HotSocial 2012 - The First ACM International Workshop on Hot Topics on Interdisciplinary Social Networks Research (HotSocial)

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 fundermentally has changed our way of thinking, individual behaviors and social activities. It is forseeable that the public health relating to epidemic diseases is greatly impacted by this emerging nennectivity 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, there seem not enough opportunities for people from these diverse background to directly interact with one another. The diversity of approaches and methodologies study various social networks have 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 in the study of networks. Among the fundamental open questions are:
How to access social networks data? Different communities have different means, each with pros and cons. Experience exchanges from different communities will be beneficial.
How to protect these data? Privacy and data protection techniques considering social and legal aspects are required.
How the complex systems and graph theory algorithms can be used for understanding social networks? Interdisciplinary collaboration are necessary.
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 forming and evolution?
How does the human mobility and human interaction 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 correction for use in different communities (e.g., sociology, behavior studies, epidemiology)
privacy and ethic issues of data collection and management of large social graphs, leveraging social network properties as well as 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 and 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