Workshop Description

Social networks research has come a long way since the notable “six-degree separation” experiment. In recent years, social network research has advanced significantly, thanks to the prevalence of the online social websites and the availability of a variety of offline large-scale social network systems such as collaboration networks. These social network systems are usually characterized by the complex network structures and rich accompanying contextual information. Researchers are increasingly interested in addressing a wide range of challenges residing in these disparate social network systems, including identifying common static topological properties
and dynamic properties during the formation and evolution of these social networks, and how contextual information can help in analyzing the pertaining social networks. These issues have important implications on community discovery, anomaly detection, trend prediction and can enhance applications in multiple domains such as information retrieval, recommendation systems, security and so on.

The second SNA-KDD '2009 aims to bring together practitioners and researchers with a specific focus on the emerging trends and industry needs associated with the traditional social network study (by sociologists), the social Web (facebook, LinkedIn), twitter, and other forms of social networking systems. Both theoretical and experimental research are encouraged. The interesting topics include (1) theoretical foundations of heterogenous networks, (2) data mining advances on the discovery and analysis of communities, on personalization for solitary activities (like search) and social activities (like discovery of potential friends), on the analysis of user behavior in open fora (like conventional sites, blogs and fora) and in commercial platforms (like e-auctions) and on the associated security and privacy-preservation challenges; (3) social network modeling, scalable, customizable social network infrastructure construction, dynamic growth and evolution patterns identification and discovery using machine learning approaches or multi-agent based simulation.

Workshop Topics

The second SNA-KDD '2009 solicits contributions on social network analysis and graph mining, including the emerging applications of the Web as a social medium. Papers should elaborate on social network theory, data mining methods, issues associated to data preparation and pattern interpretation, both for conventional data (usage logs, query logs, document collections) and for multimedia data (pictures and their annotations, multi-channel usage data). Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
* Social network theory from sociologists and their implications for relational network analysis
* Foundations of heterogenous networks
* Communities discovery and analysis in large scale online and offline social networks
* Personalization for search and for social interaction
* Recommendations for product purchase, information acquisition and establishment of social relations
* Data protection inside communities
* Misbehavior detection in communities
* Web mining algorithms for clickstreams, documents and search streams
* Preparing data for web mining
* Pattern presentation for end-users and experts
* Evolution of patterns in the Web
* Evolution of communities in the Web
* Dynamics and evolution patterns of social networks, trend prediction
* Contextual social network analysis
* Temporal analysis on social networks topologies
* Search algorithms on social networks
* Multi-agent based social network modeling and analysis
* Application of social network analysis
* Anomaly detection in social network evolution

Paper Submission

All submissions must be made electronically at the paper submission website.

Papers should be no longer than 10 pages inclusive of all references and figures. Papers should be submitted in ACM proceedings format (two columns, 9pt font, approx. 1in margins). Please use the prescribed formatting guidelines of KDD (ACM Proceedings) which can be found at: http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html.

All papers must be submitted in either PDF (preferred) or postscript. Please ensure that any special fonts used are included in the submitted documents. All papers must be original, and have not been published elsewhere.

The workshop proceedings will be published by the ACM Digital Library and distributed during the workshop.

Important Dates

* May 1 , 2009: Electronic submission of full papers & abstracts
* May 15, 2009: Author notification
* May 29, 2009: Submission of Camera-ready papers
* June 28, 2009: Workshop in Las Vegas, California

Workshop Co-Chairs

Note: for inquiries please send e-mail to hazhan @ microsoft.com and pmitra @ ist.psu.edu

* Lee Giles Pennsylvania State University
* Prasenjit Mitra Pennsylvania State University
* Igor Perisic LinkedIn
* John Yen Pennsylvania State University
* Haizheng Zhang Microsoft