I will speak at the International Symposium on Convergence Technology (ConTech 2011) – Smart & Humane World – on November 3rd in Seoul, South Korea.

Date: 2011 November 3 (Thurs)
Place: COEX Grand Ballroom, Seoul, Korea
Organized by Advanced Institutes of Convergence Technologies (AICT), Seoul National University (SNU)
In Cooperation with Ministry of Knowledge Economy, Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, National Research Foundation of Korea, Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology (GSCST)
Symposium Chair : Choi, Yanghee (President, AICT)

Program
09:00~09:30 Registration
09:30~10:00 Opening Ceremony
Plenary Session : Smart & Humane World through Convergence
10:00~10:40 Speaker (TBD)
10:50~11:30 Speaker (TBD)
11:30~13:00 Lunch
Session 1 : Bio Convergence (Chair : Prof. Kim, Sunghoon)
Session 2 : IT Convergence (Chair : Dr. Lee, Manjai)
Session 3 : Appropriate Technology (Chair : Prof. Kang, Namjun)
13:00~15:00 Scott A. Strobel (Professor, Yale University)
Speaker Kevin Kim (Professor, University of Illinois)
Speaker Masaru Kitsuregawa (Professor, Tokyo University)
Speaker Haesun Park (Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology)
Speaker Marc Smith (Connected Action)
Speaker Sang-goo Lee (Professor, Seoul National University)
Speaker Haklae Kim (Samsung)
Speaker Raghu Ramakrishnan (Yahoo)

My slides: 20111103 con tech2011-marc smith

I will also visit Professor Han Woo Park at YeungNam University (Wikipedia) in Daegu, South Korea to meet with his students in the Webometrics Institute program.

This will be my second trip to Korea, I was there last year for a related event.  Pictures after the jump:

I will speak at Purdue University on September 22 and 23, 2011 about mapping social media networks.

My host is Sorin Matei, professor of Communications, who has been researching the social structure of social media networks.

I will also speak at Professor Matei’s class: COM 63200 On-line Interaction and Facilitation

Here is an example map of the connections among the people who tweeted the word “Purdue” on September 16th, 2011:

Connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word Purdue when queried on September 16, 2011, scaled by numbers of tweets (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one another.

See: www.purdue.edu/

Layout using the “Group Layout” composed of tiled bounded regions. Clusters calculated by the Clauset-Newman-Moore algorithm are also encoded by color.

(Edges connecting users are bundled and curved with recent features added to NodeXL v.177.)

A larger version of the image is here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/6155750905/sizes/o/in/ph…

Betweenness Centrality is defined here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality#Betweenness_centrality

Clauset-Newman-Moore algorithm is defined here: pre.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v70/i6/e066111

Top most between users:
@lifeatpurdue
@jajuanjohnson
@stfu_gabby
@purdueexponent
@charliienosheen
@mbrister2
@boilerfootball
@purduesports
@hipandresanbo
@cheesebrrrrr

Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 1000
Unique Edges: 4045
Edges With Duplicates: 706
Total Edges: 4751
Self-Loops: 977
Connected Components: 429
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 395
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 528
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 4134
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 12
Average Geodesic Distance: 3.517707
Graph Density: 0.003507508
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.177

More NodeXL network visualizations are here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157622437066929/

NodeXL is free and open and available from www.codeplex.com/nodexl

NodeXL is developed by the Social Media Research Foundation (www.smrfoundation.org) – which is dedicated to open tools, open data, and open scholarship.

The book, Analyzing social media networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, is available from Morgan Kaufmann and from Amazon.

Summer Social Webshop
on
Technology-Mediated Social Participation
University of Maryland, College Park
August 23-26, 2011

Several years ago a program at the University of Maryland called “Webshop” (Web Workshop) was organized by Professor John Robinson and held for three consecutive Summers.  I visited and spoke at two of these events and know many people who attended or spoke at one or more and remember the event enthusiastically.   The students who attended include some of the now leading researchers in the field of social science studies of the internet.  There is an impressive alumni list.

The last Webshop was held in 2003 and many years and significant changes have occurred in the time since.  Twitter, Facebook, StreetView, iPad, FourSquare, Android, Kinect, EC2, Mechanical Turk, Arduino, were all new or non-existent when the first Webshops were run.  Today we have more reason than ever to focus on the details and patterns of computer-mediated human association. Ever more people channel more of their communications with others through more digital media, often of the social kind.  A new data resource for the social sciences is growing in scale and promise: from billions of events it is possible to start to build a picture of an aggregate whole, and to start to grasp the terrain and landscape of social media.

The Summer Social Webshop (@Webshop2011) is happening again!  With the generous support of the National Science Foundation and additional assistance from Google Research, this August 23-26 at the University of Maryland, College Park, a group of students will hear and engage with more than two dozen leading researchers exploring digital social landscapes from a variety of perspectives.  Organized by a collaboration between the University of Maryland’s Human Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL), the College of Information Studies, the Sociology and Computer Science Department, and the Social Media Research Foundation, the event will gather students from a wide range of disciplines to get a concentrated dose of advanced efforts to gather data from social media and people’s understanding and practices around digital technologies.   Doctoral students in computer science, iSchools, sociology, communications, political science, anthropology, psychology, journalism, and related disciplines are invited to apply to attend this summer’s 4-day intensive workshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation (TMSP).  The workshop explores the many ways social media can be applied to national priorities such as health, energy, education, disaster response, political participation, environmental protection, business innovation, or community safety.  The workshop should be of interest to graduate students at US universities studying social-networking tools, blogs and microblogs, user-generated content sites, discussion groups, problem reporting, recommendation systems, mobile and location aware media creation, and other social media.

For more information, please contact Alan Neustadtl (alan.neustadtl@gmail.com).

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Photos

I am very interested in the Quantified Self conference to be held in Mountain View, California, May 28 and 29.  While I have attended just a few of the in-person meet-ups, which were engaging and intriguing events, I have followed the blog and tweet stream closely.  These events feature short presentations about practices, prototypes, and products that record information about our own behavior and activity.  It is great to hear that, as the meet-ups grew to become very large, a conference has been organized to accommodate the demand and growing interest in the intersection of sensors and other devices with medical and personal self-monitoring.  Using a variety of devices, our lives can now create detailed inscriptions that illuminate our behavior and patterns with novel clarity and detail. (See: http://quantifiedself.com/conference/)

I plan to attend.  I will speak on Sunday morning at a 10:30 breakout session on using social media network analysis to map personal and collective social media spaces.

Quantifying the “Quantified Self” discussion in Twitter: Here is a map of the connections among the people who recently tweeted the string “quantified self” on May 25th, 2011.

Click for larger image.

The top most between participants in this graph were:

@timoreilly
@quantifiedself (-1)
@harscoat (-)
@edyson
@qsparis
@egadenne (-4)
@agaricus (-)
@brunoaziza
@adriana872
@chloester

Bolded users also appeared in a previous map made earlier in the year, on January 20, 2011, which looked like this:

This is the list of the most “between” users in this network on January 20th, 2011:

The most between participants in this graph are: @quantifiedself, @egadenne, @harscoat, @genomera, @neufit, @jxa, @agaricus, @emergentorder, @bulletproofexec, @2healthguru.

The topics discussed in the quantifiedself tweet stream can be rendered as a network graph based on words that co-occur:

I will be speaking at the Jacob T. Schwartz International School for Scientific Research week long Lipari School on Computational Social Science , July 17 – July 23, 2011, Lipari Island, Italy.

This year’s program is dedicated to Computational Social Science: Text and Decisions

Speakers:

• Claudio Cioffi-Revilla: Director of the Center for Social Complexity, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, George Mason University, Washington DC.
• Huan Liu: Community Detection and Mining in Social Media [abstract]
  School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University
• Roel Popping: Computer-assisted text analysis, and the relevance of decision making and text mining [abstract]
  Department of Sociology, University of Groningen

Tutorials

• Marc A. Smith: Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media: Maps and Measures with NodeXL [abstract]
  Chief Social Scientist, Connected Action Consulting Group
• Calogero Zarba: Introduction to matrix algebra [abstract]
  Neodata Intelligence s.r.l., Italy
• Alessandro Pluchino: Netlogo: An agent based simulation programmable environment [abstract], University of Catania, Italy

I returned to South Africa to attend the 2010 edition of Mobile Web Africa, a conference focused on the remarkable adoption and development of mobile networks and technology in Africa.

The conference took place on 29th & 30th September 2010 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

I presented a workshop on social media network analysis, see: http://www.mobilewebafrica.com/marc-smith-workshop.php

The conference twitter hashtag #MWA2010 received a significant amount of traffic.  I mapped the collection of collections formed when people who tweeted “#MWA2010″ also followed, replied, or mentioned one another.  The following two EventMaps of the #MWA2010 twitter hashtag illustrates the development of the network.

Map of the connections among people who tweet “MWA2010″ on October 5th, 2010

Map of the connections among people who tweet “MWA2010″ on September 29th, 2010

The later graph is defined by three leading contributors who each generated significant retweeting along with mentions and replies.

I attended the previous 2009 Mobile Web Africa conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, organized by AllAmber Media which also featured a focus on the next wave of mobile devices and services.

Mobile is BIG in Africa.  The “Remote control of the Universe” = Mobile Phone.

The speaker from Samsung last year noted that for many Africans, the mobile device is their first and main method for managing digital objects.  A phone is not just a phone, it is a still and video camera, music player, watch, web browser, flashlight, wallet and file system.

