Conference on Reproducibility, Validity, and Integrity

Guardians 2023

The BHAVI 2023 October Symposium with title Guardians 2023 Conference will be held Monday October 9 as a virtual meeting at 09:00 - 13:30 PDT. Guardians 2023 will be held as an online event in our series of annual Guardians of Truth and Integrity Conferences. There will be no registration fees charged for attendance at this symposium held via GoToMeeting videoconference at meet.goto.com/545479117. With technical and publishing support from IEEE, Brain Health Alliance has contributed a prize award fund of $7500 for best student papers presented at Guardians 2023. This IEEE workshop will be co-sponsored by the Technical Community on Multimedia Computing (TCMC) and the Technical Community on Semantic Computing (TCSEM) of the IEEE Computer Society. There will be no registration, processing or publication fees charged to authors who submit their research reports, which if accepted for presentation at Guardians 2023, will be published in the IEEE Computer Society proceedings for the conference. Visit Guardians 2023 for author instructions and forms for submission of manuscripts contributed in response to our call for papers.

2023 Guardian

At Guardians 2023, we honor Dr. Anthony Fauci as our 2023 Guardian of Truth and Integrity.

Invited Speakers

Conference Program

The October 9 online Guardians 2023 will ask the same question posed last year for Guardians 2022, ie, Who are the Guardians of Truth and Integrity? and discuss the continuing information wars with the spread of polarized and extremified propaganda and lies, and the now prevalent political use of mis-information, dis-information, anti-information, caco-information, and mal-information. Please refer to our Guardians 2022 and the summary report for last year's program of talks, slide presentations, and background references on these information wars. In addition, for the Guardians 2023, we will also address the state of affairs concerning the phenomena of "academic ghosting" and "research ghosting", the decline of professional collegiality and adherence to a professional code of conduct, and the increase in prevalence of organized fraud with misconduct in academia.

Call for Papers

Research reports contributed to the conference for presentation must be submitted no later than September 22, with notice of review decisions announced September 29, and presentation versions of manuscripts re-submitted by October 6 prior to the meeting on October 9. There will be no registration, processing or publication fees charged to authors who submit their research reports, which if accepted for presentation at Guardians 2023, will be published in the IEEE Computer Society proceedings for the conference. Manuscripts may address any form of research from basic to applied science and medicine, from primary to secondary and tertiary research, from computational and quantitative to non-computational and qualitative, including literature reviews and meta-analyses, and across the entire spectrum of research including "bench-to-bedside" and clinical trials. Novelty for the sake of novelty --- without supporting, enabling, and implementing reproducibility, reliability and integrity --- will not be considered an important criterion for selection of manuscripts by the program committee.

Instead, manuscripts will be evaluated for both the quality of the substantive reproducibility, reliability, and integrity of their experimental methods, data, and results and also the quality of the written description and report of those methods, data, and results. The program committee will favor those reports which demonstrate use of open software tools and methods, open data and results, rational inferences and conclusions, the presence of valid statistical analyses with hypothesis testing, and the absence of inherent self-contradictions, false equivalences, and other common fallacies in logical reasoning including the correlation/causation fallacy. Review criteria addressing experimental reproducibility and reliability do not apply in a direct manner to those papers considered opinion pieces which contain exclusively commentary and discussion of other published research literature. For these opinion essays, the logical reasoning criteria nevertheless do apply, but the experimental reproducibility and reliability criteria will not be required. Thus, opinion essays can be submitted as opinion essays without any new experiments reported with data and results.

Student Best-Paper Awards

Guardians 2023 will offer cash prizes of $2500 for best papers by students in each of the 3 award categories:

For eligibility to compete in the student best-paper competitions, the first (or only) author of the submitted manuscript must be matriculated in a degree-granting educational program, and the manuscript must be accompanied by a letter from the student's mentor attesting to the student's authorship or co-authorship role for both the research conducted and the manuscript written.

Important Dates

Organizing Committees

Conference Awards Committee:

Conference Program and Publication Committee: