ICWSM-12
THE 6TH INTERNATIONAL AAAI CONFERENCE ON WEBLOGS AND SOCIAL MEDIA
4-8 JUNE 2012: TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, IRELAND

Call for Papers
===============

Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial
Intelligence
Technical Paper Submission Site: Available November 1, 2011

Abstracts Due: January 13, 2012
Full Papers Due: January 18, 2012 (by midnight Pacific Time)

The International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
(ICWSM) is a unique forum that brings together researchers from
the disciplines of computer science, linguistics, communication,
and the social sciences. The broad goal of ICWSM is to increase
understanding of social media in all its incarnations.
Submissions describing research that blends social science and
computational approaches are especially encouraged.

Though this conference is just in its sixth year, it has become
one of the premier venues for social scientists and technologists
to gather and discuss cutting-edge research in social media. This
is largely due to a typical acceptance rate of 20% for
full-length research papers published in our conference
proceedings and support from the Association for the Advancement
of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

For ICWSM-12, in addition to the usual program of contributed
technical talks, posters and invited presentations, the main
conference will include a selection of keynote talks from
prominent social scientists and technologists. Building on the
success of the first workshops program in 2011 and our regular
tutorials day, ICWSM-12 will also hold a workshops and tutorials
day just before the main conference.

Disciplines
-----------

* Computational linguistics/NLP
* Text mining/data mining
* Psychology
* Sociology (including social network analysis)
* Communication
* Anthropology
* Media studies
* Visualization
* Political science
* Computational social science
* HCI
* Economics
* Graph theory, concrete analysis and simulation of graphical
models

Media
-----

* Weblogs, including comments
* Social networking sites
* Microblogs
* Wikis (Wikipedia)
* Forums, mailing lists, newsgroups
* Community media sites (YouTube, Flickr)

Topics Include
--------------

* Psychological, personality-based and ethnographic studies of
social media
* Analyzing the relationship between social media and mainstream
media
* Qualitative and quantitative studies of social media
* Centrality/influence of social media publications and authors
* Ranking/relevance of blogs and microblogs; web page ranking
based on blogs and microblogs
* Social network analysis; communities identification; expertise
and authority discovery; collaborative filtering
* Trust; reputation; recommendation systems
* Human computer interaction; social media tools; navigation and
visualization
* Subjectivity in textual data; sentiment analysis;
polarity/opinion identification and extraction
* Text categorization; topic recognition; demographic/gender/age
identification
* Trend identification and tracking; time series forecasting;
measuring predictability of phenomena based on social media
* New social media applications; interfaces; interaction
techniques
* Social innovation and effecting change through social media

Keynotes
--------

* Andrew Tomkins (Google+)
* More to be announced

Author Submission Account
-------------------------

Authors must set up an account (or add ICWSM-12 to your list of
conferences) at the ICWSM-12 web-based technical paper submission
site, which will be available November 1, 2011. Please make a
note of your password, as this will allow you to log on to submit
an abstract and paper. In order to avoid a rush at the last
minute, authors are encouraged to set up their account as soon as
possible, and well in advance of the January 13, 2012 abstract
deadline.

Abstract and Paper Submission
-----------------------------

Electronic abstract submission through the ICWSM-12 paper
submission site is required on or preferably before January 13,
2012 at 11:59 PM PST. Full papers are due via the submission site
no later than Monday, January 18, 2012 at midnight PST. We cannot
accept submissions by e-mail or fax. Authors will receive
confirmation of receipt of their abstracts and papers, including
a paper number, shortly after submission. AAAI will contact
authors again only if problems are encountered with papers.

Content Guidelines
------------------

Submissions to other conferences or journals: ICWSM-12 will not
accept any paper that, at the time of submission, is under review
for or has already been published or accepted for publication in
a journal or conference. This restriction does not apply to
submissions for workshops and other venues with a limited
audience. If in doubt please contact the PC Chairs.

If duplicate submissions are identified during the review process
then:

* All submissions from that author will be disqualified from the
current ICWSM conference;
* And authors will not be permitted to submit papers to the ICWSM
conference in the following year.