The representative from Yonder Mobile Media noted that mobile phones have now exceeded the installed base of the previously most widely used communication technology: FM Radio.  But mobile is different from FM: mobile devices are two way, provide a method for exchanging payments, and are a primary method of access to the internet for many billions of people.  Mobile is the “first” screen for many people in Africa, not the third screen role that it plays in more developed economies.  Regional services like MXIT and The Grid are offering Internet services tailored to affordable mobile devices.

Photos from this year’s event:

Photos from last year’s event:

Photos from Cape Town:

Mapping mobile social networks with NodeXL: finding key users, groups, and locations

The video is now available:

The video reviews the creation of maps like this:

That illustrate the connections among people who tweet the term “#ecomm2010″, scaled by the number of followers.

Abstract: Social network analysis (SNA) is a powerful method for gaining insight into the massive collections of connections created when many people connect to one another through mobile devices. SNA has been widely applied to desktop social media and is moving into the mobile world. Prominent studies of the “call graph” have been produced at national scales.

Mobile providers are applying SNA to identify key subscribers who can reduce churn and help gain adoption of new services and products. Network analysis has historically had a steep learning curve, but now new tools are making SNA easier for less technical users. This talk will describe social network concepts and their application to mobile data sets. A free and open add-in for the popular Excel 2007 spreadsheet called NodeXL (http://www.codeplex.com/nodexl) can perform many complex SNA tasks like data import, scrubbing, metrics calculation, clustering, and visualization. Applying this tool to call graph and subscriber data sets can reveal key positions in the network that can attract and hold other subscribers in the system.

Examples of network analysis of social media and mobile data sets can be found on the Connected Action blog (http://www.connectedaction.net).

The 2010 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit was held July 12 and 13 in Redmond, Washington.  Among the many panels and discussions related to the state of computer science the NodeXL team had several representatives talking about the ways network science education can be expanded using an easy to use application for network analysis built on Excel.

Jimmy Lin from the University of Maryland also attended to speak about programming in the cloud.

Here is the abstract for the NodeXL talk:

NodeXL – Social Network Analysis in Excel—Natasa Milic Frayling, Microsoft Research; Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland; Marc Smith, Connected Action

Businesses, entrepreneurs, individuals, and government agencies alike are looking to social network analysis (SNA) tools for insight into trends, connections, and fluctuations in social media. Microsoft’s NodeXL is a free, open-source SNA plug-in for use with Excel. It provides instant graphical representation of relationships of complex networked data. But it goes further than other SNA tools—NodeXL was developed by a multidisciplinary team of experts that bring together information studies, computer science, sociology, human-computer interaction, and over 20 years of visual analytic theory and information visualization into a simple tool anyone can use. This makes NodeXL of interest not only to end-users but also to researchers and students studying visual and network analytics and their application in the real world. NodeXL has the unique feature that it imports networks from Outlook email, Twitter, flickr, YouTube, WWW, and other sources, plus it offers a rich set of metrics, layouts, and clustering algorithms. This talk will describe NodeXL and our efforts to start the Social Media Research Foundation.

Some photos from the event:

Saul Greenberg

Ben Shneiderman and Andy van Dam

Ben Shneiderman, Natasa Milic-Frayling and Marc Smith

Tom McMail and Marc Smith

Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
(ICWSM-10)
May 23-26, 2010
George Washington University, Washington, DC

Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence

The ICWSM 2010 conference starts Sunday.  This is a very high quality conference on the study of social media.  My colleague, Professor Derek Hansen, and I will lead a tutorial on using NodeXL to analyze social media networks.

SA2: Introduction to Social Media Network Analysis
Marc Smith (Connected Action) and
Derek Hansen (University of Maryland)

Social networks are the defining data structure of social media, created as people reply, link, click, favorite, friend, re-tweet, co-edit, mention, or tag one another. In this tutorial, we review the core concepts and methods of social network analysis and apply it to the collection, analysis, and visualization of social media networks. Using the free and open NodeXL application, learn how to extract a social media network and generate metrics and visualizations that highlight key people and positions within streams of tweets, videos, photos, or emails.

Next week I will be attending and discussing mobile social media and social networks at the Mobile Web Africa conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. It is my first time to Africa and I am excited to both visit and to discuss how mobile networked devices can change social organizations.  Mobile devices are in many ways more important in emerging and developing regions where the availability of these tools enable the first voice and data services that have ever been affordable and reliable, let alone mobile.  There are vast opportunities in this space, a topic well reviewed in the recent issue of the Economist:

The Mobile Web Africa event will focus on these key questions:

1. How will the industry evolve to a point where the vast majority of people have access to the mobile web and the content they want to view?
2. How will the industry fully exploit existing and future opportunities?
3. How can PC or mobile based developers and start-ups monetise their innovation and creativity to grow in to companies that will drive the expansion of the ecosystem?
4. How can Operators, Original Equipment Manufacturers, global associations and other mobile powerhouses assist their smaller partners?
5. How can societal and economic problems be tackled by the development of the capabilities of the mobile device?
6. What handsets, standards, networks and designs will allow consumers to successfully access the content and consume it?
7. How will the consumer be able to discover that content – through an Application, Browser, Search Engine, Advert, Social Network?

