POLITICS, ELECTIONS AND DATA (PLEAD)
CIKM'12 Workshop

Maui Hawaii, USA
November 2, 2012 (tentative)

June 29, 2012 Papers submission Deadline

http://research.yahoo.com/workshops/plead2012/


= Politics, Elections and Data =

What is the role of the internet in politics and during campaigns and what is the role of large amounts of user data in all of this?

In the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign the Democrats were far more successful than the Republicans in utilizing online media for mobilization, co-ordination and fundraising. For the first time, social media and the Internet played a fundamental role in political campaigns. However, technical research in this area has been surprisingly limited and fragmented.

The goal of this 1-day workshop, taking place right before the U.S. presidential elections, is to bring together researchers working at the intersection of social network analysis, computational social science and political science, to share and discuss their ideas in a common forum; and to inspire further developments in this growing, fascinating field of computational political science.


= The Workshop Topics =

* Classifying users according to political leaning
* Classifying web queries and web pages according to political leaning
* Discovering political topics from search logs and social media data
* Describing and quantifying political campaigns and their effect on online media
* Influence of political fact checking (e.g. Politifact) on rumor spreading
* Visualizing political issues and other socio-economic controversies
* Applying sentiment analysis to find positive/negative aspects of issues
* Quantifying the effects of a "Daily Me" in political search and content
* Prediction markets for election prediction

The workshop will include Filippo Menczer as a keynote speaker, a panel discussion with scientists and media experts, as well as presentations of accepted contributions. The schedule will provide time for both organized and open discussion.


= Submission Guidelines =

Papers should be no longer than 8 pages (2-column), including all references, figures and appendices. Shorter papers describing work in progress are explicitly encouraged, though there is no separate short paper track. Please submit your papers through CIKM's CMT Site (https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/CIKM2012/Default.aspx). You'll find the workshop listed as one of CIKM's "tracks".

Submissions should follow the ACM SIG proceedings format, Option 2 (http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates/).

All submissions must be in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). Please ensure that any special fonts used are included in the submitted documents. All papers must be original and must not have been published or under review elsewhere.


= Important Dates =

June 29, 2012 Papers submission Deadline
August 3, 2012 Notification of acceptance
August 19, 2012 Camera-ready submission
Nov 2, 2012 Workshop date (tentative)

All due dates are defined in terms of times before 11:59pm, Hawaii time (i.e., GMT - 10 hours) of the due date.

The 1-day workshop will take place during October 29 - November 2 but the exact date still needs to be confirmed.


= Organizers =

Workshop chairs:
Ingmar Weber, Yahoo! Research, Spain
Ana-Maria Popescu, Yahoo! Labs, USA
Marco Pennacchiotti, Yahoo! Labs, USA

PC members:
Guillaume Bouchard, Xerox Research Centre Europe, France
Erik Borra, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Miles Efron, University of Illinois, USA
Michael Gamon, Microsoft Research, USA
Daniel Gayo-Avello, University of Oviedo, Spain
Noriko Hara, Indiana Unversity, USA
Matthew Hindman, George Washington University, USA
Meena Nagarajan, IBM Research, USA
Maya Ramanath, IIT Delhi, India
Alan Ritter, University of Washington, USA
Richard Rogers, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Aaron Shaw, UC Berkeley, USA
Junehwa Song, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea
Gerhard Weikum, Max Planck Institut Informatik, Germany
Alex Yates, Temple University, USA