Professor Derrick L. Cogburn (American University) leads an ongoing special collection of articles in Data & Policy entitled Big Data Text Analytics for Policy. This consists of extended versions of articles accepted for the prestigious Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS). HICSS is one of the longest continuously running international academic conferences in the world and 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.
The Big Data Text Analytics for Policy special collection is built on the HICSS Fast Track to Publishing structure. Prof. Cogburn leads two HICSS minitracks:
- Minitrack on AI Safety, Cybersecurity and Inclusion through Advanced Text Analytics;
- Minitrack on Culture, Identity & Inclusion within the Digital and Social Media Track.
The special collection largely consists of articles that derive from these minitracks but we also encourage submissions by authors accepted to HICSS that include diverse theoretical and empirical approaches to analyzing large scale text as data. Given the audience of the journal, we ask authors to draw out the policy implications of their analyses in the versions submitted to Data & Policy.
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.