I will focus my discussion on the idea of the “Electrification of the Interaction Order” and topics related to the growing use of sensors on mobile devices and the sharing of the resulting data.  A service like SenseNetworks is a  good example of a mobile data collection, analysis, and presentation service.  Other sites, like Quantified Self, CureTogether, and FitBit, are examples of the social movements, web applications, and devices that are emerging in the self-monitoring medical tracking space.  These communities overlap with the trail based exercise communities of runners, bikers, skaters, hikers, and skiers, some with artistic inclinations.  I see a new wave of devices that are extensively quantify your “self” and “others”, perhaps when people swap sensor data with one another.  The recent work of Nathan Eagle and his co-authors illustrate the possibilities of using many devices with (already existing and widely used) sensors can generate remarkable maps of human behavior.  Much of this data will take the form of social networks as people are linked by “hyperties” – forms of association and connection that are authored by machines from the records of association and behavior.  People will be linked who have never met, in the same way that web book store customers who have never met can be linked by common browse and purchase patterns.  Hyperties will be formed by shared use of location, even if at different times, or patterns created by passing through different spaces at different times but in common patterns (Starbucks, then gas?  Or subway then tea shop?).  The notion of “Tribes” used by the SenseNetworks company is a good example of this approach.    The Economist is all over this topic, with another article “Mobile phones Sensors and sensitivity” that captures the topic.  Jonathan Donner’s work is also a good resource for insights on the role of mobile technology in many parts of the world.  The ability to enable a form of banking service is a particular benefit for the many people who do not have access to banking services.

On October 29th, I will be offering a workshop in Mountain View, California on the application of social network analysis to the measurement of social media.

The workshop will run from 9m to 4pm and include hands-on exercises using real world social media data sets and the free and open NodeXL social network analysis add-in for Excel 2007.  We will create social network metrics and visualizations from personal email, twitter, facebook, and message board records to reveal the broad outline of a community, its various kinds of leaders and active participants, major cliques and clusters, and pivotal events.

The workshop will make use of the NodeXL tutorial:
http://casci.umd.edu/NodeXL_Teaching

Registration at:
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/386418789

I will post the slides for those who cannot attend, but the live event will allow me to help those interested in learning how to visualize social media networks and generate and interpret social network metrics.  What’s an “eigenvector centrality”?  Come find out why that number highlights special people in a network and how to calculate it on your own network data sets.  Find experts, identify the people who are most heavily connected, and key contributors. If you plan to attend, it would be great if you bring sample data: any edge list or matrix is fine.  We can plot and measure sample data participants bring along with them.

I will demonstrate how to create twitter network maps like the one above which shows networks of follows connections among a group of people who tweeted the string “#CHI2010″ (as returned by search.twitter.com).  You can make your own twitter maps with NodeXL!  Similar maps can be made with a user name. In the workshop we will be sure to make a twitter network for anyone there who tweets.

Upon completion of this workshop, participants will:
* be able to understand the basics of SNA, its terminology and background.
* be able to transform communication data (e.g. Twitter, email, flickr, message boards etc.) into network data.
* understand the different possible presentations of social networks, e.g. in a matrix or a sociogram.
* apply network metrics and visualizations to find clusters and key contributors in real world social media data sets.
* get familiar with the use of standard SNA tools and software in general and the NodeXL social network analysis add-in for Excel in particular.
* be able to derive practical and useful information through SNA analysis that would help design an innovative and successful online community.

Who should attend? People interested in community management, social media monitoring and marketing, knowledge management, collaboration and human resources, legal discovery, organizational behavior and management

Registration.

View Larger Map

Other Maps:
Yahoo | Mapquest | Microsoft

The Catalyst Conference was July 27-31 in San Diego which gathered many people to discuss new technologies for enterprise computing.
On Wednesday, July 29 at 11:15 a.m. I gave a presentation about the use of social network analysis within the enterprise.

Session Details: Social Network Analysis: A New Source Of Business Intelligence

Mike Gotta, Principal Analyst, Burton Group with Marc Smith, Internet Sociologist

Where do people go when they need subject-matter expertise? How do you discover someone in your company who knows someone in a firm you’re trying to sell products and services into? Who is the person everyone goes to when they need to find out what’s really going on? Such relationships within organizations have been difficult to identify and leverage because they are often invisible to those outside people’s informal and personal networks. Technology has compounded the problem by fragmenting interactions between people across a multitude of tools. The advent of social networking sites within the enterprise (e.g., a “Corporate Facebook”) has triggered a resurgence of interest in the visualization and analysis of relationship structures.  Social network analysis represents a new source of insight that aids a variety of business activities. It can also reveal interaction patterns and relationship structures that help strategists improve organizational effectiveness.  As social networks gain increased adoption, numerous issues arise:

• How should relationship data be leveraged? What are the applications?
• Who conducts this type of work – do IT organizations have the skills?
• Will identifying “social roles” become a key component of organizational development and management practices? What are the privacy concerns?

