Announcing a Call for Submissions for a workshop on Public Health's Wicked Problems: Can InfoVis Save Lives? In conjunction with IEEE VIS 2013 October 13-18, 2013 Atlanta, GA, USA http://www.cdc.gov/oid/public-health-workshop-1013.html --Introduction-- Public health is charged with assessing current and emerging health threats and issues, developing effective population-based policies and interventions to address these problems, and monitoring delivery and outcomes of public health actions. Many public health problems, such as the obesity epidemic, HIV/STI transmission, and environmental hazards are called “wicked” due to their complexity and multi-layered causal factors at individual, group, and social levels. Such problems must be tackled with a mix of interventions that can include changes in health care delivery systems, community and neighborhood planning, social and educational institutions, and social and individual behavior change programs. Other public health actions require rapid response and public engagement using the best data possible as it emerges in real-time, such as emerging infectious diseases, outbreaks, and emergency operations to protect public safety. To make decisions about when and where to deploy resources that produce the greatest net benefits in complex or rapidly evolving situations, public health practitioners need new tools to integrate multiple sources of data from formal disease surveillance systems, secondary sources of geographic and demographic data, and new data streams such as real-time social media content. The field of information visualization, in which datasets are explored, analyzed, and presented through a range of graphical means, could offer entirely new ways of representing, seeing, and solving population-based health problems. --Call for Participation-- The goal of the workshop is to bring together world-class public health and information visualization experts and curious learners to discuss how the fields can come together to generate new tools for emerging and longstanding public health problems. All registered attendees of IEEE VIS are encouraged to attend the workshop, with a special invitation to public health professionals who are interested in data visualization techniques to attend the conference in Atlanta. We are soliciting full papers and extended abstracts/presentations across the range of focus areas of visualization, from issues in data collection for maximizing visualization opportunities, to analysis techniques, traditional and novel presentation formats, and data storytelling. Submissions should focus on the use of visualization to identify, analyze, and solve public health and related health system challenges. --Scope and Topics-- We invite original research, case studies/practice reports, systematic reviews, evaluation studies, methodology innovations, or commentary on the following topics of specific interest, while welcoming work on all aspects of public health and information visualization. --Challenges and opportunities in public health/health data collection for public health visualization applications --Data visualization tools and techniques for public health analysis and action --Collaboration between public health domain and data visualization experts --Approaches to analyzing effects of structural and social determinants of health (SDH) --Evaluation studies of the use of visualization in public health applications --Uses of information visualization to communicate public health priorities and potential interventions --Submission Guidelines-- Submissions for papers can be 4-8 pages long, with the length of submission appropriate to the contribution; extended abstracts for presentation should be 2 pages long. All submissions will be peer-reviewed by the workshop organizers. ***Please email your submissions to publichealthinfoviz@gmail.com.*** All submissions should be formatted in the IEEE VIS format style. Use instructions found on this page: http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~vis/Tasks/camera.html. Submissions must be made in PDF. --Key Dates-- Deadline for submissions: September 6, 2013 Notification of acceptance: September 16, 2013 Workshop: October 13 or 14, 2013 (pending) --Organizers-- Susan J. Robinson, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, SJRobinson@cdc.gov Marty Cetron, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, MCetron@cdc.gov Hazel Dean, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HDean@cdc.gov David S. Ebert, Purdue University, ebertd@ecn.purdue.edu Bradford Hesse, National Cancer Institute, NIH, hesseb@mail.nih.gov Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland, ben@cs.umd.edu John Stasko, Georgia Institute of Technology. stasko@cc.gatech.edu Workshop Contact Email Please contact Susan Robinson, SJRobinson@cdc.gov.