Scope

The Data Analytics for Social Impact specialty section of Frontiers in Big Data aims at providing an impact-focused venue for disseminating highly curated research and best practices related to data analytics, AI, machine learning for positive and equitable social impact in a responsible and ethical manner. Examples of social impact areas include health, education, sustainability, criminal justice, social services, and economic development.

The specialty section publishes interdisciplinary work with strong connections to the needs and constraints of real-world problems and requires submissions that develop and propose new methods to be empirically evaluated on real-world social impact problems. The discussion of ethical issues encountered and accounts of how these issues have been and will be dealt with is crucial and should be addressed thoroughly.

We encourage a wide variety of submissions and are open to ideas and suggestions by the community of researchers, practitioners, and the public interested in this topic. We have currently created five categories of submissions that we want to encourage

• Case studies: Describing work that tackles a real social problem, with real data, and ideally in collaboration with social impact organizations.

• Methods: Research contributions of new methods motivated by, applied to, and evaluated on real-world problems in social good.

• Lessons learned: By researchers and/or practitioners working on data analytics for social impact problems.

• Challenges: Describing challenges encountered in both research and deployment for the field to learn from and hopefully tackle.

• New Questions for the field: Position papers ranging from new questions that we, as an interdisciplinary field need to tackle, ranging from ethical questions to technical questions to societal questions.

Every submission must have a clear, strong, and demonstrated social impact and discussions of ethical choices and values as well a discussion of the human impact of the work. Proposed Research Topics should set these requirements for submissions to be accepted while papers need to demonstrate a clear connection to social impact and a thorough discussion of ethical issues and societal implications.

Submission

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