In this session, Marc Smith will outline SNA trends and discuss real-world examples with Principal Analyst Mike Gotta of Burton Group.

Some tweets from the talk:

• Spesh00: I think Marc Smith just completely validated my prior statement about leveraging my social score against my knowledge tags. #catalyst09
• atownley: Moving discussions for internal use from email to messageboards, etc. to segregate personal/corp data – Marc Smith #smchat #catalyst09
• aewang: Chief Social Scientist (Marc Smith) – what a cool title! #catalyst09
• aewang: Love Marc Smith‘s comment about ascribing status vs. achieving status. achieving hard to do w/o social media #catalyst09
• atownley: Very interesting presentation from Marc Smith of Telligent on social analytics of many different sources for “networks” #smchat #catalyst09
• aewang: Interesting presentation from Marc Smith @Telligent on social analytics #catalyst09
• Spesh00: NodeXL – Free program for Social Analytics.. Looks slick as all get out. #catalyst09
• Spesh00: Social Network Analysis from Mike Gotta and Marc Smith. I wanna be the “Discussion Person”… #catalyst09

There were several notable points made during presentations that captured my attention:

• Social Media platforms are seen as meta identity servers.  Where LDAP and AD are not end user editable (usually), social media allows self-annotation AND annotation on others.
• Metrics in enterprise social media can be applied to assess how much an organization is isolated in silos: compartmentalized enterprises have few links across organizations.
• Issues with employees who leave (and might someday return) – how to keep the information while freezing the identity.
• Identity Management is a major area: lots of talk about “ascribed” roles (you are a person who can approve payments) versus “achieved” roles (you start behaving like an Answer Person).
• Identity leakage and diffusion: what happens when internal profile data gets outside or outside social media gets pulled internally?  If content is created on employee owned device and on personal time is it owned by the corporation?
• Citrix embraces employee provisioned hardware: provides $2,100 to employees to buy a laptop that meets or exceeds corporate requirements.  They own it and take it with them if/when they leave.
• Booz Allen Hamilton embraces internal social media, demonstrates value to organization versus “free and public” sites.  Will onboard 5K NEW EMPLOYEES this year!  Need to integrate new people fast!

Peter Pirolli, research at PARC, presented the keynote about the challenges and opportunities for the use of social media to address social problems.

There is growing interest in this space, for example NSF funding was significantly increased this year. For example, there is the new NSF Social-Computational Systems (SoCS) program: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503406&org=NSF&sel_org=NSF&from=fund

President Obama’s recent speech to the National Academy of Science (http://www.nasonline.org/site/PageServer) sets some of the context for this group’s vision, he speaks about crowd sourcing and its impact on science. (See minute 28:30) video is on the web site of the National Academy of Science http://edg1.vcall.com/video/nas/launch.asp

“I have charged the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy with leading a new effort to ensure that federal policies are based on the best and most unbiased scientific information. I want to be sure that facts are driving scientific decisions – and not the other way around.

As part of this effort, we’ve already launched a website that allows individuals to not only make recommendations to achieve this goal, but to collaborate on those recommendations; it is a small step, but one that is creating a more transparent, participatory and democratic government.”

Elsewhere in the speech there is a refernce to the role of (appropriately) digitizing medical records which I think includes the idea that people will increasingly gather online to work towards better personal health:

“The Recovery Act will support the long overdue step of computerizing America’s medical records, to reduce the duplication, waste, and errors that cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives.

But it’s important to note: these records also hold the potential of offering patients the chance to be more active participants in prevention and treatment. We must maintain patient control over these records and respect their privacy. At the same time, however, we have the opportunity to offer billions and billions of anonymous data points to medical researchers who may find in this information evidence that can help us better understand disease.”

There seems to be a role for the kinds of online communities and social media that people turn to when facing physical or medical challenges.

National Initiative for Social Participation at University of Maryland
http://iparticipate.wikispaces.com/Motivating+Scenario
http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/05/17280n.htm
http://www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157617551332795/

Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy

Here is the slide deck I presented at the “Studying Society In A Digital World” conference at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University.  They just posted most of the conference slides.  I took some pictures and posted to flickr.  Here is the slide deck I presented along with my talk at the conference.

The theme of mobile sensor data shared via social networks was one reinforced by the many presentations at the conference. In my talk, I focused on the idea that information want not to be free or expensive, rather, information wants to be copied.  Like DNA, the goal of any string of bits is to make a duplicate copy of themselves.  Several technical realities mean that while information may exist on a spectrum from private to public, it only moves in one direction (public) and almost never back.  Once made public on the Internet, even if only for a moment, a photo, document, or other digital object is almost certainly to have been copied, indexed, backed up, or replicated.  All efforts to delete a digital object once widely distributed is like trying to take wine out of water.  This is because all cryptography become brittle over time, most bits end up exposed after they get distributed, and more events trigger widespread distribution of bits than expected (for example, linking a photo, and a location, to a tweet that gets copied to LinkedIn and Facebook, that then appears in an RSS feed and is copied from there to Friend Feed.  As it travels, information looses more of the access controls that initially made it relatively private until it is effectively public.

