SWATD 2012 - Workshop on Social Web Analytics for Trend Detection

Social networks on the Web are growing rapidly and offer a fertile ground for data mining and analysis. So many social networks flourish in an unforeseen manner and social data are evolving from various social streams. Such data embed human interactions and interests and their analysis is valuable for detecting trends, events and phenomena on today's Web reality. Methodologies and techniques of information retrieval, databases, preference modeling, graph theory, etc. have been leveraged and adapted into the social web dynamic environment but still open questions remain in terms of introducing new methodologies which will facilitate trend detection. The workshop addresses these issues by providing a forum for researchers and practitioners to discuss the social data analytics relevant topics with emphasis on the critical actors in emerging online social networks. The workshop aims at taking up the topics of the main WISE conference (such as Web Data Models, Web Information Retrieval, Web Metrics and Performance, Web Mining and Web Warehousing, Web Monitoring and Management, etc) and specializing them on the issues relevant to trend detection. Trend detection is vital in today's societies, academia and industries since major applications can rely on them (recommendations, content outsourcing, policy making, advertising etc).
This workshop aims at gathering researchers from the fields of social computing, machine learning, and data mining to think about the obstacles that hurdle the leveraging of understanding and capturing of trends in the social Web. We target researchers from both industry and academia to join forces in this exciting area. We intend to discuss the recent and significant developments in the general area and to promote cross-fertilization of techniques. In particular, we aim at identifying techniques that will enable researchers to understand and predict those trends in social networks and social media, as well as specify important directions for the research communities. Understanding, capturing, mining and being able to predict the trends in social media is interesting for several areas such as marketing, security, and Web search. The workshop will include the following topics of interest (but not limited to…):
Trend detection principles in social networks
Network evolution and growth mechanisms
Social Web statistical analysis for trends
Social networks computational aspects
Behavioral modeling for trends in social networks
Affective social computing and emerging trends
Mining techniques for the social trends
Semantic analysis and social networks trends
Privacy and anonymity in social networks
Social networks communities for trends discovery
Information diffusion in social networks
Prediction and trends developing in online social networks.
Collaborative Filtering in the social Web
Social networks analytics tools
Experiments and applications of trends detection in social networks
Target Community
This workshop will be of particular interest to researchers of different areas (e.g. databases, data mining, information retrieval, etc.), who are working and/or applying their research in social networks, in building models and algorithms for understanding the underlying challenges and the ongoing efforts in predicting the trends in social networks. With new projects being started every day, this community is growing significantly and we see it as particularly useful for the Social Web community that lightweight approaches to information organization make best use of available techniques.