IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing • September 4–7, 2016 • Cambridge, UK

Call for Papers
Scope and Topics
We solicit original, unpublished research papers on computing technologies and languages for programming, modelling and communicating. These technologies should be easier to learn, use or understand than the state-of-the-art and papers should focus on efforts to design formalize, implement, or evaluate them. This includes languages and tools intended for general audiences (e.g., professional or novice programmers, or the public) or domain-specific audiences (e.g., people working in healthcare, urban design or scientific domains). It encompasses languages and tools for expressing forms of computation and reasoning through any means (e.g., visual, textual, form-based, haptic) and in any computing context (e.g., cloud, web, desktop, mobile or pervasive computing).

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
Design, evaluation, and theory of visual languages
End-user development and end-user programming
Novel representations and user interfaces for expressing computation
Human aspects and psychology of software development and language design
Debugging and program understanding
Crowdsourcing, as related to languages and tools
Computational thinking and Computer Science education
Model-driven development
Domain-specific languages
Software visualization
Probabilistic programming languages
Intelligent machine learning systems
Special Emphasis for 2016: Tools and Techniques for Early Stage Problem Formulation

Visual languages such as diagrams are used to represent information in a variety of domains. They are particularly important at the early stages of problem solving such as problem definition and solution searching. The visual languages used during these early stages may be quite different than those used for the final solution. The special focus of VL/HCC 2016 is on the techniques and tools used in the early stages of problem solving. We particularly encourage work on capturing hand-drawn visual languages, tools that relax the syntax requirements of a visual language and human studies of people formulating and exploring problems using visual languages.
Paper Submissions

We invite two kinds of papers (deadlines below under Important Dates):
full-length research papers, up to 8 pages -- plus 1 additional page that contains only references
short research papers, up to 4 pages -- plus 1 additional page that contains only references
Papers must be submitted using the EasyChair system: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vlhcc2016

To facilitate assigning papers to reviewers, we ask that paper abstracts are entered into EasyChair at least one week before the paper submission deadline (see Important Dates below). The abstract may be no longer than 150 words and must be kept up-to-date such that it matches exactly the abstract in the submitted paper. Note that for technical reasons EasyChair may allow abstracts to exceed 150 words, but the 150 word limit must be adhered to.

In addition to papers, we also invite contributions of other types -- see below under Workshops, Showpieces (Posters & Demos), and Graduate Consortium.

All accepted papers, whether full or short, should be complete archival contributions. Contributions from full papers are more extensive than those from short papers. Work-in-progress, which has not yet yielded a contribution, should be submitted to the Showpieces category. All submissions will be reviewed by members of the Program Committee. Submission and reviews for the technical program are managed with EasyChair.

Accepted papers will be distributed at the conference and will be submitted for inclusion in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/). The proceedings are an official electronic publication of the IEEE in Computer Science, with an ISBN number. Be sure to use the current IEEE conference paper format, which was changed in 2011:

http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html

The latest details are available at our website: https://sites.google.com/site/vlhcc2016/
Evaluation and Justification

Papers are expected to support their claims with appropriate evidence. For example, a paper that claims to improve programmer productivity is expected to demonstrate improved productivity; a paper that claims to be easier to use should demonstrate increased ease of use. However, not all claims necessarily need to be supported with empirical evidence or studies with people. For example, a paper that claims to make something feasible that was clearly infeasible might substantiate its claim through the existence of a functioning prototype. Moreover, there are many alternatives to empirical evidence that may be appropriate for justifying claims, including analytical methods or formal arguments. Given this criterion, we encourage potential authors to think carefully about what claims their submission makes and what evidence would adequately support these claims.

The evaluation process will proceed as follows:
Initial review period: At least three members of the Program Committee will review each paper. At the end of this period, these initial reviews will be released to the authors.
Author response period: Authors will have an opportunity to submit a 500-word response based on their initial reviews. Responses should focus on answering reviewers' questions, addressing reviewers' concerns, and clarifying any factual misunderstandings.
Final review period: Taking the author response into account, the original reviewers will revise their reviews as they deem appropriate, and the Program Committee will reach a final decision to accept or reject the submitted work.
Workshops, Showpieces (Posters & Demos), and Graduate Consortium

The conference also invites submissions for workshops and tutorials, showpieces (e.g., demos and posters), and the Graduate Consortium (GC). More information about these contribution types will be posted on the VL/HCC 2016 web site at https://sites.google.com/site/vlhcc2016/.
Important Dates

All deadlines are by the end of the day Anywhere on Earth.

Workshops and Tutorials
Fri 11 March: Submission by e-mail - Workshop/tutorial proposals
Fri 9 May: Notification of final decision - Workshop/tutorial proposals
Papers (Full and Short)
Fri 11 March: Paper abstract submission
Fri 18 March: Paper submission
Mon 9 May: Preliminary notifications to authors
Fri 13 May: Author response deadline
Fri 27 May: Final notification
Fri 15 July: Camera ready deadline
Showpieces and Graduate Consortium
Fri 3 June: Submission by e-mail - showpieces, and GC applications
Fri 24 June: Notification of final decision - showpieces, and GC applications
Fri 8 July: Deadline - All final camera-readies

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