Held in conjunction with SocialCom ’09
29th-30th August, Vancouver, Canada
http://thesocialmobileweb.org

The mobile space is evolving at an astonishing rate. At present there are over 3.5 billion mobile subscribers worldwide and with continued advances in devices, services and billing models, the mobile web looks set to inspire a new age of anytime, anywhere information access. The inherent characteristics of mobile phones enable new types of interactions, e.g. mobile phones are personal to the individual, they are always on and always connected. And as such we are seeing a shift towards mobile devices for social mediated tasks. The world is also witnessing an explosion in social web services. Online social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace continue to experience huge increases in usage, with more and more users seeking novel ways of interacting with their friends and family.

In this workshop we are interested in the combination of these two exciting research spaces: the social web and the mobile space. We believe that the social mobile web is going to be a highly influential research area in the near future. As such this workshop will investigate the current state of the social mobile web. Topics of interest to this workshop include (but are not limited to) the following:

* Novel social interactions on mobile devices.
* Social mobile content sharing and distribution services.
* Context aware mobile services – beyond location based services.
* Social mobile search and social mobile browsing.
* User evaluations of social mobile services.
* Mobile user interfaces that incorporate social elements.
* Mobility and social networks.
* Models of mobile social behavior and mobile traces.
* Urban gaming, mobile mixed reality, etc.
* Innovative social mobile applications.

This workshop is targeted towards researchers working within the mobile web and social web spaces.  Participants are invited to submit: (1) a short position or demonstration paper of 2-4 pages in length or (2) a full length technical paper of up to 10 pages in length. Papers should be in IEEE publication format and should be submitted as a PDF file via email to organizers@thesocialmobileweb.org. Workshop papers will be published by IEEE CS Press. Note that at least one author of accepted papers needs to register and attend the workshop.

Organising Committee
————————–
* Karen Church, Telefonica Research, Barcelona
* Josep M. Pujol, Telefonica Research, Barcelona
* Barry Smyth, University College Dublin, Ireland
* Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University, Evanston

Program Committee
————————–
* Lada Adamic, University of Michigan
* Alex Arenas, Universitat Rovira i Virgili
* John Breslin, DERI Institute, NUI Galway
* Meeyoung Cha, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
* Augustin Chaintreau, Thomson Research
* Nathan Eagle, MIT/Santa Fe Institute
* Andreas Flache, University of Groningen
* Jill Freyne, CSIRO
* Scott A. Golder, Cornell University
* Carmen Guerrero, Universidad Carlos III
* Tom Heath, Talis
* Matt Jones, FIT Lab, Swansea University
* David Lazer, Harvard University
* Nuria Oliver, Telefonica Research
* Alex Payne, Twitter
* Ramon Sang¸esa, Technical University of Catalonia, Citilab
* Albrecht Schmidt, University Duisburg-Essen
* Marc Smith, Telligent Systems
* Roger M. Whitaker, University of Cardiff
* Peter Mika, Yahoo Research Labs

Important Dates
11th May 2009: Deadline for submissions
5th June 2009: Notification to authors
15th June 2009: Final paper version deadline
29th-31st August 2009: Conference dates

Website
Further details are available from the workshop website at: http://thesocialmobileweb.org

2009 Communities and Technologies Conference

C&T 2009
June 25-27, 2009
The Pennsylvania State University
Information Sciences and Technology Building

In an increasingly networked world, the concept of community has taken on new meanings and inspired the development of a wide range of technologies aimed at forging connections, improving communication, and enabling coordination among groups of people. Today, such terms as virtual community, blogging, podcasting, and smart mobs have become commonplace, yet each represents a complex system of hardware, software, and people, shaped by perceptions, norms, rules, and habits, and occurring within varied social and cultural settings.

The Communities and Technologies biennial international conference serves as a forum for stimulating and disseminating research on the complex connections between communities – both physical and virtual – and information and communication technologies. Researchers studying aspects of this interaction between communities and technologies, regardless of disciplinary background, are providing original contributions to the Fourth International Conference on Communities and Technologies.

http://cct2009.ist.psu.edu/workshops.cfm

http://cct2009.ist.psu.edu/program.cfm

I am please to note that a paper about NodeXL will appear at the Communities and Technologies conference, there will also be a workshop on the use of the tool presented prior to the official start of the conference.

Penn State hosts C&T 2009

Hope to see you there!

Here are some pictures from the prior Communities and Technologies conference in 2007 on the campus of Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan.

Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy

Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy is hosting a conference on “Studying Society in a Digital World”

Thursday - Saturday, April 23-25, 2009 at Princeton University

http://citp.princeton.edu/front/conference-studying-society-in-a-digital-world/

Here are some standout people and talks at the conference:

Lada Adamic, Michigan

Eric Horvitz, Microsoft: 
Through the Lens of a Large Instant-Messaging Network: Planetary-Scale Views on Behavior

Nathan Eagle, MIT: 
Scaling of Sociodynamics

Michael Macy, Cornell

Scott Golder, HP: 
Temporal Rhythms in Electronic Society: Examples from Facebook and Elsewhere

Jukka-Pekka Onnela, Harvard: 
Using Cell Phones to Study the Large-Scale Structure of Social Networks

Paul Resnick, Michigan

Matt Salganik, Princeton:
Community-Generated and Community-Sorted Information

Edward Castronova, Indiana:
The Emergence of Virtual Money: Results from a Virtual World Experiment

Nosh Contractor, Northwestern

Robert Kraut, Carnegie Mellon: 
Theory-Based Design of On-Line Worlds

Jon Kleinberg, Cornell: 
Spatial Signatures of On-Line Behavior

Program on Networked Governance CCCSN Seminar 2009-03-02: Tanzeem Choudhury from Networked Governance.

This is a very informative lecture at Harvard from Tanzeem describing her Dartmouth group’s work to create, deploy and interpret the data from mobile inter-personal sensors.

2009 Social Computing Conference

A great conference on social media and related issues will be held this August in Vancouver: 2009 IEEE Social Computing Conference.  I will be reviewing for the conference and will be working on a couple of papers that will be submitted for review.

http://cse.stfx.ca/~socialcom09/

Topics of particular interest for the conference include, but are not limited to:

· Social Computing Theories
· Social System Design and Architectures
· Social Network Analysis and Mining, Semantic web
· Social Behavior Modeling
· Social Intelligence, Social Cognition
· Social Computing Applications such as collaborative filtering, bookmaking, tagging, and multi-agent systems
· Human Machine Interactions
· Emotional Intelligence, Cultural Dynamics, Opinion Representation, Influence Process
· Data Mining, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Artificial Intelligence in Social Contexts
· Trust, Privacy, Risk and Security in Social Contexts
· Social Engineering, Tools, and Case Studies
· Services Science, Quality, Architecture, Management, and Tools
IMPORTANT DATES
Workshop Proposal: March 01, 2009
Paper Submission Deadline: April 15, 2009
Authors Notification: June 01, 2009
Final Manuscript Due: June 15, 2009

Professor Ben Shneiderman, from the University of Maryland, Department of Computer Science, will deliver one of the keynote addresses on: “Network Analysis and Visualization for Understanding Social Computing”.

Hyperlinked Society

In my paper From Hyperlinks to Hyperties in  The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age (Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui, Editors; which came from the symposium of the same name at Annenberg School of Communication in Philadelphia).  I propose one of the ways mobile devices and social software will change the nature of the “interaction order” is to create “hyperties” – here is the abstract of the paper:

Goffman did write about telephone conversations as well as the ways broadcasters altered the patterns of spoken interactions in radio transmissions but he died before mobile phones became popular or online Internet social spaces became mainstream.  Several scholars have applied Goffman to social interaction in cyberspace.  There are lots of possible connections: Goffman wrote at length about the ways people “present” their identities to one another as if we were all actors on a stage.  After decades of “reality TV” this is not the revolutionary thought it once was in Goffman’s day.  Today his work can be a guide to studying the ways people now use the Internet to create representations of themselves and interact with one another.  Profiles on social network systems and other kinds of Internet based media publication tools are a new kind of surface for displaying membership insignia and symbols of connections with other people.  Like clothing or landscaping, Internet media are a medium for self-expression and claims to membership in a number of demographics and sub-cultures.

It is no longer necessary to bring Goffman to the Internet; the Internet is coming to Goffman.  Goffman’s work has even more value in the coming years.  The main focus of his work was the minute details of face-to-face interactions.  Goffman relished the details of careful control of eye contact and posture, tone of voice and timing.  When applied to “online” media this aspect of Goffman’s work has been applied metaphorically to the interactions of avatars and user names.  It is certainly possible to extend Goffman into these Internet spaces.  But now Internet spaces are extending themselves into the Interaction Order.

Mobile Internet devices are now along for the ride in many of the situations Goffman wrote about: meetings and encounters between people which feature exchanges and evaluations of identity claims.  Mobile phones are becoming more general purpose networked mobile computers.  Today these devices remain end points of Internet data more than sources.  But increasingly mobile devices have sensors that allow them to measure physical states of their owners and the presence of others in proximity.  When my phone notices your phone and can tell that it is your phone new opportunities emerge for people interacting in the interaction order.

