Description

We solicit submissions of papers describing designs and implementations of solutions and systems for practical tasks in data mining, data analytics, data science, and applied machine learning. The primary emphasis is on papers that either solve or advance the understanding of issues related to deploying data science technologies in the real world. Papers demonstrating significant, verifiable business- or real-world impact as a result of such deployments are encouraged. Template guidelines are here: https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. For details, please go over the Requirement section below.

The topics of submissions include data-science applications in all mature and emerging domains, as well as contributions to enabling algorithmic, infrastructure, and optimization methodologies to improve learning efficiency, scaling, and adoption/deployment. Applications include, but are not limited to the following areas:

Requirements

The Applied Data Science Track is distinct from the Research Track in that submissions focus on applied work addressing real-world problems and systems demonstrating tangible impact/value in their respective domains (e.g., industries, government initiatives, social programs). Please note that papers that do not satisfy the requirements (e.g., a research track paper) might be rejected without a formal review.

A paper in the Applied Data Science Track may fall into two major categories, Deployed and Evidential.

Category DEPLOYED: Must describe an implementation of a system that solves a significant real-world problem and is (or was) in production use for an extended period. The paper should present the problem, its significance to the application domain, the decisions and tradeoffs made when making design choices for the solution, the deployment challenges, and the lessons learned from successes and failures. Evidence must be provided that the solution has been deployed by quantifying post-launch performance. Papers that describe enabling infrastructure for large-scale deployment of applied machine learning also fall in this category. An example might be a deployed system that collects heartbeat audio from mobile phones during a marathon race and uses machine learning to identify potentially irregular heartbeat signals and alert support personnel. The work may particularly focus on how to overcome challenges in data collection, low-resource processing, and usability, and it is perfectly fine that the underlying machine learning algorithms are not fundamentally groundbreaking.

Category EVIDENTIAL: Must describe fundamental insights derived from addressing a significant real-world problem, even though a system has not been deployed. This might include papers providing significant gains in the understanding of an applied area/domain (for example, involving data or system deployment needs) or even papers where a conclusion has been reached that the problem is unsolvable. In addition to insights, the paper must explain what milestones were reached, what the practical impact is, and (if applicable) what the obstacles to deployment are. Straightforward improvements over trivial baseline solutions are unlikely to qualify. Continuing the example above, a paper in this category might present a system that achieves reasonable error rates in an experiment with many volunteers but suffers from interferences among mobiles that are located very close to each other.

Besides common requirements such as impact, clarity of presentation, reproducibility, we require that a submission specifies an audience or a group of users that have benefited or will benefit from the solution presented in the submission. In particular, the focus of novelty for an ADS submission is different from that of a Research Track submission in the sense that we focus more on application novelty, engineering novelty, usability, business use case and user experience novelty, and whether the work provides significant gains in the applied domain.

Submission Directions

KDD is a dual track conference hosting both a Research track and an Applied Data Science track. Due to a large number of submissions, papers submitted to the Research track will not be considered for publication in the Applied Data Science track and vice versa. Authors must read the track descriptions carefully and choose an appropriate track for their submissions. Submissions to the Applied Data Science track is *single*-blind (author names and affiliations should be listed).

Submissions are limited to a total of nine (9) pages, including all content and references, and must be in PDF format. Please use ACM Conference Proceeding templates (two column format). One recommended setting for Latex file is: \documentclass[sigconf, review]{acmart}. Template guidelines are here: https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. In addition, authors can provide an optional two (2) page supplement at the end of their submitted paper (it needs to be in the same PDF file and start at page 10) focused on reproducibility (see reproducibility section for more details). After the submission deadline, the set of authors cannot be changed.

Important policies

Reproducibility
Submitted papers will be assessed based on their novelty, technical quality, potential impact, insightfulness, depth, clarity, and reproducibility. Authors are strongly encouraged to make their code and data publicly available whenever possible. Algorithms and resources used in a paper should be described as completely as possible to allow reproducibility. This includes experimental methodology, empirical evaluations, and results. The reproducibility factor will play an important role in the assessment of each submission.

Authorship
Every person named as the author of a paper must have contributed substantially both to the work described in the paper and to the writing of the paper. Every listed author must take responsibility for the entire content of a paper. Persons who do not meet these requirements may be acknowledged, but should not be listed as authors. Post-submission changes to the set of authors are not allowed.

Dual submissions
Submitted papers must describe work that is substantively different from work that has already been published, or accepted for publication, or submitted in parallel to other conferences or journals. However, there are several exceptions to this rule.

1. Submission is permitted for a shorter version of a paper submitted to a journal, but not yet published. Authors must declare such dual-submissions on the submission form and must ensure that the journal in question allows concurrent submissions to conferences.

2. Submissions are permitted for papers presented or to be presented at seminars, conferences or workshops without proceedings.

3. Submissions are permitted for papers that have previously been made available only in the form of technical reports with no peer reviews, such as on arXiv.

KDD ADS Program co-Chairs

Xin Luna Dong, Meta
Daxin Jiang, Microsoft
Nov. 24, 2021: Those who are interested in serving as a PC, please feel free to fill in this form.