--background--

Nowadays, social platforms have become the most popular communication system all over the world. In fact, due to the short format of messages and the accessibility of these systems, users tend to shift from traditional communication tools (such as blogs, web sites and mailing lists) to social network for various purposes. Billions of messages are appearing daily in these services such as Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, etc. The authors of these messages share content about their private life, exchanging opinions on a variety of topics and discussing a wide range of information news.

--objective--

In light of this, the number of active users is estimated to 1 billion worldwide, which makes these systems the fastest- growing web sites in the world. Even if these system cannot represent an alternative to the authoritative information media, considering the number of its users and the impressive response time of their contributions, they represent a sort of real-time news sensor that can also predate the best newspapers in informing the web community about the emerging topics and trends. In fact, the most important information media always need a certain amount of time to react to a news event; i.e. professional journalists require time, collaborators and/or technology support to provide a professional report. However a user can easily report, in few characters, what is happening in front of the user’s eyes, without any concern about the readers or the writing style. These aspects make social services the most powerful sensor for events detection and automatic news generation. The aim of this workshop is to ask researchers to enter into such view, by studying how Social platforms can be used in a real-time scenario to detect emerging events and enrich them with contextual information like categorization, named entities and relationships with other events and sources of information.


The call for papers will assume the form of a call for surveys and ideas, to motivate researchers to present their view on the current state of the art and the future research challenges. Authors will be thus asked to submit a paper
describing the following points:

1. State of the art survey on the recent literature which can be interpreted as a social-sensor study or analysis
2. Existing research challenges which can be considered as emerging, or completely new challenges that can be proposed in future
research, with their impact on the community
3. A proposed set of features, models, techniques that can be adopted, and the expected results

Papers will be qualitatively evaluated as in a usual reviewing process, but with a particular focus on the clarity of the proposed
survey and the identified research challenges. At conference time, authors will be invited to present their works, and briefly introduce their points of view on the social-sensor current research. Then, an open discussion panel will follow, aiming at fostering new ideas through face to face interactions.

--topics--

• Social Media as Social Sensors
• Social Media Analytics and Social Network Analysis
• Topics, Trends and Community Extraction
• Social-sensor Ontologies
• Big Data and Social Media
• Cultural Analysis of Social Media
• NLP, IR, and Visualization in Social Media
• Social Media applications
• Privacy in Social Media
• Chatbots for Social Media

** IMPORTANT DATES **

- Paper submission (extended!): 30th March 2018
- Notification to authors: 16th April, 2018
- Camera-ready: 24th April, 2018

** SUBMISSIONS **

The best papers from each workshop may be included in the supplementary proceedings of ESWC 2018, which will appear in the Springer LNCS series.

** WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS **

- Mario Cataldi - Université Paris 8, France
- Luigi Di Caro - Department of Computer Science – University of Turin, Italy
- Claudio Schifanella - Department of Computer Science – University of Turin, Italy

** PROGRAM COMMITTEE **
- Luca Aiello - Yahoo! Labs, Spain
- Andrea Ballatore - Center for Spatial Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
- Iván Cantador - Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
- Federica Cena - Department of Computer Science, University of Torino, Italy
- Martin Chorley - School of Computer Science and Informatics, Cardiff University, Wales
- Simon Harper - University of Manchester, England
- Dino Ienco - Irstea, UMR TETIS, Montpellier, France
- Séamus Lawless - Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
- Emmanuel Malherbe - Multiposting, France
- Rosa Meo - Department of Computer Science, University of Torino, Italy
- Ruggero G. Pensa - Department of Computer Science, University of Torino, Italy
- Rossano Schifanella - Department of Computer Science, University of Torino, Italy
- Thomas Steiner - Google, USA
- Luca Vignaroli - RAI – Centre for Research and Technological Innovation, Turin, Italy