HotSocial 2012 

First ACM International Workshop on
Hot Topics on Interdisciplinary Social Networks Research

August 12, 2012, Beijing, China (in conjunction with ACM KDD 2012, August 12-16, 2012)

Sponsor: ACM KDD

Supported by Tsinghua University Interdisciplinary Social Network Research Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, University of Goettingen and Nanjing University

Call for Papers

With the blessing of information technology, we are living in an increasingly networked world. People, information and other entities are connected via World Wide Web, email networks, instant messaging networks, mobile communication networks, online social networks, etc. These online networks grow fast and possess huge amount of recorded information, which presents great opportunities in understanding the science of these networks, and in developing new applications from these networks and for these networks. The increasingly networked society has fundamentally changed our way of thinking, individual behaviors and social activities. It is foreseen that the public health relating to epidemic diseases is greatly impacted by this emerging connectivity as they are by nature mediated by direct or indirect human interactions and mobility. However, new challenges have to be met – the networks are huge and information is noisy, and they demand new methodologies in accessing and analyzing these networks, and in developing theories and applications for the networks. 

To meet with these challenges, researchers from a wide range of academic fields, including theory and algorithms, data mining and machine learning, computer systems and networks, statistical physics and complex systems, sociology, social psychology, economics and managerial science, etc. are all actively studying various aspects concerning social and information networks.

However, we lack the proper opportunities for people from these diverse backgrounds to directly interact with each other. The diversity of approaches and methodologies to study various social networks has raised the need for an interdisciplinary effort to create the required expertise to address the fundamental open questions in this field. This workshop is intended to present such an opportunity and serve as a forum to bring together people from various fields to exchange their latest research results and to sparkle new ideas and directions to properly understand these networks. 

Some of the fundamental open questions are:

• Accessing social network data. Different communities have different means, each with pros and cons. Experience exchanges from different communities will be beneficial.
• Protecting users’ data. Privacy and data protection techniques considering social and legal aspects are required.
• Interdisciplinary collaborations to enable in depth understanding of social behaviors.
• Can social network features be exploited for a better computing and social network system design?
• How do online social networks play a role in real-life (offline) community formation and evolution?
• How do human mobility and interactions influence human behaviors and thus public health? How can we develop methodologies to investigate the public health and their correlates in the context of the social networks?

Topics of Interest:

Main topics of this workshop include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Methods for accessing social networks (e.g., sensor nets, mobile apps, crawlers) and bias correlation for use in different communities (e.g., sociology, behavior studies, epidemiology)
• Privacy and ethic issues of data collection and management of large social graphs, with focus on legal and social constraints
• Application of data mining and machine learning in the context of specific social networks
• Information spread models and campaign detection
• Trust, reputation and community evolution in the online and offline interacted social networks, including the presence and evolution of social identities and social capital in OSNs
• Understanding complex systems and scale-free networks from an interdisciplinary angle
• Interdisciplinary experiences and intermediate results on social network research

Paper Submissions

Submissions must present original results. Selected papers will be forward-looking, describe their relationship to existing work, and have impact and implications for ongoing or future research.

Submissions can be either a full workshop paper (no more than 6 pages long, double-column) or an extended abstract/position paper (2 pages, double-column); please strictly follow the SIGKDD template. All paper submission will be handled via Easychair Submission System. Papers will be reviewed single blind by the TPC.

Extended versions of selected papers of special merit presented at the workshop are subject to considerations - subject to peer review - for publication in Elsevier Computer Communications journal.

Camera Ready Instruction for Authors of Accepted Papers

Formatting: http://kdd2012.sigkdd.org/author_instructions.shtml, keywords: ACM template, single-space, double-colume 10pt font size.

For your convenience we have prepared an Proceedings Template in Word, Latex Style File (meanwhile  http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/sig-alternate.tex provides a Latex sample file). ACM ISBN number will be available shortly for you to replace the field " X-XXXX-XXX-X/XX/XXXX."

Page limit for camera ready versions:

• For accepted full papers: up to 8 pages

• For accepted short papers: up to 4 pages

• For extended abtract for invited speakers and panelists: up to 2 pages

• You must upload the camera ready version via your EasyChair entry for the paper you submitted earlier, by 14th June 2012.

Registration:

• Each accepted workshop paper must have a registered presenter (similar to the policy of main conference). Please register under http://kdd2012.sigkdd.org/registration.shtml  for early-bird registration.

