Session details: MSND'12 workshop 10

Abstract

In the real-time Web, the latest evolution of the Web, information (e.g., videos, images, and blogs) is generated very quickly, consumed by millions of users, and updated rapidly by others through commenting, replying, transferring, etc. This is practiced by people who differ in culture, knowledge, background, ideology. Moreover, information generally comes from several channels and is sent out to different ones. This is amplified by the social networking phenomenon - the social Web, which is nowadays a well established set of technologies, based on which users and service providers can exchange messages through an interaction network, share information and collaborate, advertise a product, create communities and influence them, etc. Besides, there is an abundant literature regarding the different aspects of social networks be it their construction or the detection of nodes playing specific roles. Thus, it is difficult to draw a clear image linking the existing models of social networks and the real underlying social mechanisms. As a result, there is a big gap in concertizing and evaluating most of the research efforts in this area. Furthermore, due to the growing complexity of digital social networks and the huge quantity of new data available every day, it becomes crucial for researchers to provide a clear understanding of the dynamics of these networks. It also becomes important for the community to not only understand what is happening currently in the network but also to predict the next evolution and monitor the trends in the network.To address the above mentioned aspects of social network dynamics, we solicited the following topics (but not limited to): Information diffusion in social networks, community extraction, analysis, and evolution, detection of (possibly evolving) roles, content evolution and tracking in social networks, social media recommendations, information quality and evolution in social content, evaluation techniques and benchmarks, new challenges in mining social networks, and example studies and use cases of dynamics of social networks. Such approaches can be applied to various areas including social sciences, politics, economics, marketing, tourism and culture. Among such areas, social networks are generating huge changes in the creation, distribution, and consumption of News creating opportunities for new applications and redefining business models. The workshop includes a special session on Social Media Applications in News, including papers specifically addressing these issues and positions from News business experts and practitioners.This year, the workshop has attracted 29 submissions. All submissions went through a rigorous review process with at least three reviews per paper. The selection was very hard since the submissions are of high quality and we have time constraints for presentations. To this end, 16 papers are accepted for oral presentations, and our workshop program consists of these 16 oral presentations and a keynote talk about the dynamics in social networks and the special session focusing on social networks usage for journalism.