The Web provides a valuable space for individuals to interact with each other, and read, publish and share content. Despite these benefits, the proliferation of virality and anonymity in the modern Web has resulted in a breeding ground for online misbehavior and compromised cybersafety in varying forms such as fraudulent engagement, misinformation and propaganda, user deception and scams, harassment, hate speech, cyberthreats, cyberbullying and more. These issues have severe negative impacts in terms of manipulated user perception and increased exposure to harmful and offensive content at best, and social, psychological and physical harm at worst. Thus, they unsurprisingly incur large social and financial costs from the perspectives of online social platforms who aim to improve user experience and encourage web activity.

The study of these topics has become especially crucial in recent years, due to the constant increase in abuse vectors and tactics, and has taken a social spotlight due to its widespread ramifications. The CyberSafety 2019 workshop provides an interdisciplinary venue for researchers in various computational fields including network science, machine learning, data mining, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, web systems, security and privacy and more, to gather and present recent advances in research on online misbehavior.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Bots, cyborgs, and automated accounts
  • Fraudulent and inflated engagement
  • Fake reviewers and reviews
  • Scams and deception
  • Hate speech
  • Harassment and cyberthreats
  • Cyberbullying
  • Flashers
  • Misbehavior and its relation to misinformation
  • Misbehavior spread
  • Adversarial analysis
  • Empirical impacts of online misbehavior
  • Enforcement and usable security measures
  • Characterization and case studies
  • Detection methods

Paper Submission

Authors are invited to submit papers of 2-8 pages in length. Papers should be submitted electronically in PDF format, using the ACM SIG Proceedings format, with a font size no smaller than 9pt. Submit papers through https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cybersafety2019

All submissions will be single blind and peer-reviewed. All accepted papers will be presented at the workshop. In addition, accepted papers will be published in the companion proceedings of the WWW conference and the ACM digital library, unless the authors choose to opt out from publishing their papers. We encourage both academic and industry submissions of the following types, but not limited to:

  • Novel research papers in full or short length
  • Work-in-progress papers
  • Survey papers
  • Comparison papers of existing methods and tools
  • Case studies
  • Demo papers
  • Extended abstracts

Important Dates

Paper Submission Deadline: Sunday, February 10, 2019

Acceptance notification: Monday, February 25, 2019

Camera-ready due: Sunday, March 3, 2019

Workshop date: May 13, 2019