CLOSED Call for Papers: Special Issue on Information Hygiene and the Fight against the Misinformation Info-demic

Submission deadline: 24 September 2021

Publication: March/April 2022

Nowadays, misinformation spreads more rapidly and more broadly than reliable information does, creating an “info-demic.”  This has a serious impact globally. Though the main originators may be malicious entities exploiting social media, “fake news,” and conspiracy-theory generators, it is ourselves and our own network of people that propagate misinformation and fake content simply by sharing them often without assessing their validity.

How can we address this challenging problem facing society by leveraging technology and information hygiene practices? How can IT and AI assist people in assessing correctness, validity, and trustworthiness of a piece of information prior to sharing it? How can users be supported in adopting good habits of information hygiene? Researchers, the social-media industry, and government agencies are addressing these questions. Initiatives such as EUNOMIA, which promotes trusting over liking, and other EU projects on misinformation under the H2020 framework and similar programs in other countries highlight the seriousness of the problem and the need to address them soon, before it becomes a devastating problem.

This special issue of IT Professional seeks to present an overview of the problems and showcase recent developments that address them and applications of IT to support humans in the fight against misinformation. We invite articles that present recent advances, perspectives, and use cases in this area. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Information trustworthiness, trust, and reputation models
• Online misinformation diffusion models and diffusion prediction and prevention
• Information hygiene practices and "social-media information" literacy
• AI and machine-learning approaches to identify and filter misinformation and prevent its propagation
• Detection of deepfakes – fake image, audio, or video
• Crowdsourcing approaches to fighting misinformation
• Impacts of misinformation, fake news, and deception
• Information provenance in social media and the Internet
• Digital nudging for information hygiene
• The role of regulatory policy in lieu of self-policing
• Examination of the economic – for-profit – models that contribute to the info-demic
• “Best practices” for managing mis- and disinformation across the globe
• Role of individuals, industry, regulatory bodies, and government

Submission Guidelines

Only submissions that describe previously unpublished, original, state-of-the-art research and that are not currently under review by a conference or another journal will be considered. Extended versions of conference papers must be at least 30 percent different from the original conference works.

Feature articles should be no longer than 4,200 words and have no more than 20 references (with tables and figures counting as 300 words each). For author guidelines, see our peer review information page. All manuscripts must be submitted to ScholarOne Manuscripts (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/itpro-cs) by the deadline in order to be considered. Submissions are subject to peer review on both technical merit and relevance to IT Pro’s readership. Articles should be understandable by a broad audience of computer science and engineering professionals, avoiding unnecessary theory, mathematics, jargon, or abstract concepts. Figures and tables should be placed in the appropriate location within the template, ideally in files that are 300 dpi or higher using the dimensions defined in the document template.

Questions?

Please direct any correspondence before submission to the guest editors at it2-2022@computer.org.

Guest Editors

• George Loukas, University of Greenwich, London, UK
• Stephen J. Andriole, The Villanova School of Business, Villanova University, USA
• San Murugesan, BRITE Professional Services and Western Sydney University, Australia