VL/HCC 2023: IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing https://conf.researchr.org/home/vlhcc-2023 **Call for Research Papers** IMPORTANT DATES - Abstracts only: April 21, 2023 - Submission deadline: April 28, 2023 - Rebuttal phase: June 5 - 9, 2023 - Notification: June 23, 2023 - Camera-ready: July 14, 2023 The IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing is the premier international forum for research on this topic. Established in 1984, the mission of the conference is to support the design, theory, application, and evaluation of computing technologies and languages for programming, modeling, and communicating, which are easier to learn, use, and understand by people. The 2023 symposium is scheduled to take place October 2-6 in Washington, DC, USA. VL/HCC 2023 is 100% Sponsored by IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Multimedia Computing (TCMC). SCOPE AND TOPICS We solicit original, unpublished research papers on computing technologies for modeling, programming, communicating, and reasoning, which are easier to learn, use or understand by humans than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). Empirical papers that validate current proposed solutions with rigorous scientific means (i.e., empirical studies, controlled experiments, rigorous case studies, etc.) are also welcome. 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 “Contact” below). We welcome those new to the VL/HCC community to submit! SPECIAL EMPHASIS FOR 2023: Low-Code / No-Code Development This year’s special topic is “Low-Code / No-Code Development”. This development paradigm enables the creation and deployment of fully functional applications using visual abstractions and interfaces and requiring little or no procedural code. This way, users are empowered to create software applications for constrained domains, even if they lack a programming background. This year, we especially welcome papers at VL/HCC that design, build, or evaluate any aspects of low-code and no-code solutions. 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 ( https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vlhcc2023). 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. Note that some full paper submissions may be accepted as short papers if reviewers deem contributions to be comparable in size to a short paper. Work-in-progress, which has not yet yielded an archival contribution, should be submitted to the Posters/Showpieces category. All submissions will be reviewed by members of the Program Committee in a double-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 2023 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/). DOUBLE-BLIND REVIEWING We follow a double-blind reviewing process. 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 using full (non-anonymized) citations, including the author’s own prior work, so that reviewers can evaluate novelty. Please reference your own prior work in the third-person just like you would do for any other related work (e.g., avoid “As described in our previous work [10], … ” and instead write something like “As described by [10], …”). It is also 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 three days of the submission deadline. Only changes to resolve anonymity issues will be permitted. 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. CONTACT PC Co-Chairs: - Philip Guo (University of California San Diego, United States) - Esther Guerra (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain) - Contact email: vlhcc2023(a)googlegroups.com