CALL FOR PAPERS AND PROPOSALS

*** Final extension of main-round submission deadline to 2021-02-28 ***

iLRN 2021: 7th International Conference of the Immersive Learning Research Network

May 17 to June 10, 2021, on iLRN Virtual Campus, powered by Virbela
… and across the Metaverse!

Technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Education Society,
with proceedings to be submitted for inclusion in IEEE Xplore(r)

Conference theme: “TRANSCEND: Accelerating Learner Engagement in XR across Time, Place, and Imagination”

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Conference website: https://immersivelrn.org/ilrn2021/

PDF version of this CFP available at: https://bit.ly/3qnFYRu

The 7th International Conference of the Immersive Learning Research Network (iLRN 2021) will be an innovative and interactive virtual gathering for a strengthening global network of researchers and practitioners collaborating to develop the scientific, technical, and applied potential of immersive learning. It is the premier scholarly event focusing on advances in the use of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), and other extended reality (XR) technologies to support learners across the full span of learning–from K-12 through higher education to work-based, informal, and lifelong learning contexts.

Following the success of iLRN 2020, our first fully online and in-VR conference, this year's conference will once again be based on the iLRN Virtual Campus, powered by VirBELA, but with a range of activities taking place on various other XR simulation, gaming, and other platforms. Scholars and professionals working from informal and formal education settings as well as those representing diverse industry sectors are invited to participate in the conference, where they may share their research findings, experiences, and insights; network and establish partnerships to envision and shape the future of XR and immersive technologies for learning; and contribute to the emerging scholarly knowledge base on how these technologies can be used to create experiences that educate, engage, and excite learners.
Note: Last year's iLRN conference drew over 3,600 attendees from across the globe, making the scheduling of sessions a challenge. This year's conference activities will be spread over a four-week period so as to give attendees more opportunities to participate at times that are conducive to their local time zones.

##### TOPIC AREAS #####

XR and immersive learning in/for:

Serious Games • 3D Collaboration • eSports • AI & Machine Learning • Robotics • Digital Twins • Embodied Pedagogical Agents • Medical & Healthcare Education • Workforce & Industry • Cultural Heritage • Language Learning • K-12 STEM • Higher Ed & Workforce STEM  • Museums & Libraries • Informal Learning • Community & Civic Engagement  • Special Education • Geosciences • Data Visualization and Analytics • Assessment & Evaluation

##### SUBMISSION STREAMS & CATEGORIES #####

ACADEMIC STREAM (Refereed paper published in proceedings):
– Full (6-8 pages) paper for oral presentation
– Short paper (4-5 pages) for oral presentation
– Work-in-progress paper (2-3 pages) for poster presentation
– Doctoral colloquium paper (2-3 pages)

PRACTITIONER STREAM (Refereed paper published in proceedings):
– Oral presentation
– Poster presentation
– Guided virtual adventures
– Immersive learning project showcase

NONTRADITIONAL SESSION STREAM (1-2 page extended abstract describing session published in proceedings):
– Workshop
– Special session
– Panel session

##### SESSION TYPES & SESSION FORMATS #####

– Oral Presentation: Pre-recorded video + 60-minute live in-world discussion with
others presenting on similar/related topics (groupings of presenters into sessions determined by Program Committee)
– Poster Presentation: Live poster session in 3D virtual exhibition hall; pre-recorded video optional
– Doctoral Colloquium: 60-minute live in-world discussion with other doctoral researchers; pre-recorded video optional
– Guided Virtual Adventures: 60-minute small-group guided tours of to various social and collaborative XR/immersive environments and platforms
– Immersive Learning Project Showcase: WebXR space to assemble a collection of virtual artifacts, accessible to attendees throughout the conference
– Workshop: 1- or 2-hour live hands-on session
– Special Session: 30- or 60-minute live interactive session held in world; may optionally be linked to one or more papers
– Panel Session: 60-minute live in-world discussion with a self-formed group of 3-5 panelists (including a lead panelist who serves as a moderator)

Please see the conference website for templates and guidelines.

