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NOTICE: We extended the submission deadline to April 19th!

COVID-19 Information: In accordance with the current recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and prevention (CDC) and the United States Government to slow the spread of the COVID-19, the physical meeting of ICWSM-2020 in Atlanta, Georgia has been cancelled. However, plans are underway to convert ICWSM-20 to a virtual meeting during the same time period of June 8-11, 2020. More information will be posted on https://www.icwsm.org/2020/index.html

5th International Workshop on Social Sensing (SocialSens 2020)
Special Edition on Narrative Analysis on Social Media
An ICWSM 2020 Full-Day Workshop

Important Dates
Paper submission: April 19th
Notification: May 10th
Final manuscript submission: TBD


The social sensing workshop (started in 2015) is a multidisciplinary meeting place that brings together social scientists and computer scientists, interested in social media analysis, around research that interprets social media as measurement instruments. Social media democratized information production offering an unprecedented view into human habits, customs, culture, stances, and indeed descriptions of physical events that transpire in the world. They also give unprecedented opportunities to spread misinformation, influence opinion, distract from truth, or advance specific agendas, hidden or overt. What are scientific foundations for modeling this new communication channel? How to exploit information media signals to better understand social systems, communities, and each other? How to identify and remove noise and misuse of this medium? If social media are measurement instruments, what specifically can one measure, what underlying theory allows one to do so, and what applications are enabled by the endeavor? Traditional sensors in physical domains respond to signals with well-understood behaviors and propagation models. What can one learn from physical signal processing literature to enable novel social media analysis methods? This scope brings about new interdisciplinary research challenges and opportunities at the intersection of communication and sensing, social network analysis, information theory, data mining, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and social science.

The 5th installation of the workshop focuses on the human narrative. The narrative is a construct that embodies both linguistic and social aspects. It is one of the units of communication that intertwine subject descriptions with the author's point of view. Narratives therefore potentially shed light simultaneously on both the covered topic (e.g., an event in the world) and the different attitudes towards it. How can a narrative be described and captured with computational techniques? How can one separate different narratives (or spins) on the same topic? How can one infer social attitudes from narrative attributes? Can one predict how a narrative might propagate on the medium? Can one determine if a certain narrative is organic or part of an interference effort? What is an effective counter-narrative? How does finite human attention and cognitive capacity impact narrative propagation in the presence of accidental or intentional concurrent distractions? Ultimately, can one predict the evolution of narratives? Historically, the intent of the social sensing workshop has been to combine scientists from computing and social domains around social media related topics. With narrative analysis as the topic in 2020, we invite papers and vision abstracts that approach it from different perspectives, from physical signal processing to social science. The hope is that such a multidisciplinary intellectual exchange generates insights that draw on the best of multiple worlds: analysis of physical signals (that propagate on physical channels, such as acoustic and vibration signals), analysis of information signals (that propagate on social channels), and analysis of social systems.

The 5th international workshop on social sensing (special edition on narrative analysis on social media) solicits contributions from academia, industry, and government on recent advances in both theoretical and experimental research in the above areas. We invite technical papers and position abstracts describing novel ideas, exciting results, and/or real-world experiences. Two types of submissions are solicited:

1. Full papers: Maximum length of 6 pages, including title, author list, abstract, all figures, tables, and references. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the workshop and present the paper. Accepted papers will be broken into thematic sessions and presented in a panel discussion format (see workshop format below).
2. Vision abstracts: This is a 2-page extended abstract that offers a future vision for a research direction the field of social sensing. The abstract should include title, author list, description (the vision statement), and references. A graphical illustration is highly desired (included in the 2-page limit). At least one author of each accepted abstract must register for the workshop and participate in a "Future Visions" session. The session will include short position talks by authors of accepted abstracts, followed by discussion.

All submissions should be in English. They should be prepared as ICWSM proceeding format. All paper/abstract submission will be electronic, in PDF format. Failure to register for the workshop may disqualify the paper/abstract from inclusion in the proceedings.

Submission Page
Click Workshop Submission System

General Chairs:
Jiawei Han, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA
Ning Yu, Leidos Inc., USA
Program Chairs:
Emilio Ferrara, University of Southern California, USA
Tarek Abdelzaher, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA