Aim and Scope

Social networking services have become extremely popular in recent years, especially for young people. However, they are still rooted in the virtual world. People usually need to sit behind a desktop computer to upload photos, write blogs and communicate with friends. The development of wireless networks and location sensing technologies have made it easier to track and share personal location information on the fly. By adding a location dimension, we can bring social networking back from the virtual world into real life and allow real-life experiences to be shared in a more convenient way. We define Location Based Social Networks (LBSN) as social network services where people can track and share location related information with each other, via either mobile or desktop computers. As location is one of the most important aspects for people’s everyday lives, a lot of novel application scenarios can be supported by LBSN. For example, we can collect and share more trustworthy location recommendations within LBSN and use them to rank interesting locations, discover new places, people and activities.

The objective of this workshop is to provide a single forum for researchers and technologists to discuss the state-of-the-art, present their contributions, and set future directions in emerging innovative research for location based social networks.



Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following aspects of location based social networks:

• Spatial data mining and knowledge discovery

• Personal location/trajectory data mining

• Spatial query log mining

• Geo-tagged multimedia mining

• Opinion mining for location related information

• Spatial data indexing

• Hybrid index for spatial, textual and multimedia data

• Index for moving objects

• Location based social network analysis

• Geographical information extraction and retrieval

• Spatial data acquisition and pre-processing

• Spatial data visualization and computer human interface

• Location privacy, data sharing and security

• Navigation and traffic prediction

• Systems, architectures and middleware



Submission

We seek three kinds of submissions related to location based social networks:

• Full research papers – up to 8 pages

• Vision papers and short technical papers - up to 4 pages

• Demo papers – up to 2 pages

Authors are invited to submit full, original, unpublished research papers that are not being considered for publication in any other forum. Manuscripts should be submitted in PDF format and formatted using the ACM camera-ready templates available at:

http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html

Papers must be submitted electronically, via the submission website on or before the submission deadline. All accepted papers will be included in the ACM digital library.



Important Dates

Paper submission: Aug. 18, 2009

Notification of acceptance: Sep. 7, 2009

Camera-ready copies due: Sep. 28, 2009

Workshop date: Nov. 3, 2009



General Chair

Xiaofang Zhou, University of Queensland (Australia)

Program Chair

Xing Xie, Microsoft Research Asia (China)

Demo Chair

Gang Guan, Microsoft Research Asia (China)

Program Committee

Xin Chen, NAVTEQ (USA)

Bin Jiang, University of Gavle (Sweden)

Marek Kowalkiewicz, SAP Research (Australia)

Wang-Chien Lee, Pennsylvania State University (USA)

Iqbal Mohomed, Microsoft Research (USA)

Sung Hyon Myaeng, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Korea)

Yanwei Pang, Tianjin University (China)

Wen-Chih Peng, National Chiao Tung University (Taiwan)

Kazutoshi Sumiya, University of Hyogo (Japan)

Qiang Yang, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Hong Kong)

Nenghai Yu, University of Science and Technology of China (China)

Yang Yue, Wuhan University (China)



Contact Information

For enquiries and further information, please contact:

Xing Xie (xingx at microsoft.com)

Xiaofang Zhou (zxf at itee.uq.edu.au)

Gang Guan (gguan at Microsoft.com)