production), SDG14 (life below water), SDG15 (life on land), SDG16 (peace, justice, and strong institutions), among the rest. Namely, according to GSDR 2023 and SDG Progress Report 2024, achieving zero hunger requires food systems that are sustainable and resilient, while achieving good health and wellbeing requires making healthier food choices. On the other hand, recent global crises have shown how unresilient current food systems are by disrupting food supply chains, causing record-high food prices, and impacting the available and affordable food choices for many people. At the same time, while millions of people suffer from hunger, an enormous amount of food is wasted globally (of which around 60% attributed to household waste in 2022). Such waste generates significant greenhouse gas emissions which negatively affect the climate and biodiversity. Together with the irresponsible utilization of natural resources by humanity, they all negatively impact the stability of the food systems even more. In that sense, as the UN 2030 Agenda postulates, although the 17 SDGs are addressing different areas of sustainable development, they are actually integrated, indivisible, and interlinked.

The BFNDMA workshop has established a global forum for discovering, discussing, and communicating fresh ideas, advanced methodologies, and data-driven solutions for dealing with big data related to food, nutrition, and the environment. Its main aim is to enable better understanding and improvement of food systems as required by both society and the environment. The BFNDMA 2025 is a continuation of the successful workshops BFNDMA 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. Since the actions towards achieving sustainable and resilient food systems are interlinked with actions taken in many other areas of sustainable development (which is in accordance with the essence of the UN 2030 Agenda - integrated, indivisible, and interlinked SDGs), BFNDMA 2025 broadens its scope to the use of big data in advancing all areas of sustainable development directly or indirectly related to food and nutrition.

The focus of BFNDMA is on methodologies for big data management and analysis of structured and unstructured food, nutrition, and sustainable development data, as well as their synergies and trade-offs. BFNDMA 2025 will consider original and unpublished research articles that propose bold steps toward addressing the challenges of data management and analysis for food, nutrition, and sustainable development data, with a strong emphasis on exploring relations between food systems, human health, and the environment.


TOPICS
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Topics of interest related to food and nutrition include (but are not limited to) the following:

- Large language models specialized for food, nutrition, and sustainable development;
- Retrieval augmented generation for food, nutrition, and sustainable development;
- Information retrieval, information extraction, natural language processing techniques, and artificial intelligence for food, nutrition, and sustainability sciences;
- Food and nutrition data normalization;
- Knowledge representation for food and nutrition;
- Ontologies, vocabularies, and ontology design patterns, with a focus on describing the - modeling process for food, nutrition, and sustainability sciences;
- Crowdsourcing task designs that have been used and can be (re)used for building resources such as gold standards for food, nutrition, and sustainable development data;
- Predictive and descriptive modeling of food systems, including food production and demand-supply chains;
- Modeling life on land and underlying ecological and biophysical phenomena from satellite images;
- COVID-19 and other catastrophes’ impacts on food, nutrition, and sustainable development, about their security, diversity, safety, and provision.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
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Please submit a full-length paper (up to 10 page IEEE 2-column format), or short or position paper (2-4 page IEEE 2-column format), through the online system (https://wi-lab.com/cyberchair/2025/bigdata25/scripts/submit.php?subarea=S26&undisplay_detail=1&wh=/cyberchair/2025/bigdata25/scripts/ws_submit.php).

Papers should be formatted following the IEEE Computer Society Proceedings Manuscript Formatting Guidelines, as instructed by the conference organizers.

NOTE: In order to participate in this workshop, full or student registration of IEEE BigData 2025 is required for at least one of the authors.


INVITED LECTURES
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To be announced ...


IMPORTANT DATES
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- Paper submission due: October 1, 2025
- Decision notification: November 4, 2025
- Camera-ready submission: November 23, 2025
- Workshop: December 8-11, 2025



ORGANIZERS
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Prof. Barbara Koroušić Seljak, PhD
Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Asst. Prof. Tome Eftimov, PhD
Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Assoc. Prof. Riste Stojanov, PhD
FCSE, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, North Macedonia

Gjorgjina Cenikj, PhD Candidate
Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Ana Nikolikj, PhD Student
Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Ana Kostovska, PhD
Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Ana Gjorgjevikj, PhD
Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia

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