WADS participates in SafeToC and is dedicated to providing an environment that is free from harassment, bullying, discrimination, and retaliation for all participants.
All participants at WADS are expected to:
- Exercise consideration and respect in their speech and actions;
- Refrain from demeaning, discriminatory, or harassing behaviour and speech.
Unacceptable behaviour during WADS is:
- Abusive action directed at an individual, such as threats, intimidation, or bullying;
- Racism, homophobia, and other behaviour that discriminates against a group or class of people;
- Sexual harassment of any kind, such as unwelcome sexual advances, words/actions of a sexual nature, unwelcome touching of an individual’s body, humiliating comments about an individual’s appearance, or displaying or distributing sexually explicit images or messages.
Harassment can occur when there is no deliberate intention to offend. Be careful in the words that you choose. Harassment committed in a joking manner or disguised as a compliment still constitutes unacceptable behavior. Remember that sexist, racist, and other exclusionary jokes can be offensive to those around you.
If a participant engages in prohibited behaviour during WADS activities, WADS reserves the right to
- Remove them from the conference without warning or refund;
- Prohibit them from participating in future WADS conferences.
Appropriate sanctions also will be taken toward any individual who knowingly makes a false allegation of harassment.
Anyone who observes or experiences such incidents should report them to the WADS ToC advocates, who are Faith Ellen (faith [at] cs.toronto.edu) and Stephane Durocher (durocher [at] cs.umanitoba.ca).
Conflicts of Interests
Authors who submit papers to WADS and have reason to believe that a potential reviewer may be unfairly and negatively biased, may report such a conflict of interest to the ToC advocates.
WADS PC members and subreviewers will be instructed not to review papers of authors with whom they have a conflict of interest, in particular:
- Family member or close friend.
- Ph.D. advisor or advisee (no time limit), or postdoctoral or undergraduate mentor or mentee within the past five years.
- Person with the same affiliation.
- Person involved in an alleged incident of harassment. (It is not required that the incident be reported.)
- When a favour is owed (e.g., recently requested reference letter).
- When frequent or recent collaboration precludes objective assessment.