The AIED Society organizes the AIED conference and is aimed at advancing science and engineering of intelligent human-technology ecosystems that support learning. The AIED 2024 conference will be the 25th of a longstanding series of international conferences, known for high quality and innovative research on AI-assisted systems and cognitive science approaches for educational computing applications. AIED is ranked A in CORE (top 16% of all 783 ranked venues), the well-known ranking of computer science conferences. 

Given the success of this track last year, AIED 2024 will include the BlueSky special track, which invites papers from researchers, practitioners, and industry partners to reflect upon the progress of AIED so far and envision what is to come in the upcoming future. As technological advances reshape our society, how will such evolution change the context and way we learn? How can AI be used to support continuous learning? Disruptive events, such as the COVID pandemic, accelerated the adaptation of artificial intelligence in education and changed the public’s view of technology-supported learning. How will AIED adapt from supporting and enhancing traditional-style learning to the new-age of learning? These are questions meant to begin and not limit the discussion in the BlueSky papers.

Abstracts due: March 4, 2024 (mandatory)

Papers due: March 11, 2024

Notification of acceptance to authors: April 18, 2024 

Camera-ready paper due: April 29, 2024

Conference: July 8 - 12, 2024

Note: the submission deadlines are at 11:59 pm AoE (Anywhere on Earth) time.

System. Please note that the submissions must be written in English. Papers should be submitted electronically, as a PDF file, through the AIED 2024 EasyChair conference system (https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=aied2024), selecting the “Blue Sky Papers” track. 

Types. We encourage two types of submissions (reviewers will comment on whether the size is appropriate for each contribution): 

- Full papers (between 9 and 14 pages including references; for a long oral presentation). 

- Short papers (between 6 and 8 pages including references; for a short oral presentation). 

Format. Submissions must be in Springer format. Papers that do not use the required format may be rejected without review. Authors should consult Springer’s authors’ guidelines and use their proceedings templates, either for LaTeX or for Word, for the preparation of their papers. Springer encourages authors to include their ORCIDs in their papers. Submissions must follow Springer policies on publication (including policies on using AI during authoring). 

Expectations. BlueSky paper submissions do not necessarily require new empirical results, unlike more traditional AIED submissions. Despite BlueSky submissions’ focus on novel, exploratory solutions for the future, there is still the need to support their ideas with sufficient evidence. When BlueSky submissions focus on novel perspectives on existing problems or a new research vision, as examples, they might not require empirical results. However, such submissions are still expected to defend their positions via robust scientific argument rooted in the relevant literature. A thorough exploration of implications, with detailed discussions, are considered important as well.

The AIED Society values diversity, equity, and inclusion (and related principles under this broad umbrella) as essential and fundamental values for the AIED community to uphold. Thus, in AIED 2024, we incentivize authors to carefully consider diversity, equity, and inclusion when reporting on your work. 

When preparing your paper, please consider the following: 

• Authors should write with care toward inclusive language. This includes understanding identify-first vs. person-first language, gender neutral language, appropriate demographic categories and terminology, and avoiding the conflation of distinct dimensions such as race and ethnicity, or sex and gender. 

• Authors are encouraged to consider how their theoretical frameworks and findings are related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. For example, authors may discuss how these issues influence key assumptions, hypotheses, and methods. Likewise, authors might address implications or appropriate interpretations of their findings with respect to diversity, inclusion and equity. 

Please consider the following criteria when reporting samples: 

• Authors should be clear and specific about the composition of human-sourced data. Who were the participants? What was the distribution of gender, race, ethnicity, or related variables? If corpus data or training data were sourced from humans, a similar description could be offered. 

• Skewed or non-representative samples would not necessarily trigger a "reject" decision, but authors should acknowledge the demographic imbalances and discuss the potential impact on data, results, or conclusions. A more compelling paper would describe barriers to inclusive and representative sampling and the steps taken to generate an inclusive and representative sample (this is basic science, but often overlooked for convenience). 

• Authors should demonstrate some awareness of how equity, inclusion, accessibility issues impact their data, methods, products, or findings. How are different demographic groups or communities differentially connected to the work? People who are developing educational technologies need to think about access and use, for example. Corpus analyses need to address the impact of skewed/exclusive datasets and potential outcomes (e.g., algorithmic bias). It is also important to use strategies to control or reduce bias against populations of any kind (e.g., benefit or bring prejudice to a particular gender, race, or people with different economic status) when collecting, using, or aggregating data. 

• Authors are encouraged to discuss/justify how demographic variables are included in the analyses. If they are not included or "covaried out" please justify. If they are included, what are the assumptions? Are there "categorical effects"? Are the effects of different demographic variables independent, interdependent, or intersectional? What valid conclusions can be drawn? What erroneous conclusions need to be avoided or tempered?

Process. All submissions will be reviewed by three members of the program committee or other ad-hoc reviewers, followed by a second round of review conducted by a senior member of the program committee. Papers will be reviewed for relevance to the track, quality of reflection, originality and innovation, significance and potential for influence, multidisciplinarity and societal impact considerations, clarity and coherence of presentation. It is important to note that the work presented should not have been published previously or be under consideration in other conferences of journals. Any paper caught in double submission will be rejected without review. 

Anonymity. The process will be double-blind, i.e., both authors and reviewers will remain anonymous, to meet rigorous academic standards of publication. Hence, authors should eliminate all information that could lead to their identification, cite their own prior work (if needed) in third person, and remove acknowledgments and references to funding sources. 

Ethics. Authors should demonstrate awareness of how ethical issues (including but not limited to equity, inclusion, accessibility) impact the content of their paper, also including if available data, methods, tools, approaches, products, and findings.

Each accepted paper within the BlueSky track must be accompanied by a unique author registration (i.e., one registration per paper), completed by the early registration date cut-off. Please note that presenters of papers accepted to the BlueSky track are expected to be on-site to give their presentations and interact with the audience, to have the paper included in the proceedings. An online streaming option will be set-up for remote observers. 

Accepted papers in the BlueSky track will be published in the second volume of the AIED 2024 proceedings included in Springer Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS). Scholarships are available for researchers who lack funding to present at the conference, see website for more information.

If you have any further questions, please, contact the BlueSky Chairs: 

• Ryan S. Baker, University of Pennsylvania, US (rybaker at upenn.edu)

• Benedict Du Boulay, University of Sussex, UK (b.du-boulay at sussex.ac.uk)

• Mirko Marras, University of Cagliari, Italy (mirko.marras at acm.org)