Overview

Online social networks (e.g., Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc.) are among the most popular sites on the Web and are still growing rapidly. These systems have their own characteristics and challenges. However, the popularity of these new systems is not reflected in current systems research. There is no major venue or conference dedicated to system support for social networks. Little research has examined these systems or addressed their needs, for instance fundamental problems like managing and online querying of large social graphs are still mostly unchartered territories.

The workshop addresses this situation by providing a forum for researchers to discuss the systems issues associated with online social networks. The workshop nicely complements the topics of the main EuroSys conference, since the research issues with online social networks span the topics of distributed computing, databases, and storage systems as well as security and privacy. The ultimate goal of this workshop is to bring together the researchers and practitioners who are active in this emerging area.

Workshop topics

Online social networks provide mechanisms for establishing online identities and creating relationships. The resulting social graph provides a network for maintaining social relationships and for locating content, with the potential of changing computer systems and applications, for example, by providing new means to publish and find content as well as new ways to reason about trust.

This workshop will focus on the systems issues of online social networks. Broadly, a systems issue of social networks comprises three main areas:

Infrastructure support for social networks (including distributed systems, databases, and storage systems).
Ways of leveraging social networks in systems design.
Measurement and analysis of existing deployed social networks.

In greater detail, topics of interest in this workshop include, but are not limited to:

Management and querying of large social graphs.
Graph query engines and query optimization for online processing.
Support for consistency among concurrent readers and writers to a large distributed social graph.
Partitioning large social graphs.
Data storage and organization.
Benchmarking, modeling, and workload characterization.
Crawlers and other mechanisms for observing social network structure.
Experiences with deployed systems.
Leveraging social network properties in systems design.
Issues of privacy and security.
Tools for designing and deploying social networks.
Application programming interfaces for social networks.
System support for social analytics and network dynamics.
Methods for integrating multiple networks.
Performance measurement and analysis of online social networks systems.

Submission

Submissions may not exceed 6 pages double column, including everything (i.e., figures, tables, references, appendices, etc.), and should use a 10pt font (so specify \documentclass[10pt,twocolumn]{sigplanconf}). Papers must be formatted according to the ACM SIGPLAN style, for which templates are available for both LaTeX and Word ( http://eurosys2012.unibe.ch/submissions ).
Important dates (to be confirmed)
8 February 2012 Paper submission deadline
4 March 2012 Notification of acceptance
18 March 2012 Camera-ready submission deadline
10 April 2012 Workshop