
On June 4th in Dublin, Ireland the 2012 International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. ICWSM gathers computer scientists, linguists, communications scholars, and the social scientists to increase understanding of social media in all its incarnations. Now in its sixth year, ICWSM is a leading venue for cutting-edge research in social media.
ICWSM-12, features a program of workshops, tutorials, contributed technical talks, posters and invited presentations. The main conference features keynote talks from prominent social scientists and technologists.
Keynote
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Keynote
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Keynote
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ANDREW TOMKINS
ENGINEERING DIRECTOR
GOOGLE+ |
PATRICK MEIER
DIRECTOR OF
CRISIS MAPPING AND PARTNERSHIPS
USHAHIDI |
LADA ADAMIC
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN |
Andrew Tomkins is an engineering director at Google working on measurement, modelling, and analysis of content, communities, and users on the World Wide Web. Prior to joining Google, he spent four years at Yahoo! as chief scientist of search, and eight years at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, where he co-founded the WebFountain project. Andrew holds Bachelors degrees in Math and CS from MIT, and a PhD in CS from Carnegie Mellon University; he has published over a hundred technical papers. |
Patrick Meier is a recognized expert and thought leader on the intersection between new technologies, crisis early warning, humanitarian response and human rights. He is the co-founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers and previously co-directed Harvard University’s Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning. Over the past 10 years, Patrick has consulted extensively with several international organizations including the UN, OSCE and OECD in Africa, Asia and Europe. Patrick is also a distinguished scholar completing his PhD at The Fletcher School during which time he was a Doctoral Fellow at Stanford University. In 2010, President Bill Clinton publicly thanked him for his leadership and contributions. He blogs at iRevolution.net. |
Lada A. Adamic is an associate professor in the School of Information and the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan. She is also affiliated with EECS. Her research interests center on information dynamics in networks: how information diffuses, how it can be found, and how it influences the evolution of a network’s structure. Her projects have included identifying expertise in online question and answer forums, studying the dynamics of viral marketing, and characterizing the structure in blogs and other online communities. She has received an NSF CAREER award, and best paper awards from Hypertext ’08, ICWSM-10 and ICWSM-11, and the most influential paper of the decade award from Web Intelligence ’11. |
ICWSM-12 will also hold a workshops and tutorials day just before the main conference. Of the workshops, I am particularly interested in the Workshop on Social Media Visualization (SocMedVis) – http://socmedvis.ucd.ie/
“The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers and industry practitioners interested in visual and interactive techniques for social media analysis, particularly in social sciences and humanities as well as in industry and to discuss ideas, techniques, and applications to support social media analysis.”
I will present a tutorial on Social Media Network Analysis with NodeXL on June 4th at the event:
Marc Smith (marc@connectedaction.net)
9:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Networks are a data structure common found across all social media services that allow populations to author collections of connections. The Social Media Research Foundation’s NodeXL project makes analysis of social media networks accessible to most users of the Excel spreadsheet application. With NodeXL, Networks become as easy to create as pie charts. Applying the tool to a range of social media networks has already revealed the variations present in online social spaces. A review of the tool and images of Twitter, flickr, YouTube, and email networks will be presented.

This network graph represents a network of 29 Twitter users whose recent tweets contained “icwsm”. The network was obtained on Saturday, 21 April 2012 at 20:33 UTC. There is an edge for each follows relationship. There is an edge for each “replies-to” relationship in a tweet. There is an edge for each “mentions” relationship in a tweet. There is a self-loop edge for each tweet that is not a “replies-to” or “mentions”. The earliest tweet in the network was tweeted on Saturday, 14 April 2012 at 18:55 UTC. The latest tweet in the network was tweeted on Saturday, 21 April 2012 at 05:48 UTC.
The graph is directed.
The graph’s vertices were grouped by cluster using the Clauset-Newman-Moore cluster algorithm.
The graph was laid out using the Harel-Koren layout algorithm.
The edge colors are based on relationship values. The vertex sizes are based on followers values.
Top 10 Vertices, Ranked by Betweenness Centrality:
@icwsm
@johnbreslin
@IBMResearch
@CaptSolo
@marc_smith
@bde
@karenchurch
@imbenzene
@hemant_Pt
@_akisato
Overall Graph Metrics:
Vertices: 29
Unique Edges: 68
Edges With Duplicates: 32
Total Edges: 100
Self-Loops: 18
Connected Components: 5
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 4
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 25
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 96
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 3
Average Geodesic Distance: 1.866455
Graph Density: 0.082512315270936
Modularity: 0.2488