##### PROGRAM TRACKS #####

Papers and proposals may be submitted to one of 10 program tracks, the first nine of which correspond to the iLRN Houses of application, and the tenth of which is intended for papers making knowledge contributions to the learning sciences, computer science, and/or game studies that are not linked to any particular application area:

Track 1. Assessment and Evaluation (A&E)
Track 2. Early Childhood Development & Learning (ECDL)
Track 3. Galleries, Libraries, Archives, & Museums (GLAM)
Track 4. Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Access, & Social Justice (IDEAS)
Track 5. K-12 STEM Education
Track 6. Language, Culture, & Heritage (LCH)
Track 7. Medical & Healthcare Education (MHE)
Track 8. Nature & Environmental Sciences (NES)
Track 9. Workforce Development & Industry Training (WDIT)
Track 10. Basic Research and Theory in Immersive Learning (not linked to any particular application area)

##### PAPER/PROPOSAL SUBMISSION & REVIEW #####

Papers for the Academic Stream and extended-abstract proposals for the Nontraditional Session Stream must be prepared in standard IEEE double-column US Letter format using Microsoft Word or LaTeX, and will be accepted only via the online submission system, accessible via the conference website (from which guidelines and templates are also available).

Proposals for the Practitioner Stream are to be submitted via an online form, also accessible from the conference website.

A blind peer-review process will be used to evaluate all submissions.

##### IMPORTANT DATES #####

– Main round* submission deadline — all submission types welcome: 2021-02-28 (FINAL extension)
– Late round* submission deadline — Work-in-progress papers, practitioner presentations, and – nontraditional sessions only: 2021-03-22
– Notification of review outcomes from main submission round: 2021-04-06
– Camera-ready papers for proceedings due — Full and short papers: 2021-04-16
– Presenter registration deadline — Full and short papers (also deadline for early-bird registration rates): 2021-04-16
– Notification of review outcomes from late submission round: 2021-04-20
– Camera-ready work-in-progress papers and nontraditional session extended abstracts for proceedings due; final practitioner abstracts for conference program due: 2021-04-30
– Presenter registration deadline — Work-in-progress papers, practitioner presentations, and nontraditional sessions (also deadline for regular registration rates): 2021-04-30
– Deadline for uploading presentation materials (videos, slides for oral presentations, posters for poster presentations): 2021-05-10
– All presenters to attend a mandatory orientation and training session on the iLRN Virtual Campus (choose from several days/times): 2021-05-11 to 2021-05-14
– Conference dates: 2021-05-17 to 2020-06-10

*Full and short papers can only be submitted in the main round.

##### PUBLICATION & INDEXING #####

All accepted and registered papers in the Academic Stream that are presented at iLRN 2021 and all extended abstracts describing the Nontraditional Sessions presented at the conference will be published in the conference proceedings and submitted to the IEEE Xplore(r) digital library.

Content loaded into Xplore is made available by IEEE to its abstracting and indexing partners, including Elsevier (Scopus, EiCompendex), Clarivate Analytics (CPCI–part of Web of Science) and others, for potential inclusion in their respective databases. In addition, the authors of selected papers may be invited to submit revised and expanded versions of their papers for possible publication in the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies (2019 JCR Impact Factor: 2.714), the Journal of Universal Computer Science (2019 JCR Impact Factor: 0.91), or another Scopus and/or Web of Science-indexed journal, subject to the relevant journal's regular editorial and peer-review policies and procedures.

##### CONTACT #####

Inquiries regarding the iLRN 2020 conference should be directed to the Conference Secretariat at mailto:conference@immersivelrn.org.

General inquiries about iLRN may be sent to mailto:info@immersivelrn.org.

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Please consider to contribute to and/or forward to the appropriate groups the following opportunity to submit and publish original scientific results to:

– eKNOW 2021, The Thirteenth International Conference on Information, Process, and Knowledge Management

eKNOW 2021 is scheduled to be July 18 – 22, 2021 in Nice, France under the DigitalWorld 2021 umbrella.