The “interaction order” has been very analog and few innovations have taken place there — with a few notable exceptions.  Speech and body adornment were both big innovations that gave humans a big advantage in the creation of complex societies.  Since those novel practices there have been few things that have dramatically altered the basic nature of human to human interaction in face-to-face situations.  It could be argued that refinements like amphitheaters increase the number of people who can usefully gather in one place and still hear one another.  Similarly, writing and printing altered the interaction order only to the extent that sitting side-by-side with someone looking at the same relatively rare books created a structured interaction space but not new ways of presenting who we are or reading one another’s claims.

Clocks and maps help people get to an interaction at the right time and in the right place, but they do not change the basic capacity to signal between people.  Phones and cell phones create new kinds of spaces for an interaction order – with novel rules, but they do not change face-to-face interaction as much as they pull people out of face-to-face interactions and into a network mediated interactions.

Goffman will have renewed value for those trying to understand the impact of mobile devices because for the first time networked digital machines are aware of social interactions and are able to alter how we interact with each other.  The Interaction Order is “electrified” when we bring devices into our interactions with other people and those devices help us display the right symbols to others and access the right symbols about others.

As we just crossed the 5,000 download milestone, it seems time for the next phase in the evolution of all software projects: t-shirts.

We need an image, logo, or design that best reflects the NodeXL project and we would like your help!  If you have ideas, sketches or screen shots that you think could become a good logo for the project, please post them here!

We will pick among the best submissions and award a *FREE* copy of the 5th Edition of Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction by Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant to the one that inspires a logo for the project.

Designing the User Interface - 5th Edition

Submissions can be posted to the comments here or the discussion board on the NodeXL Codeplex Site at http://www.codeplex.com/nodexl

Thanks!

The next meeting of the “Quantified Self” group will be held on January 27th, 2009 at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information.

The group focuses on the emerging practice of recording lots of data about your physical state and activity.  Its where life logging meets populations of people grappling with illness or seeking optimal health.  The idea is that close records of our health will reveal connections between behaviors and outcomes, letting us change our behavior or at least detect early when things go wrong.  Others are just interested in detailed record keeping, an extension of detailed blogging or life streaming.  In many cases people are sharing these records with others, sometimes to get social support to meet a goal like running more miles or loosing more pounds.

I find the topic interesting for all these reasons and because the technologies for the “Quantified Self” are also going to be applied to the “Quantified Other” – sensors that record data about your body may ultimately notice that you are near other people.  It is when machines automatically notice when people are near people that I think the “QS” effort will have greatest impact.

Kevin Kelly has been blogging about “QS” on a blog of the same name. This will be the 3rd meeting of Quantified Self people.  I was able to attend the second meeting at the IDEO offices in San Francisco which had a great turn out of people and presentations of projects for assembling personal biographies and recording fleeting thoughts.  Hope to see you at the next meeting!

These projects point towards a world in which computers and mobile devices do more than connect us to the network, they will sense the world around us and reason about both our location and who is with us.  Combined with back-end data mining, new mobile sensor studded devices are coming that will alter the nature of social interaction in its last, most analog hold out: face-to-face, co-present interaction.

I want to explore this change in the nature of what the sociologist Erving Goffman referred to as the “interaction order“.  We are living through the early stages of the “electrification of the interaction order”, a time in which the ways we interact with one another is changed dramatically by the availability of mobile social information networks.  Online social networking, content sharing and discussion systems have effects that are multiplied when channeled through a device carried by every person and active in every interaction, however fleeting.  

Imagine going to a business meeting or conference and having Facebook suggest that you link to the people you spent the longest time talking to.  Mobile social computing will add more content to the torrent already generated by “desktop” experiences.  Some projects are already digging into this area: good examples include companies and products like nTag.com, SpotMe.Com, and the many trail and path tracking applications now appearing in the iPhone AppStore.  Scott Counts and I wrote about a location based social networking application that demonstrated many of these features as well as search and matching features that have yet to appear in the first wave of production systems.

A first step in this direction is to focus more on the analytic back-ends that will be needed for the management of all forms of social media repositories.  Community analysis servers that provide a dashboard of community health and activity indicators will be a critical differentiating feature for community hosts, managers, and leading participants.  Successful communities will be those that can cultivate contribution the best while managing conflict at the lowest cost.  Once desktop bound social encounters are channeled through an analytics console more real-world events sensed by mobile devices can be added to the mix.  

I am looking forward to some time to push back and reflect more about these changes while looking around for new ways to explore them.  I will take some time to get my family settled into our new home in California.  I hope to catch up with many people!  I will also be visiting Yale, University of Maryland and Berkely for talks this fall.  I plan to attend the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium in Redmond (it will be good to be back!) and the Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) in Sonoma.

My old masmith@microsoft.com email address is no longer active, so please contact me at marc.smith.email at gmail.com.  

I look forward to staying in touch with my many friends and colleagues at Microsoft while finding the time now to meet with a wide range of people interested in social media.