Call For Papers
WHAC26 proposes a data challenge focused on developing computational models to understand the long-term resilience of human societies to environmental change. We provide a novel assembled dataset combining cultural evolution variables about past societies (population, crises, cultural evolution proxies, secular cycle phases etc.) with paleoclimate proxies (temperature and relative growth trend per continent) and challenge communities working in social computing, cultural evolution, Natural Language Processing and Cliodynamics in two tasks:
Task 1: predict the secular cycle phase of societies from the shared dataset,
Task 2: modeling patterns of cultural evolution and climate resilience from the shared dataset
The data challenge format will allow the comparison of different approaches and findings. We welcome short papers (4 pages, excluding references) following the LNCS template available on Overleaf, Word, LaTeX. Papers can address just one or both tasks. Participants are allowed to add any other resource or methodology available to perform the task, but we require the use of the provided dataset.
Data Challenge Playground
WHAC26 offers a shared Colab notebook with tools and algorithms that participants can use for their experiments
Prize
the paper with the best system performing task 1 will be selected for pubblication in the Journal of Computer Science