The Workshop on Big Data in Social Simulations (BDSS) has issued a call for papers to be presented at the IEEE International Conference on Big Data to be held in Washington DC on October 29, 2015.

Overview

Dynamic processes on complex socio-physical networks (such as contagion spread in a population) are pervasive and integral to many engineering and scientific disciplines including civil, ecology, electrical, life sciences, social sciences and more. In such networks, the ability to give quantitative and predictive answers to a wide variety of counterfactuals (or "what if'') questions with regard to complex phenomena and interactions (e.g., epidemics) is of great societal importance. To this end, researchers in almost all these disciplines have increasingly started investigating frameworks -- the core of which consists of autonomous, but interacting, actors. Agent-based systems are examples of such frameworks. The model for autonomous actors and their interactions resemble the physical world counterpart and its simulation tracks and computes complex phenomenon.

The data in such frameworks are heterogeneous, evolving, incomplete, and noisy. The models and the counterfactuals, themselves, are multi-faceted and often have many physical (e.g., spatial, temporal, network) and social (e.g., demographics, community, administrative) attributes. Furthermore, the creation of models often requires a confluence of many disparate data sources. The simulations and follow-up analysis can have very large data footprints (orders of several terabytes) and require a vast amount of compute resources. Hence, big data techniques and software stack has potential to contribute towards the capabilities of such frameworks and in turn towards our understanding of socio-physical networks.

Submission Details

This workshop welcomes original research that investigates and broadens this role of Big Data in Modeling and Analysis of Socio-Physical Networks (MASPN).

Topics include:
Realistic modeling of actor behavior
Management, provenance, storage and archival of MASPN datasets
Analytics and mining of MASPN datasets
Informatics and integration in source datasets for MASPN
Probabilistic and statistical methods for building actor models
Modeling and scalable implementation of realistic interventions
Applications for MASPN in financial, social, internet, ecology and other disciplines
Semantic web tools for modeling behavior and organization of data
Testing, validation and analysis of complexity of MASPN

For full submission instructions, please visit the conference website.

Important dates:
August 30, 2015: Due date for full workshop papers submission
September 20, 2015: Notification of paper acceptance to authors
October 5, 2015: Camera-ready of accepted papers
October 29-November 1, 2015: Conference