Call for Papers – ICWSM 2010 – Washington, D.C. May 23-26

Here is the Call for Papers for the


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

IMPORTANT DATES:
Tutorial Proposals: December 1, 2009
Paper Submission: January 8, 2010
Poster/Demo Submission: January 8, 2010

Paper Acceptance: March 3, 2010
Poster/Demo Acceptance: March 3, 2010
Workshop Submission: March 1, 2010
Camera Ready Copies: March 12, 2010

Featuring a keynote by:
Professor Bob Kraut
, CMU,
on “Designing Online Communities from Theory

Professor Michael Kearns, Computer and Information Science,
Univ. of Pennsylvania,
on “Behavioral Experiments in Strategic Networks”

Speakers in Special Sessions:
– Nicole Ellison, Dept. of Telecommunication,
Information Studies and Media, Michigan State Univ.
– James Pennebaker, Dept. of Psychology, Univ. of Texas, Austin
– S. Craig Watkins, Dept. of Radio, TV and Film, Univ. of Texas, Austin- Don Burke, CIA Directorate of Science and Technology, Intellipedia
– Haym Hirsh, National Science Foundation IIS Division Director
– Macon Phillips, U.S. White House, Head of New Media

Tutorial Speakers will include:
– Jake Hofman, Yahoo! Research,
“Large-scale social media analytics with Hadoop”

– Cindy Chung and James Pennebaker, Univ. Texas,
“Using LIWC to uncover social psychology in social media”

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Liveblogging ICWSM 2009 – Day 2

ICWSM 2009 in San Jose

[Vladimir Barash is liveblogging the ICWSM conference]

10.30am A categorical model for discovering latent structure in social annotations (Said Kashoob)
Given a collection of web objects, users and tags, can we model the underlying tag generation process?

-Discover implict communities of interest?

-Categories of related tags?

-For given category, id most relevant objs for category

-compare categories

Initial thoughts: content-based topic modeling (Latent Dirichlet Allocation, LSA). Recent work applying LDA models to tags (Wu 2006, Zhou 2008)

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Liveblogging ICWSM 2009 – Day 1

2009 ICWSM in San Jose

[Vladimir Barash is liveblogging the ICWSM conference]
9-10AM: A Tempest: Or, on the Flood of Interest in Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, and the Computational Treatment of Subjective Language (Lillian Lee)

-Sentiment analysis using discussion structure: clasify speeches in US congressional floor debates as supporting or opposing proposed legislation -Individual doc classifier -agreement (degree) classifier for pairs of speeches

-Agreement info allows COLLECTIVE CLASSIFICATION – “agreeing speeches should get the same label”

-ECON: debate about effect of sentiment on sales
-comScore (users willing to pay 20-99% more for 5 star item vs. 4 star item)
-Jury is still out

-SOC: What opinions are influential? (Niculescu-Danescu Muzyl et al.)
-Prior work has focused on features of text and has not been in context of sociological aspects of reviews
-look at helpfulness scores

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Conference: 2009 International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media in San Jose

ICWSM 2009 in San Jose

Another conference focused on research on blogs and other forms of social media is “ICWSM” – the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.  I was able to attend the previous meeting of this conference last March in Seattle and give a talk about different classifications of social media and I am looking forward to attending this year’s meeting in San Jose.  Last year we had a poster paper in the conference about the ways some users in a blog system called Wallop were able to hold other users in the system.

Some Users Pack a Wallop: Measuring the Impact of Core Users on the Participation of Others in Online Social Systems
Thomas M. Lento, Eric Gleave, Marc A. Smith, Howard T. Welser
2008 ICWSM - Some Users Pack A Wallop

There was also a paper about the lessons learned from managing large corporate online community efforts.

Space Planning for Online Community
Danyel Fisher, Tammara Combs Turner, Marc A. Smith

This year, we have a poster in the conference that is focused on the ways network structures created when people reply to one another can be used to predict whether a message or thread is a question and answer exchange or a long discussion or debate.

Distinguishing Knowledge vs. Social Capital in Social Media with Roles and Context
Vladimir Barash, Marc Smith, Lise Getoor, Howard Welser

The conference attracts some great people and features the state of the art in research at the intersections of computer science, natural language processing, social network analysis, search engine/information retrieval design, information visualization, knowledge management and the social sciences.  That can be eclectic but this is the place for hearing about new work on Wikis, Blogs, Message Boards, and other social media systems like social networking services, micro-blogging systems, and mobile software.

2009 ICWSM in San Jose

The conference is held this year in May, from the 17th-20th, in San Jose, California.

Here are my pictures from last year’s ICWSM in 2008, held in Seattle, Washington.

[flickrset id=”72157604404329067″ thumbnail=”square” overlay=”true” size=”medium”]

There is also a nice picture from Joe McCarthy of Tom Lento and me in front of our poster at ICWSM 2008.

Tom Lento and Marc Smith @ ICWSM 2008
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