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- New Deadline: Friday, December 4, 2020, Anywhere-on-Earth

- Submission Portal: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tsas
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CALL FOR PAPERS

ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems
*** Special Issue on "Contact Tracing" ***

* Guest Editors:
    - Mohamed F. Mokbel, Qatar Computing Research Institute
    - Li Xiong, Emory University
    - Demetrios Zeinalipour-Yazti, University of Cyprus

Contact Tracing refers to the process of tracking persons who may have come
into spatial contact with an infected person, and subsequently collecting
further information about these contacts. The feature-rich interaction,
processing and localization/communication modalities of smartphone devices,
have brought these to battle on the technological forefront and have curbed
the fast spread of pandemics, like COVID-19, introducing the notion of
"digital vaccines" to custodians aiming at fast prevention rather than
slow intervention.

The community has to this date proposed a wide range of approaches, ranging
from: opportunistic to participatory approaches, privacy-sensitive to
no-privacy approaches, handheld-based (distributed) to cloud-based
(centralized) approaches, proximity-based (e.g., BLE, sound) to
location-based approaches (e.g., Wi-Fi, GPS), for only outdoor settings
to indoor settings, using closed-source to open-source counterparts. However,
a wide range of challenges remain unanswered, including methodologies to
improve the penetration and adoption rates, alleviate privacy or expectation
skepticism, ubiquitous availability on low-end terminals as well as
technological/psychological adoption barriers, achieving cross-country
interoperability with standard formations beyond recommendations,
scalability/reliability and accuracy verification of engaged spatial
technologies as well as lessons about effectiveness from real large-scale
deployments.

This special issue intends to bring together transdisciplinary researchers and
practitioners working in topics from multiple areas, e.g., Information
Communication Technologists (geographic information systems, databases,
storage, big data, data mining, machine learning, security/privacy),
Epidemiologists, Medical Practitioners, Psychologists, Emergency Response
and Public safety, among others.

* Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

    - Proximity and localization technologies for Contact Tracing
    - Spatial data structures and algorithms for Contact Tracing
    - Open-source Contact Tracing apps
    - Machine learning and mobility prediction for Contact Tracing
    - Geospatial graphical user interfaces for Contact Tracing
    - User behavior characterization in Contact Tracing
    - Contact Tracing architectures and protocols
    - Domain-specific Contact Tracing apps (e.g., factories, campuses,
      hospitals)
    - Location privacy, data sharing and security
    - Contact Tracing large-scale field studies and lessons learnt
    - Accessibility of Contact Tracing apps and systems
    - Ubiquitous Contact Tracing for low-end smartphone device and device
      diversity aspects
    - Individual vs. collective spatial intelligence in Contact Tracing
    - Exposure risk modeling
    
The journal welcomes articles on any of the above topics or closely related
disciplines in the context of contact tracing. TSAS will encourage original
submissions that have not been published or submitted in any form elsewhere,
and submissions which may significantly contribute to opening up new and
potentially important areas of research and development. TSAS will publish
outstanding papers that are "major value-added extensions" of papers
previously published in conferences. Such extensions should contribute at
least 30% new original work. In this case, authors will need to identify
in a separate document the list of extensions over their previously
published paper. For more information, please visit tsas.acm.org/authors.cfm.

* Important Dates (all dates are in Anywhere-on-Earth timezone)

    - Dec 04, 2020: New Submission Deadline of full-length papers
    - Jan 31, 2021: Notification of initial reviews
    - Feb 28, 2021: Submission of revisions
    - Apr 30, 2021: Notification of final reviews
    - Fall 2021: Expected publication

* Submission Portal

Please submit your work under the following URL selecting type:
"Special issue on Contact Tracing":

    - https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tsas

For questions and additional information, contact the special issue
guest-editors at tsas.ct@gmail.com.