Special Session Proposal Due: 14 Feb. 2020
Special Session Proposal Notification: 21 Feb. 2020
Special Session Submission Deadline: 24 May 2020
Special Session Notification: 26 Jul. 2020

DSAA Special Sessions are an important part of the main conference program. Special sessions are crucial for promoting emerging data science research areas that are not well established and covered in the main conference tracks. They bring together researchers, industry experts, practitioners and potential users who are interested in cultivating specialized and important aspects of data science and analytics.
DSAA special sessions feature much higher quality, integrity and impact of presentations than classic workshops typically hosted in all major conferences. Papers submitted to special sessions are not deemed to take obvious acceptance advantage than to the main conference. Quality integrity will be enforced across all special sessions and with the main conference.
DSAA’2020 will feature a number of special sessions.

Proposals for hosting special sessions at DSAA’2020 are welcome. The proposals must address:

1. Title
2. Aims and scope
3. Topics of interest
4. Relevance to the DSAA main conference tracks and topics
5. Organizers
6. Past special sessions or relevant experiences or track records
7. Potential committee members
8. Potential invited speakers

For each organizer in (5), provide name, affiliation, country, email and a short biographical sketch, describing relevant qualifications and experience; identify at least one organizer as the contact person.
For (6), list any special session or relevant events (e.g., workshops) the organizers have organized in recent years in DSAA or other major conferences; for each, list the year, the conference, number of submissions, number of papers accepted, number of participants, etc.
For (7), give a list of qualified committee members who would be invited.
For (8), please provide the names of one or two authoritative speakers that could open the special session, and that can deliver a comprehensive overview of the topic of interest.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Data quality and misinformation
• Understanding data characteristics and complexities
• Statistical and mathematic foundations for data science
• Quantum computing for data science
• Domain-specific data science areas, e.g., FinTech, environmental data science, educational data science, health/medical data science, government/enterprise data science
• Data science applications and practice
• Data science systems, infrastructure and software
• Deep learning and its practice in data science and analytics
• Statistical machine learning and practice in data science and analytics
• Social and ethical issues and impact, privacy, fairness, and bias in data science and analytics
• Interpretability, visualization and presentation
• Better data science practice
• Data science education
• Other emerging topics

Special session proposals will be reviewed based on the above criteria and quality of the proposals as well as their relationship to the main conference topics. Preference may be given to timely topics that are critical for data science and analytics, inspire highly interactive discussions, and showcase the impact of data science and analytics.

Once a special session proposal has been accepted, its organizers should widely publicize the session for calling for papers. Papers for a special session should be submitted to the special session track instead of the main conference in the DSAA’2020 submission system. Special session papers strictly follow the same specifications, requirements and policies as the main conference submissions in terms of the paper submission deadline, notification deadline, paper formatting and length, and important policies.
All papers submitted to special sessions will be double-blind reviewed that will be coordinated by each special session’s organizers. Organizers of each special session will recommend program committee members to the DSAA Program Chairs and Special Sessions for review. Approved program committee members will be invited by the conference Special Session Chairs into the submission system for each special session. Papers will then be assigned to appropriate committee members by the special session organizers for review. Special session organizers will make recommendations of acceptance/rejection for papers in their sessions, which will be double-checked by the conference Special Session Chairs for confirmation. To guarantee uniform quality control for all special sessions and to be consistent with the main conference, the final decisions of special session paper acceptance/rejection are made by the DSAA Program Chairs.

All accepted full-length special session papers will be published by IEEE in the DSAA main conference proceedings under its Special Session scheme. All papers will be submitted for inclusion in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. The conference proceedings will be submitted for EI indexing through INSPEC by IEEE.

Organizers of special sessions may arrange special issues to further publish the extended journal versions of the papers. Several past special sessions have published special issues with the International Journal of Data Science and Analytics (JDSA, Springer).

Special session proposals should be submitted to the DSAA’2020 Special Session chairs at ssc_dsaa20@dsaa.co.

General enquiries about special session proposals, the organization of special sessions, and special session paper selection can be sent to the DSAA’2020 Special Session chairs at ssc_dsaa20@dsaa.co.
Specific enquiries about a special session should be submitted to the session organizers.