SI 2016 - Workshop on Social Influence (SI 2016)

The digital era creates new possibilities for observing humans’ behaviour, especially the one expressed on the Internet, but we also leave traces during everyday activity by making phone calls, using GPS devices or using any kind of transportation. People who meet together or communicate over the Internet or other channels constantly exchange information, rumours, spread opinions and attitudes. Sometimes it is just an information that is being passed from one to another, but it may also become the beginning of a huge change, either of an individual or even of the whole society ? but in both cases it starts with becoming influenced or influencing others. Social influence is the process of a complex nature which involves our location in social network, the network structure and dynamics, time and psychological and sociological factors. At the level of an individual it is rather a psychological process but at the network scale it is strongly dependent on the network structure and its dynamics. Hence, studying social influence is a challenging interdisciplinary task, which, if succeeded, leads to better understanding of the surrounding world.
The goal of this workshop devoted to the social influence process is to present the research on:
how the social influence occurs in society at the level of an individual and at the network level (empirical research),
how to simplify or find theoretical representation for this complex phenomenon (models),
how to target the society to maximize the spread of influence or innovations diffusion (heuristics, analytical solutions),
how to influence individuals (psychological and sociological factors, the impact of social media on the influence),
how to achieve different goals related to social influence, like minimizing the cost of change or slowing down or speeding up this process.