Call for Research Papers


Scope and Topics

We solicit original, unpublished research papers on computing technologies for modeling, programming, communicating, and reasoning, which are easier to learn, use or understand by humans than the current state-of-the-art. Papers should focus on efforts to design, formalize, implement, or evaluate those technologies and languages. This includes technologies intended for general audiences (e.g., professional or novice programmers, or the public) or domain-specific audiences (e.g., people working in business administration, production environments, healthcare, urban design or scientific domains).

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Visual Languages: Novel visual languages, Design, evaluation, and theory of visual languages and applications, Development of systems for manipulating and interacting with diagrammatic representations
- Human aspects and psychology of software development and language design, such as supporting inclusion and diversity in programming
- End-user development: End-user development, adaptation and programming, Creation and evaluation of technologies and infrastructures for end user development
- Crowdsourcing design and development work
- Representations: Novel representations and user interfaces for expressing computation, Software, algorithm and data visualization
- Modeling: Model-driven development, Domain-specific languages, including modeling languages, Visual modeling of human behavior and socio-technical systems
- Thinking more deeply about code: Computational thinking and Computer Science education, Debugging and program understanding, Explainable ML/AI

If you are not sure if your paper is a good fit for VL/HCC, feel free to email the PC Co-chairs (see “Contacts” below). We welcome those new to the VL/HCC community to submit!


Special Emphasis for 2022: Human-Centric AI

This year’s special topic is “Human-Centric AI”. As AI and explainable AI (XAI) experience explosive growth, many questions arise about how to ensure that tools and explanations for AI fit the needs of the broad populations they need to serve. This year, we especially welcome papers at VL/HCC that design, build, or evaluate technologies involving or relating to human-centric AI and issues of human-centric AI, such as trust and fairness.


Paper submissions

We invite two kinds of papers:

- full-length research papers, up to 8 pages - plus unlimited additional pages containing only references and/or acknowledgements
- short research papers, up to 4 pages - plus unlimited additional pages containing only references and/or acknowledgements.
Papers must be submitted using the IEEE two-column conference paper format. Be sure to use the current IEEE conference paper format (which was updated in 2019), and to select the “US letter” template: http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html

Papers should be submitted via the EasyChair system.

To facilitate the assigning of papers to reviewers, we require paper abstracts to be submitted via EasyChair at least 1 week prior to the paper submission deadline (see Important Dates below). The abstract must be kept up to date such that it matches exactly the abstract in the submitted paper. The abstract must be no longer than 250 words.

All accepted papers, whether full or short, should be complete, self-contained, 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 in a single blind review process. Authors will then receive the reviews for their submissions and will be able to answer them in a rebuttal phase. Only after this step the PC will make a final decision about the acceptance of the submissions. Submissions 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 2022 and present the paper at the conference. There will be a virtual presentation option in case of travel restrictions. IEEE reserves the right to exclude a paper from distribution after the conference, including IEEE Xplore Digital Library, if the paper is not presented by the author at the conference.

The proceedings of IEEE VL/HCC are published in digital form by the IEEE Computer Science Society and archived in the IEEE Digital Library with an official ISBN number. Accepted papers will be available to conference attendees via the IEEE Open Preview program in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/).


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.


Special Issue of The Journal of Computer Languages (COLA)

A select number of accepted papers will also be invited to optionally submit a revised and extended paper to a special issue of the Journal of Computer Languages (COLA). These papers will also go through the journal’s normal reviewing process. Papers accepted at both would appear both in the proceedings for VL/HCC 2022 and in COLA. Further instructions regarding formatting and the review/publication process will be provided when the invitations are made.

More information about COLA is available here: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-computer-languages


Important Dates

Abstracts only: March 23, 2022
Submission deadline: March 30, 2022
Acceptance: May 11, 2022
Camera-Ready: June 9, 2022


Contact

PC Co-Chairs:
Michelle (Ichinco) Brachman (michelle.brachman@ibm.com)
Mark Minas (mark.minas@unibw.de)