Global Public Health, Personalised Medicine, and Emergency Medicine in the Age of Big Data

Conference Aim

Everything is affected by the digital revolution. The opportunities for interdisciplinary digital health research bringing together computer science to dramatically improve public health and wellbeing of individuals and populations globally are extraordinary.

Recent technological advances enabled by creation of real-time big data streams, social media, participatory and context-aware systems and infectious disease modelling are the focus of public health informatics with the aim to achieve an integration with the existing national and international surveillance services.

At Digital Health 2017, a new strategic theme will be introduced: emergency and humanitarian medicine addressing acute needs of natural and manmade disasters will leverage opportunities created by geo-located big data, mobile technology and crowdsourcing for improving resilience, early warning and response to disasters and emergencies.

Cutting-edge research into web science, medical ontologies and recommender systems provide further opportunities for development of personalized intelligent systems for public and global health. Serious games, gamification and mhealth interventions empower users in developed world but are accelerating unprecedented access to best evidence, medical advice and healthcare services in developing world.

DH 2017, held for the first time as an independent event, will in particular focus on public and global health computer science and digital health for emergency and humanitarian contexts. DH 2017 cover a wide spectrum of subjects including communities of practice and social networks, analytics and engagement with tracking and monitoring wearable devices, big data, public health surveillance, persuasive technologies, epidemic intelligence, participatory surveillance, emergency medicine, serious games for public health interventions and automated early identification of health threats and response.

Conference Topics

Real time data analytics and mobile technologies for emergency and humanitarian contexts
Big data analytics and for public health surveillance and epidemic intelligence
Crowdsourcing and participatory surveillance
Web 2.0, online medical/patient communities of practice and persuasive technology
Smart Health and intelligent ubiquitous technologies for health and wellbeing
Social Computing for Health
Tracking/wearable and mobile technology
Personalisation and profiling, recommender systems for health
mhealth for global health in low and middle income settings
Citizens Science for Health
Digital Prevention and Interventions and behaviour changing digital interventions
Semantic Web, Knowledge Management/Extraction, Web Science and Health
E-learning, training and serious games for health
Industry and Startup Track
PhD Track

Conference Audience

Building on interdisciplinary success of Digital Health 2015-16 and the previous ehealth 2008-11 conference series, the aim of the conference is to bring together a multidisciplinary spectrum of researchers, industry/start-ups and healthcare practitioners. Submissions are welcome from the range of stakeholders involved in digital health including:

Computer scientists, health informaticians, emergency medicine experts
Public health experts, epidemiologists, clinicians, GPs
National and international public health agencies (e.g. PHE, InVS, RKI, ECDC, WHO)
Epidemic intelligence systems providers (MEdi+Board, GPHIN, MediSys, HealthMap)
NGOs and Agencies (MSF, Red Cross/Crescent, UNHCR, UN ITU, etc)
Industry and startups, Medtech, IT/SM industry, pharmaceutical industry

Important Dates

Main Track and PhD Students Track (for inclusion in the proceedings):

Pre-submission deadline (optional, but helpful): ~~Monday, Feb 6th, 2017~~
Extended! Monday, Feb 13th, 2017
Submission Deadline: ~~Monday, Feb 13th, 2017~~
Extended! Monday, Feb 20th, 2017
Notification of Acceptance: Thursday, April 6, 2017
Camera-Ready Deadline: Thursday, April 20, 2017

PhD Students Track (will not be included in the proceedings*):

- Submission Deadline:
  RE-EXTENDED! Thursday, April 20th, 2017

*will be featured on the website and in the abstracts book distributed at the conference.

Posters and Demos (not included in the proceedings):

Submission Deadline: Thursday, April 20th, 2017
Notification of Acceptance: Thursday, April 27th, 2017

Conference: 7th ACM Digital Health: 2-5 July 2017

Organizers and Technical Programme Committee

General and Scientific Chair: Patty Kostkova, IRDR, UCL, London, UK
Programme Co-Chairs: Yelena Mejova, QCRI, Qatar
Arnold Bosman, Transmissible, Netherlands
Floriana Grasso, University of Liverpool, UK
Carlos Castillo, Eurecat, Spain
Local and Communications Chair: Patrizia Isabelle Duda, University College London – IRDR; WADEM, UK / Israel
Poster and Demo Chair: Andreea Molnar, University of Portsmouth, UK
Web and Proceedings Chair: Andrew Roxburgh, University of Liverpool, UK
PhD Track Chair: Yelena Mejova, QCRI, Qatar

Submissions

The Proceedings of the Digital Health conference 2017 papers will be peer reviewed by three members of the Programme Committee for relevance, originality, quality, and will be included in the Digital Health 2017 Proceedings, published by ACM.

All submitted papers (including extended abstracts) must:

be written in English;
contain author names, affiliations, and email addresses;
be formatted according to the ACM SigConf Proceedings template with a font size no smaller than 9pt;
be in PDF (make sure that the PDF can be viewed on any platform), and formatted for US Letter size.
conform to the publication policies listed here

It is the authors’ responsibility to ensure that their submissions adhere strictly to the required format. Submissions that do not comply with the above guidelines may be rejected without review.

We are proposing a wide range of options for submission types, in two main groups: published in the proceedings and not published in the proceedings.

Main Track and PhD Students Track

Submission types to be published in the ACM DH 2017 proceedings and to be presented orally at the conference (all page limits are final, including the abstract, references, and appendices):

Long research papers: up to 10 pages;
Short research papers: up to 5 pages;
Abstracts from health professionals: up to 2 pages . Medical abstracts may follow the medical paper structure (background, aims, methods, results, conclusions), but this is not essential;
Progress reports from PhD students: up to 2 pages, having at least one result from the ongoing work (not merely a research proposal). We note that PhD students may also submit long and/or short papers. PhD reports submitted by February 20 2017 will be included in the proceedings, whereas those submitted later by April 20 2017 will NOT be published in the proceedings but will be featured on the website and in the abstracts book distributed at the conference.

Extensions of accepted submissions will have the opportunity to be submitted to the Frontiers in Digital Health Research Topic (Special Issue) after the conference. We particularly encourage health professionals to consider this opportunity.

Long research papers, short research papers, abstracts from health professionals, and progress reports from PhD students, if not accepted as such, may be recommended for poster presentation.

Previous work: any paper of 4 pages or more that has been accepted for a journal or conference after peer reviewing, constitutes previous work which will be considered with respect to possible self-plagiarism, and in judging the novelty and relevance of a contribution.