THE 9TH INTERNATIONAL AAAI CONFERENCE ON WEB AND SOCIAL MEDIA

The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) is a forum for researchers in computer science and social science to come together to share knowledge, discuss ideas, exchange information, and learn about cutting-edge research in diverse fields with the common theme of online social media. This overall theme includes research in new perspectives in social theories, as well as computational algorithms for analyzing social media. ICWSM is a singularly fitting venue for research that blends social science and computational approaches to answer important and challenging questions about human social behavior through social media while advancing computational tools for vast and unstructured data.

ICWSM, now in its ninth year, has become one of the premier venues for computational social science, and previous years of ICWSM have featured papers, posters, and demos that draw upon network science, machine learning, computational linguistics, sociology, communication, and political science. The uniqueness of the venue and the quality of submissions have contributed to a fast growth of the conference and a competitive acceptance rate around 20% for full-length research papers published in the proceedings by the Association for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

For ICWSM-15, 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 successes in previous years, ICWSM-15 will also hold a day of workshops and tutorials in addition to the main conference.
Disciplines

Computational approaches to social media research including
Natural language processing
Text / data mining
Machine learning
Image / multimedia processing
Graphics and visualization
Distributed computing
Graph theory
Human-computer interaction
Social science approaches to social media research including
Psychology
Sociology and social network analysis
Communication
Political science
Economics
Anthropology
Media studies and journalism
Interdisciplinary approaches to social media research combining computational algorithms and social science methodologies

Media

Social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn)
Microblogs (e.g., Twitter, Tumblr)
Wiki-based knowledge sharing sites (e.g., Wikipedia)
Social news sites and websites of news media (e.g., Huffington Post)
Forums, mailing lists, newsgroups
Community media sites (e.g., YouTube, Flickr, Instagram)
Social Q & A sites (e.g., Quora, Yahoo Answers)
User reviews (e.g., Yelp, Amazon.com)
Social curation sites (e.g., Reddit, Pinterest)
Location-based social networks (e.g., Foursquare)

Topics Include

Psychological, personality-based and ethnographic studies of social media
Analysis of 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
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, linguistic analyses of social media behavior
Text categorization; topic recognition; demographic/gender/age identification
Trend identification and tracking; time series forecasting
Measuring predictability of real world phenomena based on social media, e.g., spanning politics, finance, and health
New social media applications; interfaces; interaction techniques
Social innovation and effecting change through social media
Social media usage on mobile devices; location, human mobility, and behavior
Organizational and group behavior mediated by social media; interpersonal communication mediated by social media
Studies of digital humanities (culture, history, arts) using social media