IEEE International Workshop on:
Business Applications of Social Network Analysis (BASNA)

Colocated with IMSAA 2010, 15th December 2010, Bangalore, India

Today we reside in a networked environment - networks or links provide an integral way to connect multiple entities in that environment. For example, in telecommunication the network connects the caller and receiver of a phone conversation. On the internet, various websites are connected by means of hyperlinks. In social media, various individuals are related by visiting or commenting on the same discussion, blog, video, etc. The networks are ubiquitous in Biology and they represent interactions between various biological entities such as genes, proteins and metabolites. Network can evolve in various other domains like in economics, finance, physics, biology, medicine, neuroscience, social sciences, etc. Networks have existed for a long time, but the emergence of internet with such evident networks of hyperlinks and value addition by mining these social networks has seen a large surge of research in social networks across various domains.

Analytics or data mining has traditionally been performed on the entities in isolation. Incorporating the insights from the network can provide huge leap in the analytics and data mining insights on the entities. For example, exploiting the hyperlinks between web pages brought a revolution in web search. Improved predictions are possible by incorporating the insights from telecommunication networks. In social sciences the interaction between various people in a social network is simulated in a game theoretic framework to evaluate the effect of government policies or changes in social scenarios.

Recently, SNA has emerged also as one of the most innovative and successful fields of management research, as several special issues devoted to SNA recently published in top academic management journals testify. With the digitalization of social relations and communications, management scholars are increasingly able to extract relational data from company websites, online organizational communications, news, and online databases. Also, new research tools, such as web surveys, web scraping tools, text analysis software, and data mining tools, facilitate the extraction, organization, visualization, and interpretation of relational data. Thirdly, the increasing computer power allows management scholars to process larger amounts of data (and relational data) using more sophisticated (and memory expensive) algorithms and statistical methods (such as Exponential Random Graph Models) to analyze larger social networks.

Management consulting companies, technology providers, social networking sites, and business corporations are starting now to address their attention towards SNA as a management tool. The most successful business applications of SNA in business practice deal with knowledge management systems, support to innovation processes, customer-relationship management tools, intra-organizational coordination. However, far from being a mainstream management innovation, SNA is still a research-driven set of theories and methodologies with little applications in the business world. However, the more company data are digitalized, collected, stored, organized, and integrated in enterprise data warehouses, the more data mining tools are able to extract information and knowledge, the more SNA will be able support the identification and management of internal or external social networks for the creation of business value.

The aim of this workshop is to encourage multidisciplinary discussions related to novel ideas and application geared towards analyzing social network data. By bringing together researchers in the fields of SNA, data mining, and management studies, the workshop will focus on identifying the “grey” areas of collaboration among their respective disciplines:

* The role of data mining techniques in identifying scalable methods for the extraction and organization of social relations for management research and business practice
* The role of management research in guiding data mining efforts and SNA metrics development towards theoretically-grounded discoveries about social network emergence.
* The role of Social Network Analysis in developing and applying metrics and tools for the mapping, evaluation, visualization, and design of social relations in organizations.

Topics:
The workshop's topics of interest include (but are not limited to the following):

Topics of Interest:

* Algorithms for data mining social networks, graphs, links
* Applications of social network data mining to address a real world business scenario

* Anomaly detection in network based applications like intrusion detection in telecommunication
* Fraud detection in telecommunication network
* Application of scale-free networks (internet, finance, biology, sensor networks etc)
* Mobile social networks
* Application of network data mining to discover structures of genes, proteins or metabolites
* Data mining applications for micro-blogging (real time mining)
* Community discovery in social networks
* Data mining on large graphs
* Mining Wikipedia like graph/network structure
* Data mining applications for viral marketing
* Behavioral analysis in social networks
* Social semantic web
* Privacy issues in social networks
* Recommendations in social networks
* Contextual applications for social networks

Social Network Analysis (SNA) based:

* Knowledge Management (identifying experts, fostering knowledge exchange and integration, creating and developing communities of practice)
* Marketing (identifying new customers, customer relationship management)
* Innovation Support (enhancing innovation capacity, supporting new product development teams)
* Change Management (managing change, post-merger integration, identifying key enablers)
* Talent Management (hiring and career development)
* Leadership Development (decision-making, identifying leaders)
* Intra-Organizational Coordination (supporting coordination and information flows among organizational members and units)
* Inter-Organizational Coordination (supporting collaboration in consortia, industrial districts, inter-organizational alliances)


IMPORTANT DATES:

Paper submission: 19th September 2010 (EST, USA)
Paper review notification: 11th October 2010 (EST, USA)
Paper camera ready: 31th October 2010 (EST, USA)