The submission deadline is April 19, 2021.

Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit extended article versions to one of the IARIA Journals: https://www.iariajournals.org

All events will be held in a hybrid mode: on site, online, prerecorded videos, voiced presentation slides, pdf slides.

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============== eKNOW 2021 | Call for Papers ===============

CALL FOR PAPERS, TUTORIALS, PANELS

eKNOW 2021, The Thirteenth International Conference on Information, Process, and Knowledge Management

General page: https://www.iaria.org/conferences2021/eKNOW21.html

Submission page: https://www.iaria.org/conferences2021/SubmiteKNOW21.html

Event schedule: July 18 – 22, 2021

Contributions:

– regular papers [in the proceedings, digital library]

– short papers (work in progress) [in the proceedings, digital library]

– ideas: two pages [in the proceedings, digital library]

– extended abstracts: two pages [in the proceedings, digital library]

– posters: two pages [in the proceedings, digital library]

– posters:  slide only [slide-deck posted at www.iaria.org]

– presentations: slide only [slide-deck posted at www.iaria.org]

– demos: two pages [posted at www.iaria.org]

Submission deadline: April 19, 2021

Extended versions of selected papers will be published in IARIA Journals:  https://www.iariajournals.org

Print proceedings will be available via Curran Associates, Inc.: https://www.proceedings.com/9769.html

Articles will be archived in the free access ThinkMind Digital Library: https://www.thinkmind.org

The topics suggested by the conference can be discussed in term of concepts, state of the art, research, standards, implementations, running experiments, applications, and industrial case studies. Authors are invited to submit complete unpublished papers, which are not under review in any other conference or journal in the following, but not limited to, topic areas.

All tracks are open to both research and industry contributions.
Before submission, please check and comply with the editorial rules: https://www.iaria.org/editorialrules.html

eKNOW 2021 Topics (for topics and submission details: see CfP on the site)

Call for Papers: https://www.iaria.org/conferences2021/CfPeKNOW21.html

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eKNOW 2021 Tracks (topics and submission details: see CfP on the site)

Knowledge fundamentals

Knowledge acquisition, processing, and management; Linguistic knowledge representation; Knowledge modeling and virtualization; Types of knowledge: structural, behavioral, relationships, etc.; Knowledge representation: visual-picture, connectionist model, semi-structured [a la workflow], structured/formal; Knowledge acquisition status: potential new knowledge, guessed semantics, confirmed semantics, auditing confirmed semantics, etc.; Knowledge update: probable insertion, validated insertion, auditing the insertion periodically based on new knowledge, etc.

Advanced topics in Deep/Machine learning

Distributed and parallel learning algorithms; Image and video coding; Deep learning and Internet of Things; Deep learning and Big data; Data preparation, feature selection, and feature extraction; Error resilient transmission of multimedia data; 3D video coding and analysis; Depth map applications; Machine learning programming models and abstractions; Programming languages for machine learning; Visualization of data, models, and predictions; Hardware-efficient machine learning methods; Model training, inference, and serving; Trust and security for machine learning applications; Testing, debugging, and monitoring of machine learning  applications; Machine learning for systems.

ML: Knowledge and Information processing using Machine Learning

Machine learning models (supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement, constrained, etc.); Generative modeling (Gaussian, HMM, GAN, Bayesian networks, autoencoders, etc.); Explainable AI (feature importance, LIME, SHAP, FACT, etc.); Bayesian learning models; Prediction uncertainty (approximation learning, similarity); Training of models (hyperparameter optimization, regularization, optimizers); Active learning (partially labels datasets, faulty labels, semi-supervised); Applications of machine learning (recommender systems, NLP, computer vision, etc.); Data in machine learning (no data, small data, big data, graph data, time series, sparse data, etc.)