Important Dates

Deadline for submissions: May 9, 2012 (11:59 PM, EST)

Notification of acceptance: June 3, 2012

Camera-ready version: June 27, 2012

Early Registration: June 29, 2012

HotSocial Workshop Date: Aug 12, 2012

Workshop TPC Co-Chairs

• Xiaoming Fu, University of Goettingen, Germany
• Peter Gloor, MIT, USA
• Jie Tang, Tsinghua University, China

Panel Chair

• Jar-Der Luo, Tsinghua University, China

Technical Program Committee

• Vitaly Belik, Physics, MIT, USA and MPI-DS, Germany (Complex systems, epidemics)
• Margarete Boos, Courant Center for Evolution of Social Behaviors, U. Goettingen, Germany (Social psychology, social behaviors)
• Wei Chen, Microsoft Research Asia, China (Social and information systems)
• Kai Fischbach, Social networks and information systems, U. Bamberg, Germany (Social network analysis)
• Xiaoming Fu, Computer Science, University of Goettingen, Germany (TPC Co-Chair)
• Peter Gloor, Management Science, MIT, USA (TPC Co-Chair)
• Pan Hui, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Germany (Mobile social networks)
• Benyuan Liu, Computer Science, UMass, Lowell, USA (Online social networks, mobile social networks, epidemiology)
• Jar-Der Luo, Sociology, Tsinghua U., China (Social capital and social structure, social network analysis)
• Cecilia Mascolo, Computer Science, U. Cambridge, UK (Mobile social networks)
• Yasmin Merali, Management Science, U. Warwick, UK (Complex networks)
• Alessandra Sala, Bell Labs, Ireland (Graph algorithms, social network privacy)
• Christian Stegbauer, Sociology, U. Frankfurt, Germany (Social network analysis)
• Jie Tang, Computer Science, Tsinghua University, China (TPC Co-Chair)
• Allen Zhiwei Wu, Epidemiology/public health, Nanjing U., China (Infectious disease spreading)
• Xifeng Yan, Computer Science, UCSB, USA (Data mining, machine learning)
• Ben Zhao, Computer Science, UCSB, USA (Social network measurement, social data analysis and anonymization)
• Zhi-Hua Zhou, Computer Science, Nanjing U., China (Data mining, machine learning)

Preliminary Workshop Program

Keynote (9:00-10:00): 

• “The Wisdom of Few and the Madness of Many: Collective Prediction in Digital Social Network”

  by Peter Gloor (MIT Sloan School of Management)

  Abstract:
  The emergence of online social networks opens up unprecedented opportunities to read the collective mind, discovering emergent trends while they are still being hatched by small groups of creative individuals. The Web has become a mirror of the real world, allowing researchers in predictive analytics to study and better understand why some new ideas change our lives, while others never make it from the drawing board of the innovator. 
  This talk introduces a wide range of projects doing analysis of large corpora of digital traces of human activity, in particular the Web, Blogs, online forums, social networking sites, e-mail archives, phone logs, and face-to-face interaction through sociometric badges. In our research we have identified interaction patterns of successful teams and organizations through dynamic social network analysis. On the global level, we correlate discussion about movies on IMDB with Academy Awards and box office returns, and Blog buzz with the outcome of political elections. On the organizational level we compare performance metrics such as revenue, productivity, peer ratings, and customer satisfaction with e-mail network metrics in a variety of settings. On the individual level we employ sociometric badges as a powerful tool that can connect the impact of behaviors such as speech patterns with business outcomes.
  
  Speaker's biography: Dr. Peter Gloor is Research Scientist at the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT's Sloan School of Management where he leads a project exploring Collaborative Innovation Networks (COIN).He is also Founder and Chief Creative Officer of software company galaxyadvisors where he puts his academic insights to practical use, helping clients to coolhunt by analyzing social networking patterns on the Internet – spot the next big thing by finding the trendsetters, and to coolfarm – make the cool trends succeed on online social networking sites. In addition Peter is a lecturer at University of Cologne where he was Mercator Visiting Professor, a lecturer at Aalto University in Helsinki, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at P. Universidad Católica de Chile. Previously, Peter was a Partner with Deloitte Consulting, leading its e-Business practice for Europe, a Partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers and the section leader for software engineering at UBS. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the MIT Lab for Computer Science in the Advanced Networking Architecture group, working on hypertext well before the Web emerged and creating the multimedia CD “Animated Algorithms” (published by MIT Press). He obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Zurich, and a Master’s degree (diploma) in Mathematics also from the University of Zurich. He has written 7 books, most recently Swarm Creativity - Competitive Advantage through Collaborative Innovation Networks (Oxford University Press, 2005), Coolhunting - Chasing Down The Next Big Thing (with Scott Cooper) (AMACOM, 2007), and Coolfarming - Turn Your Great Idea In The Next Big Thing (AMACOM 2010).

