SocialObjects 2011 - International Workshop on Social Object Networks

International Workshop on
Social Object Networks (SocialObjects 2011)

organised in conjunction with

the 3rd IEEE International Conference on
Social Computing (SocialCom2011)

Boston, MA, USA, 9th or 11th October 2011

Paper submission deadline: 1st August 2011
http://ir.ii.uam.es/socialobjects2011


DESCRIPTION

The Web has become the de facto space where we run many of our daily
activities, such as shopping, reading news and books, listening to music,
watching videos, sharing our views on current topics and objects, connecting
and chatting to friends, etc. The availability of such activities in a
digital form has been fueling social-network related research and development
for decades, where such social connections are abstracted to large networks of
nodes (i.e., people) and edges (i.e., types of social connections), and then
exploited in various ways and for various purposes, such as for web science,
consumer analysis, business intelligence, and targeted marketing, to name just
a few.

The nuclei of most of these social networks are "Social Objects"; which are the
objects around which people interact. Examples of such social objects include
pictures on Flickr, songs on Last.fm, tags on Delicious, places on Foursquare,
posts on Twitter, goods on Amazon, etc. Hence anything that allows people to
connect, whether directly or indirectly, can be regarded as a social object,
and can produce a social network graph. The different examples convey the
breadth of object types around which we interact with others on a regular
basis.

Most current works, however, seem to flatten such multi-dimensional networks,
where the social objects are often left out of the networks and analysis, and
replaced with direct edges between the people in question (e.g. people who
watched the same film on Netflix are represented as two directly connected
nodes in a graph).

With more social networking sites becoming more open (e.g. through APIs,
exportable profiles, 3rd party applications), it is now possible to generate
very rich cross-community social networks that capture social connections in
many different forms and around many different social objects. This raises a
series of new questions and research challenges that this workshop is trying
to highlight, such as:

* What impact do the type and properties of a social object have on the
particular social connection it generates?
* How do social connections and networks around heterogeneous social objects
compare in terms of their dynamics and transitivity?
* What are the risks and opportunities associated with acquiring such multiple
dimensional graphs?
* What technical challenges exist for acquiring, representing and analyzing
such social-object centered networks?
* What new knowledge can be extracted from such rich object-centered social
networks?
* How can social connections and interactions around specific social objects
be fostered and exploited more intelligently for commercial and scientific
purposes?
* What kind of new services and applications do knowledge captured through
social objects networks enable?
* How do social object networks impact privacy of individuals and groups?

SUBMISSIONS

We invite two main types of contributions: short papers (max. 6 pages) and
posters (max. 2 pages). Both types of contributions could be new research
ideas, position statements, critiques of existing approaches, or experiment
reports.

Submitted papers will be evaluated according to their originality, technical
content, style, clarity, and relevance to the workshop. Each paper will be
reviewed by at least three independent referees.

TOPICS

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
* Typology and representation of social objects
* Generation and analysis of objects centered networks
* Dynamics and patterns of social networks with different social objects
* Properties of social objects: value as social connectors, forms of
social connections they enable, longevity of their social connections, etc.
* Social objects as connectors between cross-domain social networks/communities
* Semantics of social objects-based links
* Characteristics of social interactions w.r.t type and properties of object
* Building interaction profiles around social objects
* Identifying interests and social connections through social objects
* Privacy and ethical issues to do with social object networks acquisition and
analysis
* Augmentation of social object knowledge based on social interactions

The above are just a few examples of the multi-disciplinary questions that this
workshop will raise, by inviting researchers and practitioners from a wide range
of backgrounds and expertise to contribute and attend the event.

IMPORTANT DATES

* Papers due: 5th August 2011
* Notification of acceptance: 22nd August 2011
* Camera-ready: 29th August 2011
* Workshop: 9th or 10th October 2011

ORGANIZERS

* Jérôme Picault, Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, France
* Myriam Ribière, Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, France
* Iván Cantador, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
* Harith Alani, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
(to be completed)

* Ching-Man Au Yeung, NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan
* Nitin Agarwal, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, USA
* Pablo Castells, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain
* Manuel Cebrián, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
* Fabien Gandon, INRIA, France
* Gabriella Kazai, Microsoft Research, UK
* Dimitre Kostadinov, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, France
* Peter Mika, Yahoo! Research, Spain
* Alexandre Passant, DERI, Ireland
* Haggai Roitman, IBM Research, Israel
* Mathias Wagner, DoCoMo Labs, Germany