Trends on annotation and extraction

Natural Languages-based features and systems; Annotation handling (multilingual, semantic, shared, open, prosody, etc.); Annotation as a Service (AaaS); Handling argument-based knowledge; Event-based knowledge; Tagging and supertagging; Extraction patterns; Uncertain reasoning; Visual error analysis; Domain-specific paraphrase extraction; Tweets and sentence compression; Role labeling semantic; Heterogeneous annotations

Trends on news and social media

New events-based knowledge;In-context news creation; Superlative expressions; News highlights generation systems; News special summarization systems (e.g, for blind and/or visually impaired people); Sentiment classification (emotion, irony, sarcasm, rhetorical questions, opinion, etc.); Rumor dynamics and social media; Contextual pragmatic models;; Social prediction; Prediction semantic analysis; Predictability of distrust; Aspect-based sentiment analysis; Argument generation systems; Relevance of citation recommendation; Retrieval bias and retrieval performance; High-speed captioning images; Language models for images; Participative KM platforms

Trends on knowledge processing support and mechanisms

Open knowledge bases; Structured knowledge bases; Big knowledge applications; Linked knowledge objects; Knowledge datasets; Machine translation systems; Convolution neural networks; Hybrid representations and equivalent semantics; Processing bilingual information; Topic trends and temporal signatures; Cross-view features; Pattern-based knowledge; Ranking optimization in context; Concept-based classification and ranking; KM design for life long learning and long term uses

Knowledge identification and discovery

Mining for knowledge; Knowledge identification: semantic-ID, etc.; Knowledge discovery: how to express knowledge requests?, how to find knowledge?, etc.; Knowledge refinement: after many acquisitions, former knowledge can change semantically or structurally, etc.; Knowledge clustering

Knowledge management systems

Knowledge data systems; Industrial systems; Context-aware and self-management systems; Imprecision/Uncertainty/Incompleteness in databases; Cognitive science and knowledge agent-based systems; Databases and mobility in databases; Zero-knowledge systems; Expert systems; Tutoring systems; Digital libraries

Knowledge management (KM) and event processing (EP)

Methodologies and approaches to overcome technical hurdles and improve the interplay between KM and EP; Applications from various domains (e.g. financial, manufacturing, trading, telecommunication, service), which benefit from an integrated KM and EP

Knowledge semantics processing and ontology

Dynamic knowledge ontology; Collaborative knowledge ontology; Knowledge matching; Contextual reasoning; Tools for knowledge ontology; Context-based information extraction; Knowledge trading systems; Knowledge exchange portals; Cognitive sytems and knowledge processing; Human aspects in knowledge processing

Technological foresight and socio-economic evolution modelling

Anticipatory networks and decisions; Expert information management; Foresight support systems; Generating technological recommendations and rankings; Information society evolution; Online and real-time Delphi; Ontological knowledge bases of technologies and products; Roadmapping support systems; Strategic support systems; Technological information fusion; Technological policy decision support systems

Process analysis and modeling

Analysis and development of business architectures; Data mining and information retrieval for business processes; Business process modelling; Business process composition; Analysis and management lifecycle; Reasoning on business processes; Optimization of business processes; Adaptive business processes; Business process reengineering; Integration of processes; Process discovery; Business process quality; Resource allocation

Process management

Criteria for measurement of business process models; Monitoring business processes; Business process visualization; Management of business process integration; On-demand business transformation; Performance measurement; Conformance and risk management; Prediction; Business transformation; Packaged industry applications; Industry solutions

Information management

Informational mining/retrieval/classification; Geographic and spatial data Infrastructures; Information technologies; Information management systems; Information ethics and legal evaluations; Optimization and information technology; Organizational information systems

Decision support systems

Multi-criteria decision theory; Artificial intelligence; Adaptive design for decision support systems; Support technologies: knowledge-driven, data-driven, model-driven, and geographically-driven systems; Support methods: artificial neural networks, fuzzy logic, and genetic/evolutionary algorithms; Modeling, interfaces, and performance; Applications using decision support systems