Coffee break (10:00-10:20)

Session 1: Network Dynamics in Online and Offline Networks (10:20-12:00)

• Sabrina Gaito , Matteo Zignani, Gian Paolo Rossi, William Kennedy (University of Milan, Italy),  Alessandra Sala (Bell Labs, Ireland), Xiaohan Zhao (UCSB, USA), Haitao Zheng and Ben Y. Zhao (UCSB, USA). On the Bursty Evolution of Online Social Networks (full paper)
• Massimiliano La Gala, Valerio Arnaboldi, Andrea Passarella and Marco Conti (IIT-CNR, Italy). Ego-net Digger: a New Way to Study Ego Networks in Online Social Networks (full paper)
• Lianghao Dai, Jar-Der Luo (Tsinghua University, China), Xiaoming Fu (University of Göttingen, Germany) and Zhichao Li (Tsinghua University). Predicting offline behaviors from online features -- the ego-centric dynamical network approach (full paper)
• Peter Cogan (Bell Labs, Ireland), Matthew Andrews, Milan Bradonjic, William Kennedy (Bell Labs, USA), Alessandra Sala (Bell Labs, Ireland),and Gabriel Tucci (Bell Labs, USA). Reconstruction and Analysis of Twitter Conversation Graphs (full paper)

Panel (12:00-13:00):  Integrating Social Behaviors into Social Computing

• Chair: Jar-Der Luo (Tsinghua Univ)

• Panelists: Xiang Li (Shanghai Jiao Tong Univ), Peter Gloor (MIT), Jie Tang (Tsinghua Univ), Alessandra Sala (Bell Labs), Xiaoming Fu (Univ Goettingen)

Lunch Break (13:00-14:00)

Invited talk (14:00-14:50): Yuquan Wang (CEO of Haiyin Fund and Chief Consultant of Frost & Sullivan)

Coffee Break (14:50-15:10)

Technical Session 2: Sampling and Social Network Platforms (15:10-16:40)

• Jianguo Lu and Dingding Li (University of Windsor, Canada). Sampling online social networks by random walk (full paper)
• Pravin Shankar, Lu Han, Vancheswaran Ananthanarayanan, Matthew Muscari, Badri Nath and Liviu Iftode Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, USA). A Case for Automatic Sharing over Social Networks (full paper)
• Thomas Paul (TU Darmstadt, Germany), Benjamin Greschbach (KTH, Sweden), Sonja Buchegger (KTH, Sweden) and Thorsten Strufe (TU Darmstadt, Germany). Exploring Decentralization Dimensions of Social Network Services: Adversaries and Availability (full paper)
• Weimin Liao (School of Culture Communication, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, China). Strategies for Spreading Information from Local to Global in Social Complex Networks: Cases from a Village in China (short paper)

Coffee Break (16:40-17:00)

Technical Session 3: Network Properties and Behaviors (17:00-18:00)

• Alexander Mehler and Christian Stegbauer (University of Frankfurt, Germany). Emergent Semantics from Collaborative Writing: Self-similarity in Wiki-based Media (short paper)

• Lang Qin, Ling Zhou and Jar-Der Luo (Tsinghua University, China). Complex Network Perspective on Network Dynamics:  A Study on Investment Network in VC Industry in China (short paper)

• Yuexin Mao, Bing Wang, Wei Wei (University of Connecticut, USA) and Benyuan Liu (University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA). Correlating S&P 500 Stocks with Twitter Data (short paper)

• Jiayin Qi, Qixing Qu (School of Economics and Management, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China) and Yong Tan (Department of Information Systems and Operations Management, Michael G. Foster School of Business, University of Washington, USA). Topic Evolution Prediction of User Generated Contents Considering Enterprise Generated Contents (short paper)

• Jason Gustafson, Jun Li (University of Oregon, USA) and Haixin Duan (Tsinghua University, China). Towards a Socially Aware Home Router (short paper)

     http://user.informatik.uni-goettingen.de/~fu/hotsocial/