The scale, reach, and real-time nature of the Internet is opening new frontiers for understanding the vulnerabilities in our societies, including inequalities and fragility in the face of a changing world. From tracking seasonal illnesses like the flu across countries and populations, to understanding the context of mental conditions such as anorexia and bulimia, web data has the potential to capture the struggles and wellbeing of diverse groups of people. Vulnerable populations including children, elderly, racial or ethnic minorities, socioeconomically disadvantaged, underinsured or those with certain medical conditions, are often absent in commonly used data sources. The very absence of these populations in data can reveal areas of concern, indicating potential lack of access to vital technologies, and potentially being overlooked by algorithms trained on such data. The recent developments around COVID-19 epidemic makes these issues even more urgent, with an unequal share of both disease and economic burden among various populations.

Thus, the aim of this workshop is to encourage the community to use new sources of data to study the wellbeing of vulnerable populations including children, elderly, racial or ethnic minorities, socioeconomically disadvantaged, underinsured or those with certain medical conditions. The selection of appropriate data sources, identification of vulnerable groups, and ethical considerations in the subsequent analysis are of great importance in the extension of the benefits of big data revolution to these populations. As such, the topic is highly multidisciplinary, bringing together researchers and practitioners in computer science, epidemiology, demography, linguistics, and many others.

We anticipate topics such as the below will be relevant:

• Establishing cohorts, data de-biasing

• Validation via individual-level or aggregate-level data

• Linking data to disease and other well-being

• Population data sources for validation

• Correlation analysis and other statistical methods

• Longitudinal analysis on social media

• Spatial, linguistic, and temporal analyses

• Privacy, ethics, and informed consent

• Data quality issues

For more ideas, see pages for the first and second workshops.

Workshop Schedule

Recording of the workshop is available on Underline platform for those who have registered for the workshop.

14.00 Introduction

14.20 Keynote Talk by Karrie Karahalios on "Messaging, Algorithms, and Control in Social Media"

14.50 "The Coverage of Sexual Violence in Spanish News Media" by Marilena Budan and Carlos Castillo

15.10 Keynote Talk by Elaine O. Nsoesie on "Data and Health Equity"

15.40 "Characterizing Anti-Asian Rhetoric During The COVID-19 Pandemic: A Sentiment Analysis Case Study on Twitter" by Juan Banda, Ramya Tekumalla, Luis Alberto Robles Hernandez, Zia Baig, Michelle Pan and Michael Wang

16.00 - 16.30 Coffee Break

16.30 Keynote Talk by Enrique Delamonica on "Measuring and modelling socio-economic change and wellbeing: three challenges for data science and social good"

17.00 Panel discussion Q&A: Karrie Karahalios, Elaine O. Nsoesie, Enrique Delamonica

17.30 "Age dataset: A structured general-purpose dataset on life, work, and death of 1.22 million distinguished people" by Issa Annamoradnejad and Rahimberdi Annamoradnejad

17.50 "Strengths and limitations of big-data derived poverty indices in Indonesia" by Daniele Sartirano, Enrique Delamónica, Laetitia Gauvin, Manuel García-Herranz, Kyriaki Kalimeri, Daniela Paolotti, Rossano Schifanella, Michele Tizzoni

18.00 "Language Modeling and NLP Challenges in the Humanitarian Sector" by Nicolo Tamagnone, Ciro Cattuto, Kyriaki Kalimeri, Yelena Mejova, Rossano Schifanella

18.10 "Comparing United States Small Area Composite Vulnerability Indices with Mortality, Health, and Well-Being" by Sophia Lou, Salvatore Giorgi, Johannes Eichstaedt and Brenda Curtis

18.20 Closing remarks

Call for Papers & Abstracts

For accepted papers, see ICWSM Workshop Proceedings

We welcome both 2-page abstracts, as well as Long (8 pages) and Short (4 pages) papers.

All submissions should be in English. The Long and Short papers will be published in ICWSM Workshop proceedings by the AAAI Press. Please follow the AAAI format.

The reviewing process will be double blind, so please anonymize your submissions.

Submit via the Easychair portal: LINK

Program Committee:

• Oscar Araque, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid

• Mariano Beiro, Universidad de Buenos Aires

• Aleksandr Farseev, National University of Singapore

• Daniela Perrotta, Planck Institute for Demographic Research

• Vjosa Preniqi, Queen Mary University London

• Anna Sapienza, Technical University of Denmark,

• Emilio Zagheni, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

Important Dates

The event was held in a hybrid mode, live in Atlanta, GA, USA and online.

ISI Foundation’s Lagrange Project supported by CRT Foundation