May 26, 2026

Collocated with ICWSM 2026

Los Angeles, CA, USA

Workshop Day: 05/26/2026

Conference Date: 05/27-29/2026

Important Dates

•    Paper submission deadline: 3/25/2026 3/31/2026

•     Paper acceptance notification: 4/15/2026

•     Final camera-ready paper due: to define

•     Workshop Day: 5/26/2026

All deadlines are 11:59 pm AOE (anywhere on earth).

Call for Papers

Submissions will undergo single-blind peer review with a minimum of two reviewers per paper. 

According to the main conference guidelines, all papers must be submitted as PDF files, formatted in AAAI two-column format (Overleaf or AAAI Author Kit)

Authors can submit either a 5-page short paper (with the fifth page reserved exclusively for references) presenting ongoing, unpublished work with experimental results, which will be included in the workshop proceedings, or a 2-page abstract (references not included in the page limit count) covering ongoing or published research (non-archival).

For each accepted paper, the designed speaker must register for ICWSM 2026.  All attendees who wish to participate in the workshop, regardless of whether they are authors or not, must be registered. 

Submit your contribution here

The Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.

Accepted papers abstracts and will be invited to submit to the special issue Social Impacts Through the Lens of Human Mobility in Frontiers in Big Data. The manuscript must be an extended version of the workshop paper, with at least ~30% of the content original. The conference proceedings have to be referenced appropriately in the manuscript. More information about the journal’s publication policies is available here.

Motivations

Social inequalities and segregation remain significant challenges in contemporary cities, influencing access to resources, opportunities, and social interactions. Indeed, urban environments act as spatial sorting mechanisms, where an individual's location plays a crucial role in determining their access to the city's resources and influences their potential for social mobility.  This spatial inequality contributes significantly to the broader rise in social inequalities, as access to urban amenities and opportunities varies markedly across different neighborhoods and regions within cities.

Additionally, digital inequality has emerged as a critical factor in urban mobility, with differing levels of engagement with digital technologies influencing access to transportation services. This disparity affects not only mobility but also broader social participation, highlighting the need to understand how digital engagement shapes access to resources and services and vice versa.

The spatial dimension of inequality could be explored through the integration of mobility data, which reveals how daily activities, often extending beyond residential spaces, contribute to varying levels of socio-spatial segregation.

At the same time, social networks amplify these inequalities. Mechanisms such as homophily and triadic closure deepen social segregation, leading to fragmented network structures that mirror the spatial divides in urban areas so that, similarly to what happens in urban spaces, marginalization in a social network can restrict opportunities and limit access to crucial resources, such as information, social support, and social mobility.

Recent work emphasizes the importance of comprehending digital inequality in the context of urban development. Policymakers, practitioners, and academics must collectively address these issues, as the implications of digital exclusion continue to deepen.

The rise of smart city technologies has been met with both optimism and scepticism, particularly regarding their potential to exacerbate income inequalities. Factors such as unequal diffusion of information and communication technologies, affordability barriers for low-income residents, disparities in human capital, and the involvement of private sector actors have been identified as contributing to these concerns. 

However, empirical evidence on this matter remains sparse. In fact, recent studies suggest that, when well-implemented, smart cities are associated with lower levels of income inequality.

All things considered, digital technologies, including mobile internet usage, location-based services, social media platforms, and online information environments, offer new ways to explore these inequalities and segregation helping us to understand how people move through urban space, engage with others, and access services. 

These digital traces are valuable tools for understanding patterns of exclusion and disparities in access to essential urban resources (such as housing, healthcare, education, and transportation), and for assessing how social networks can help observe these dynamics or, conversely, how they may reinforce and exacerbate these inequalities.

Objectives

The primary objective of this workshop is to explore how digital traces, including social media interactions, mobile location data, and geospatial data, can provide insights into urban inequalities and segregation. 

By analysing how these traces reflect patterns of social interaction, mobility, and access to services, we aim to uncover how urban residents experience different levels of access and opportunity across various urban areas.

The workshop, thus, invites original contributions that explore the use of web-based data, social media, and mobile location traces to study inequalities in urban environments. 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Urban mobility and spatial access inequalities: Using mobility data from mobile devices, location-based services, and other digital traces to examine how patterns of movement shape unequal access to employment, services, and social interaction. This includes identifying spatial barriers, exclusionary mobility patterns, and constraints that affect residents’ opportunities across urban areas.

• Spatial distributions of urban resources and services: Applying geospatial analysis to digital traces and administrative data to map inequalities in access to housing, transportation, healthcare, education, and public infrastructure. Contributions may focus on how these spatial disparities differentially affect demographic and socio-economic groups within cities.

• Online social interaction and socio-spatial segregation: Studying how social media activity and online networks reflect, reproduce, or amplify socio-economic and spatial segregation. This includes analysing network structures, information flows, and patterns of online interaction in relation to urban neighbourhoods, as well as digital segregation beyond strictly physical space.

• Digital divides and unequal access to urban opportunities: Examining inequalities in access to digital technologies, mobile internet, and online platforms, and how these digital divides intersect with urban inequalities. Topics may include how limited digital access constrains residents’ ability to access services, participate in civic life, or benefit from urban opportunities.

• Computational approaches to measuring urban inequality: Developing and applying computational methods to analyse large-scale web, mobility, and geospatial data for the measurement of inequality and segregation. This includes methodological contributions on data integration, algorithmic indicators of exclusion, and reproducible tools for studying urban disparities.

• Personalized and trace-based assessment of urban service quality: Analysing digital traces, potentially in combination with administrative records, survey data, or domain-specific datasets, to evaluate access to and perceived quality of urban services while accounting for heterogeneous needs, preferences, and mobility constraints across population groups. Contributions may explore how personalized or recommendation-based approaches provide user-centric measures of accessibility and uncover inequalities hidden by aggregate or one-size-fits-all indicators.

Program

Tuesday, May 26

08:00 – 12:00

Room 5

The venue is located at 4676 Admiralty Way #1001, Marina Del Rey, CA 90292, United States (the USC Information Sciences Institute building).

Invited Speaker

Marta Gonzalez is Professor City & Regional Planning and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. She is Director of HuMNet Lab, where she and her colleagues develop numerical models and computational tools to better characterize and understand human interactions in the built and natural environments. Gonzalez is also a Physics Research faculty in the Energy Technology Area (ETA) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Gonzalez’s research focuses on urban sciences, with a focus on the intersections of people with the built and the natural environment and their social networks. Her ultimate goal is to design urban solutions and enable caring development in the use of new technologies. Gonzalez has developed new tools that impact transportation research and discovered novel approaches to model human mobility and the adoption of energy technologies. She is a recipient of the prestigious Joseph M Sussman Prize for Frontiers in Built Environment best article award in 2021, the UN Foundation award in support of her research studying the consumption patterns of women in the developing world in 2016, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation award to study access to financial services in the developing world in 2016. In 2023, she was named fellow of the Network Science Society for her seminal contributions to our understanding of human mobility and transportation networks, and for applying network modeling to solve societal problems in urban systems, and in 2024 she received the Lagrange-CRT Foundation Prize for her scientific research in the field of complexity sciences, its applications and dissemination.

Talk Title: TBD

Abstract: TBD

Organizers