Scope and Topics

We solicit original, unpublished research papers on computing technologies and visual languages for programming, modelling and communicating. These technologies should be easier to learn, use or understand than the current state-of-the-art, and papers should focus on efforts to design, formalize, implement, or evaluate them. This includes tools and visual languages intended for general audiences (e.g. professional or novice programmers, or the public) or domain-specific audiences (e.g. people working in healthcare, urban design or scientific domains). It encompasses languages and tools for expressing forms of computation and reasoning and in any computing context.

This year’s special topic is Programming and Play. Visual languages play a crucial role in exploratory programming, especially when individuals are learning to program. Subjects fitting within this topic include gamification of programming, problem solving reward systems and making computer science education fun.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

Novel visual languages
Design, evaluation, and theory of visual languages
End-user development and end-user programming
New representations and user interfaces for expressing computation
Human aspects and psychology of software development and language design
Debugging and program understanding
Crowdsourcing, as related to languages and tools
Computational thinking and computer science education
Problem solving through programming and play
Domain-specific languages
Software visualization

Paper Submissions

We invite two kinds of papers:

full-length research papers, up to 8 pages -- plus 1 additional page that contains only references
short research papers, up to 4 pages -- plus 1 additional page that contains only references
Papers must be submitted using the EasyChair system: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vlhcc2017

Please note we have changed to a double-blind reviewing mechanism for 2017.

To facilitate assigning papers to reviewers, we require paper abstracts to be entered into EasyChair at least one week before the paper submission deadline. The abstract must be no longer than 150 words and must be kept up-to-date such that it matches exactly the abstract in the submitted paper.

All accepted papers, whether full or short, should be complete archival contributions. Contributions from full papers are more extensive than those from short papers. Work-in-progress, which has not yet yielded a contribution, should be submitted to the Showpieces category. All submissions will be reviewed by members of the Program Committee. Submission and reviews for the technical program are managed with EasyChair. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to register for VL/HCC 2017 and present the paper at the conference.

Accepted papers will be distributed at the conference and will be included in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/). The proceedings are an official electronic publication of the IEEE in Computer Science, with an ISBN number. Be sure to use the current IEEE conference paper format:

http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html



Double Blind Reviewing

We have introduced a lightweight double-blind reviewing process for the first time this year. Double blind reviewing is used in some of the most respected Computer Science conferences including POPL, PLDI, SIGMOD, IEEE S&P, CHI and ASE.

Submitted papers must not reveal the identities of authors. However, the author names will be known to the program committee in the rebuttal phase.

Both authors and reviewers are expected to make every effort to honor the double-blind reviewing process. In case of questions, please contact the Program Chairs.

Authors should ensure that the submission can be evaluated without it being obvious who wrote the paper. This means leaving author names off the paper and using terms like “previous research” rather than “our previous research” when describing background. However, do not hide previous work – papers must still reference all relevant research, including that by the current authors, so reviewers can identify novelty. It is important that authors specify all conflicts of interest with potential reviewers during the submission phase.

Reviewers should not undertake any investigation that might lead to the revealing of authors identity. If identities are inadvertently revealed, please contact the Program Chairs.

The Program Chairs will check all submissions for obvious signs of lack of anonymity and may ask authors to make changes and resubmit the paper within four days of submission.



Evaluation and Justification

Papers are expected to support their claims with appropriate evidence. For example, a paper that claims to improve programmer productivity is expected to demonstrate improved productivity; a paper that claims to be easier to use should demonstrate increased ease of use. However, not all claims necessarily need to be supported with empirical evidence or studies with people. For example, a paper that claims to make something feasible that was clearly infeasible might substantiate its claim through the existence of a functioning prototype. Moreover, there are many alternatives to empirical evidence that may be appropriate for justifying claims, including analytical methods, formal arguments or case studies. Given this criterion, we encourage potential authors to think carefully about what claims their submission makes and what evidence would adequately support these claims. In addition, we expect short papers to have less comprehensive evaluation than long papers.



Reviewing Process

Papers will be reviewed as follows:

Initial review period: at least three members of the Program Committee or external reviewers will review each paper. At the end of this period, these initial reviews will be released to the authors.
Author response period: authors will have an opportunity to submit a response based on their initial reviews. Responses should focus on answering reviewers' questions, addressing reviewers' concerns, and clarifying any factual misunderstandings. At this point, the identity of authors will be revealed to the program committee.
Final review period: taking the author response into account, the original reviewers will revise their reviews as they deem appropriate, and the Program Committee will reach a final decision to accept or reject the submitted work.