First call for papers

AAAI Fall Symposium Series 2012: Symposium on Social Networks and Social Contagion

November 2-4, 2012, Westin Arlington Gateway, Arlington, Virginia

http://staff.vbi.vt.edu/swarup/snsc/

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Important Dates
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Paper submission deadline: May 25, 2012
Notification of acceptance: June 22, 2012
Camera ready deadline: July 20, 2012
SNSC Symposium: November 2-4, 2012

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Symposium Theme
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With the emergence of Computational Social Science as a field of
collaboration between computer scientists and social scientists, the
study of social networks and processes on these networks (social
contagion) has been gaining interest. Many topics of traditional
sociological interest (such as the diffusion of innovation, emergence of
norms, identification of influencer) can now be studied using detailed
computational models and extensive simulation. The advent and popularity
of online social media also allows the creation of massive data sets
which can inform models and underlying sociological theory. The ubiquity
of "smart devices" (such as smart phones) also provides opportunities to
gather extensive data on the behaviors and interactions of humans in
"real space".

The goal of this symposium is to bring together a community of
researchers interested in addressing these issues and to encourage
interdisciplinary approaches to these problems. We specifically encourage participation and contributions from many communities, including statistics, mathematics, the social, behavioral and economic sciences, and the medical and health sciences.

Point of contact for further questions:
Samarth Swarup (swarup@vbi.vt.edu)

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Topics
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Papers are invited on topics including, but not limited to, the following:

 * Social Contagion
     o the spread of ideas or beliefs
     o emotion contagion
     o diffusion of information
     o the spread of changes in language
     o diffusion of innovations
     o emergence of norms
     o interventions to prevent contagion
     o influence maximization
     o complex contagion
     o virtual agents, agent-human contagion
 * Social Networks
     o collaborative tagging
     o collaborative filtering
     o community structure
     o social capital in networks
     o correlating demographics and structure
 * Game Theory in Social Networks and Social Contagion
     o influence maximization
     o influence blocking maximization game
     o other game-theoretic approaches
 * Network Evolution
     o homophily and heterophily
     o relation between structure and dynamics
 * Network Formation
     o models based on sociological theory, e.g. structural balance
     o organizations, formal vs. informal networks
     o network structure inference and label inference
     o network generation models
 * Human Data Elicitation
     o expression of attitudes/personality from online sources (such as
       Twitter and Facebook)
     o using social media for tracking social contagion, developing
       social networks, etc.
     o crowdsourcing as a means to learn about humans
     o Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) as "virtual
       laboratories" to study social contagion
     o reality mining for social networks


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Submissions
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Submissions can be in two forms: a paper of up to eight pages in
 (https://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Fall/Templates/AuthorKit.zip)AAAI format for consideration for an oral presentation, or an extended abstract of up to two pages in
AAAI format for consideration for a poster presentation.

Submission website:
https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=snsc2012

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Organizing Committee
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 * Samarth Swarup, Virginia Tech
 * Madhav Marathe, Virginia Tech
 * Kiran Lakkaraju, Sandia National Laboratory
 * Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University
 * Milind Tambe, University of Southern California
 * Winter Mason, Stevens Institute of Technology

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Program Committee
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 * Rich Colbaugh, Sandia National Labs
 * Wai-Tat Fu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
 * Les Gasser, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
 * V. S. Anil Kumar, Virginia Tech
 * Antonio Sanfilippo, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
 * Michael Szell, SENSEable City Laboratory, MIT
 * Maksim Tsvetovat, George Mason University
 * Jon Whetzel, Sandia National Labs