Data & Policy Editor and Professor Derrick L. Cogburn (American University) is developing an ongoing special collection featuring revised and extended versions of peer-reviewed papers accepted for the prestigious Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS). Now preparing for its 58thyear, HICSS is one of the longest continuously running international academic conferences in the world. The conference is based on a Track/Minitrack model, which helps to aggregate research within ten broad themes, and the minitracks providing greater research focus and specificity. HICSS provides a highly interactive environment for top scholars from academia and industry from over 40 countries to exchange ideas in various areas of information, computer, and system sciences.

This Data & Policy Special Collection of peer-reviewed, open-access articles is built on the HICSS Fast Track to Publishing structure. Prof. Cogburn leads two HICSS minitracks:

• Minitrack on Big Data Analytics and Text Mining (now named AI Safety, Cybersecurity and Inclusion through Advanced Text Analytics) within the Decision Analytics and Service Science Track;
• Minitrack on Culture, Identity & Inclusion within the Digital and Social Media Track.

The Special Collection is particularly focused on papers from these minitracks, but also invites submissions by authors in these minitracks, as well as a wide range of papers accepted to HICSS that include diverse theoretical and empirical approaches to analyzing large scale text as data. Revised and extended papers accepted for this Special Collection will all pay close attention to the policy implications of their analyses.

The HICSS peer review process is double blind, beginning in June each year with the anonymous review of full papers by 3-5 anonymous peer-reviewers. Paper authors are notified in August of their acceptance or rejection. Most accepted papers go through another revision before final acceptance. All final, camera-ready, manuscripts are submitted in September in anticipation of the January conference each year.

Dr. Cogburn and Data & Policy would like to thank all the anonymous reviewers for this special collection. They would also like to thank Dr. Tung Bui, HICSS Conference Chair; Dr. Thayanan Phuaphanthong, HICSS Program Coordinator, and the entire HICSS Secretariat and Minitrack Chairs.

For information about how to submit to HICSS, as well as submission deadlines, please go to the HICSS Authors page. The complete, publicly-available collection of HICSS papers may be found on the HICSS Scholarspace collection.

Minitrack on AI Safety, Cybersecurity and Inclusion through Advanced Text Analytics:

This HICSS minitrack seeks a wide range of theoretical and empirical papers that employ natural language processing (NLP), text mining, and text analytics techniques to better understand and improve decision making in AI safety, cybersecurity, and inclusion. These papers could include, but are certainly not limited to, large scale analysis of AI risk management frameworks such as: (1) those developed in the United States by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) designed to regulate the development of AI; (2) frameworks for the development of trustworthy AI; (3) other national and international organization frameworks for the development of responsible AI which include those developed by the EU, Australia, Japan, Singapore, G20, China, Africa, and the OECD. These papers could also explore the use of AI for cyberthreat detection, and other applications of Machine Learning (ML)/Deep Learning (DL)/AI related to any aspect of cybersecurity or AI participation and inclusion. Other papers may address methodological challenges such as: text summarization, classification, and clustering; using or comparing large language models LLMs (e.g. BERT, GPT, PaLM) and generative AI products (such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini) to create large scale synthetic data; overcoming API limitations; and working on distributed, high-performance computers. We also seek papers on enhanced explainability in AI and text analytics (particularly AI/ML) relative to results and the detection and mitigation of bias in analytics.

Minitrack on Culture, Identity & Inclusion:

This HICSS minitrack this minitrack presents innovative research across a wide range of methods, subjects, and countries. Exploring how platforms and other digital technologies become interconnected with and embedded in existing socio-cultural contexts is essential to assess how they affect key power dynamics in society, politics, and the economy. It sets the scene for analyzing better how these technologies can foster – or hinder – diversity, equity, and inclusion in multiple settings, especially in a world coping with renewed calls for social justice and peace, and AI’s transformational potential on work, politics, and other social processes. Technology-facilitated social media and other platforms thus present opportunities for new frontiers of research as they interact with cultures, identities, and diversity. This minitrack highlights multi-disciplinary and multi-method research centered on the three I’s of: internet; identity; and inclusion. It welcomes research on the intersection of digital media, different inequalities, and justice, including but not limited to work that focuses on race, culture, identity, and disability, recognizing that these often intersect with one another. Emerging technologies themselves connect with existing platforms and provide opportunities for incipient research on, for example, augmented or virtual reality, social media, and inclusion or, for another example, artificial intelligence, mobile apps, social media, and exclusion. 

Timetable

• June 15, 2024: Submission deadline for HICSS 
• August 17, 2024: Notification of acceptance/rejection
• September 4, 2024: Deadline for authors whose papers are conditionally accepted to submit a revised manuscript
• September 22, 2024: Deadline for authors to submit final Manuscript for publication
• October 1, 2024: Deadline for at least one author of each paper to register for the conference
• January 3-6, 2025: 58th HICSS Conference takes place in Honolulu
• April 7, 2025: Deadline to submit to Data & Policy (paper 30% adapted from conference)
• June 3, 2025: Decision to accept in Data & Policy.

How to submit

Submission to HICSS (June 15, 2024)

Visit the HICSS Authors page to find out how to submit to the conference.

Submission to Data & Policy (April 7, 2025)

Authors submitting to Data & Policy after the conference should adapt their paper by a minimum of 30% from the conference version and bring the policy implications of their work to the fore. Data & Policy will provide a fast track service for HICSS compared to a regular submission to the journal: it considers the HICSS reviews as counting towards its process and will seek a single additional review from a policy expert.

Before submitting to the journal, authors should familiarise themselves with the Instructions for Authors. Authors will need to select one of the following article types when they submit to the journal: Research Article (typically 8,000 words excluding references); Commentary (typically 4,000 words); Data Paper (typically 8,000 words); Translational Articles (typically 6,000 words). Authors should read this section of the Data & Policy Instructions for Authors for more information about the aims of each article type. Authors are able to use either the LaTeX or Word templates or the  template in Overleaf, a cloud-based, which has collaborative features and enables authors to submit directly into the Data & Policy system without having to re-upload files.

Why submit to Data & Policy?

✔ A venue developed for and expanding the community working at the data science for governance interface, established by the Data for Policy Conference.
✔ Welcomes research, translational articles, commentaries and data papers, plus the Data & Policy blog for more immediate reflections.
✔ Well-cited (2022 Impact Factor: 2.6) and indexed in Web of Science, Scopus and Directory of Open Access Journals.
✔ Open Access with support for authors who do not have access to funding to pay publishing charges.
✔ Promotes open sharing of data and code through Open Science Badges.

Guest Editor and HICSS MiniTrack Chair

Dr. Derrick L. Cogburn is Professor at American University in Washington, DC. He has a joint appointment in the School of International Service where he serves in the Department of Environment, Development & Health; and in the Kogod School of Business where he serves in the Department of Information Technology & Analytics. He also serves at the founding Executive Director of the AU Institute on Disability and Public Policy (IDPP), is Faculty Co-Director of the Internet Governance Lab (IGL), and is Director of COTELCO the Collaboration Laboratory.