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Call for Papers

Scope and Topics

We solicit original, unpublished research papers that focus on efforts to design, formalize, implement, or evaluate computing technologies and languages for programming, modeling and communicating, which are easier to learn, use or understand than the state of the art. 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
  • Query languages

Special Emphasis for 2015: Computational Thinking and CS Education

The push to enhance computational thinking and computing skills in education has never been stronger, with a number of high-profile movements actively working to establish computer science as a foundation in education (e.g., Code.org) and to broaden participation in computing among underrepresented groups (e.g., NCWIT). VL/HCC is well suited to this pursuit: learning and education is inherently human-centered, and the potential of visual languages to captivate users and remove barriers is well recognized. Thus, for VL/HCC 2015, we seek to place a special emphasis on education-oriented topics. To this end, we strongly encourage the submission of works on visual languages and human-centric computing that, for example, explore theories of human learning, propose new methods and tools to enhance learning, and empirically investigate and evaluate learning in a variety of computing contexts.

Paper Submissions

We invite two kinds of papers (deadlines below under Important Dates):

[***NOTE: The page limits have changed for 2015.]
  • 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

[***NOTE: Updated instructions in yellow (14 Apr 2015).]


Papers must be submitted using the EasyChair system:


To facilitate the assigning of papers to reviewers, we ask that a paper abstract be entered into EasyChair at least 1 week prior to the paper submission deadline (see Important Dates below). The abstract may not be longer than 150 words, and must be kept up to date such that it matches exactly the abstract text in the final paper PDF submission. (Note that for technical reasons EasyChair will say that 200 words is the limit, but please make your abstracts 150 words or less.)

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:


Additionally, selected papers from VL/HCC 2014 and 2015 will be invited for submission in expanded form to a special issue of the Journal of Visual Languages and Computing (JVLC). The topic of the special issue will be programming and modeling tools. Further instructions regarding formatting and the review/publication process will be provided when the invitations are made.

The latest details are available at our website: http://vlhcc.org/

Evaluation

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 claims, including analytical methods or formal arguments. Given this criteria, 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:
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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 2015 web site at http://vlhcc.org/.

Important Dates

All deadlines are by the end of the day Anywhere on Earth.
** Denotes updated dates
  • Fri 3 Apr: Deadline - Workshop/tutorial proposals
  • Fri 17 Apr: Notifications - Workshop/tutorial proposals
  • ** Fri 8 May: Deadline - Paper abstracts
  • ** Fri 15 May: Deadline - Papers
  • ** Sun 17 May - Fri 12 June: Initial review period
  • ** Sat 13 June - Thu 18 June: Initial discussion period
  • ** Fri 19 June: Preliminary notifications - Papers
  • ** Sat 20 June - Fri 26 June: Author response period
  • ** Fri 26 June: Deadline - Author responses
  • ** Sat 27 June - Fri 3 July: Final review period
  • ** Wed 8 July: Final notifications - Papers
  • Fri 24 July: Deadline - Workshop papers, showpieces, and GC applications
  • Fri 14 Aug: Notifications - Workshop papers, showpieces, and GC applications
  • Fri 4 Sep: Deadline - All final camera-readies

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