Call for Papers

Call for Papers

In our modern society, software systems are highly integrated into our daily life, control important processes in industry and transportation, and advance medical treatments. With the increasing complexity of tasks and higher degrees of system autonomy, algorithms have become more complex and opaque in their decisions.
Thus, quality aspects such as ethics, fairness, and transparency have become essential for trustworthy software systems. Explainability has been identified as a means to achieve these aspects and has become a hot topic. While focusing on explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in the beginning, communities from other areas of knowledge (e.g., human-computer interaction, philosophy, psychology, and cyber-physical systems) have also started researching explainability in the last years.
Explainability needs to be carefully considered during the whole software engineering process. However, there is only little research on systematic explainability engineering yet but a long list of open research questions with challenges for different disciplines of software engineering.

We aim to tackle these open research problems. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the topic, we also focus on community building to strengthen links in the community and foster communication between researchers working in the different fields.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Explanation visualization and interfaces
• Elicitation and analysis techniques for explainable systems
• Specification and validation of explainability requirements
• Perspectives and views of different stakeholders
• Impact of explainability on other software quality aspects; and dealing with antagonistic
  quality aspects
• Modeling and specification languages
• Formal validation and verification techniques for explainable systems
• Architectures for explainable systems
• Challenges for explainability in practice
• Interdisciplinary perspectives

Contribution Types

 The workshop solicits two contribution types:

• Research papers (max. 6 pages w/o references):
  These papers should describe ongoing research or preliminary results aligned with the workshop’s topics of interest. They should already have a proof of concept or a distinct vision of what the research aims at. They could be improvements of existing approaches, as well as empirical studies, and experience reports (e.g., of applied work in the industry).
• Position or vision papers (max. 4 pages w/o references):
  These papers serve to foster discussion on hot, relevant topics in the field. They could outline rough, but plausible visions regarding the future of explainability, as well as problem statements explaining problems in industrial settings.

Important Dates – AoE (UTC-12h)

• Deadline for submission: Thu 09 Nov 2023 Thu 07 Dec 2023
• Notification of accepted papers: Thu 21 Dec 2023 Thu 11 Jan 2024
• Camera-ready paper due: Thu 25 Jan 2024
• Workshop Day: Sat 20 April 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should use the official “ACM Primary Article Template”, as can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template page. LaTeX users should use the sigconf option, as well as the review (to produce line numbers for easy reference by the reviewers). To that end, the following LaTeX code can be placed at the start of the LaTeX document:
\documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}
\acmConference[ICSE 2024]{46th International Conference on Software Engineering}{April 2024}{Lisbon, Portugal}

• All submissions must not exceed the respective page limit including all figures, tables and appendices.
• Submissions must strictly conform to the ACM conference proceedings formatting instructions specified above. Alterations of spacing, font size, and other changes that deviate from the instructions may result in desk rejection without further review.
• By submitting to the workshop, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ, that they conform to the authorship policy of the ACM, and the authorship policy of the IEEE, and that they acknowledge that they are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research In volving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.
• Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper.

Submissions must be done electronically in PDF format through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=exen24

Workshop Organizers

• Jakob Droste, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany
• Verena Klös, TU Dresden, Germany
• Maike Schwammberger, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
• Timo Speith, University of Bayreuth, Germany