_Format:_ Papers must be in trouble-free, high resolution PDF
format, formatted for US Letter (8.5" x 11") paper, using Type 1
or TrueType fonts. Full papers must be no longer than 8 pages,
including references, poster papers must be no longer than 4
pages, and demo descriptions must be no longer than 2 pages, and
all must be submitted by the deadlines given above, and formatted
in AAAI two-column, camera-ready style (see the author
instructions page ). Please note that the formatting and
submission instructions at the author site are for final,
accepted papers; no additional pages can be purchased at the
review stage. In addition, the copyright slug may be omitted in
the initial submission phase and no copyright form is required
until a paper is accepted for publication.

_Anonymity:_ ICWSM-12 review is double-blind. Therefore, please
anonymize your submission: do not put the author(s) names or
affiliation(s) at the start of the paper, and do not include
funding or other acknowledgments in papers submitted for review.
Citations to authors’ own prior relevant work should be included,
either by not specifying that this is the authors’ own work, or
where this is not possible, by anonymizing the citation itself.
It is up to the authors' discretion how much to further modify
the body of the paper to preserve anonymity. The requirement for
anonymity does not extend outside of the review process, e.g. the
authors can decide how widely to distribute their papers over the
Internet before the program committee meeting. Even in cases
where the author’s identity is known to a reviewer, the double
blind process will serve as a symbolic reminder of the importance
of evaluating the submitted work on its own merits without regard
to authors’ reputation.

_Language:_ All submissions must be in English.

Conference Registration
-----------------------

All accepted papers and extended abstracts will be published in
the conference proceedings. At least one author must register for
the conference by the deadline for camera-ready copy submission.
In addition, the registered author must attend the conference to
present the paper in person.

Publication
-----------

All accepted papers and abstracts will be allocated eight (8)
pages in the conference proceedings. Authors will be required to
transfer copyright of their paper to AAAI.

Datasets
--------

This year, for the first time, we will be providing a service for
hosting datasets pertaining to research presented at the
conference. Authors of accepted papers will be encouraged to
share the datasets on which their papers are based, while
adhering to the terms and conditions of the data provider. Of
these datasets, one will be selected for an award which will be
based on the quality, scope, and timeliness of each dataset. More
information will be available on our website.

Conference Website
------------------

http://icwsm.org/

For general information regarding ICWSM-12, please write to
icwsm12@aaai.org.

Committee
---------

General Chair:

John Breslin, NUI Galway

Programme Chairs:

Nicole Ellison, Michigan State University
James G. Shanahan, Church and Duncan Group Inc.
Zeynep Tufekci, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Local Chairs:

Derek Greene, University College Dublin
Conor Hayes, Digital Enterprise Research Institute

Sponsorship Chair:

Meenakshi Nagarajan, IBM

Data Chairs:

Derek Ruths, McGill University
Ian Soboroff, NIST

Demos Chair:

Alejandro Jaimes, Yahoo!

Social Media / Publicity Chair:

Max L. Wilson, Swansea University

Tutorials Chair:

Bernie Hogan, Oxford Internet Institute

Workshops Chair:

Sofus Macskassy, USC and Fetch Labs

Regional Chairs:

Americas: Raquel Recuero, Universidade Católica de Pelotas
Asia Pacific: Hideaki Takeda, National Institute for Informatics
Europe: Jan-Hinrik Schmidt, Hans-Bredow-Institut
Middle East and Africa: Sihem Amer-Yahia, Qatar Computing
Research Institute

Webmaster:

Ritesh Agrawal, AT&T Labs Research

Venue
-----

Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Student Awards
--------------

We will be providing an increased number of student awards this
year to help cover the cost of travel, subsistence, and
registration to the ICWSM-12 conference. Details will be posted
on the conference website.

Important Dates
---------------

Papers / Posters / Demos:

Abstract Submission: January 13, 2012
Full Paper, Poster and Demo Submission: January 18, 2012 (by
midnight Pacific Time)
Notification of Acceptance: February 27, 2012
Camera Ready Due: March 12, 2012
ICWSM-12, Dublin: June 4-8, 2012

Tutorials:

Tutorial Proposal Submission: January 9, 2012
Tutorial Acceptance: January 23, 2012

Workshops:

Workshop Proposal Submission: December 14, 2011
Workshop Acceptance: January 6, 2012
Workshop Paper Submission: March 2, 2012
Workshop Paper Acceptance Notification: March 16, 2012
Workshop Paper Final Camera-Ready Copy Due: April 2, 2012

Kind regards,
John
ICWSM-12 General Chair
John Breslin, NUI Galway