International Workshop on Social Web Mining

Co-located with IJCAI, 18 July 2011, Barcelona, Spain

Introduction:

There is increasing interest in social web mining, as we can see from the ACM workshop on Social Web Search and Analysis. It is not until recently that great progresses have been made in mining social network for various applications, e.g., making personalized recommendations. This workshop focuses on the study of diverse aspects of social networks with their applications in domains including mobile recommendations, service providers, electronic commerce, etc.

Social networks have actually played an important role in different domains for about a decade, particularly in recommender systems. In general, traditional collaborative filtering approaches can be considered as making personalized recommendations based on implicit social interaction, where social connections are defined by some similarity metrics on common rated items, e.g., movies for the Netflix Prize.

With the recent development of Web 2.0, there emerges a number of globally deployed applications for explicit social interactions, such as Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. These applications have been exploited by academic institutions and industries to build modern recommender systems based on social networks, e.g., Microsoft's Project Emporia that recommends tweets to user based on their behaviors.
In recent years, rapid progress has been made in the study of social networks for diverse applications. For instance, researchers have proposed various tensor factorization techniques to analyze user-item-tag data in Flickr for group recommendations. Also, researchers study Facebook to infer users' preferences.

However, there exist many challenges in mining social web and its application in recommender systems. Some are:

What is the topology of social networks for some specific application like LinkedIn?
How could one build optimal models for social networks such as Facebook?
How can one handle the privacy issue caused by utilizing social interactions for making recommendation?
How could one model a user's preferences based on his/her social interactions?
We hope to gather scientific researchers and industry in order to discuss the challenges, exchange ideas, and promote collaborations across different groups.
Topics:

The workshop will seek submissions that cover social networks, data mining, machine learning, and recommender systems. The workshop is especially interested in papers that focus on applied domains such as web mining, mobile recommender systems, social recommender systems, and privacy in social web mining. The following list provides examples of the types of areas in which we encourage submissions. The following comprises a sample, but not complete, listing of topics:

Active learning
Matchmaking
Mobile recommender systems
Multi-task learning
Learning graph matching
Learning to rank
Online and contextual advertising
Online learning
Privacy in social networks
Preference learning or elicitation
Social network mining
Social summarization
Tag recommendation
Transfer learning
Web graph analysis
Program:

The workshop program consists of four invited talks, a number of oral presentations, a poster session, and a panel discussion session. Detailed information is given as follows:
Invited Speakers
Ricardo Baeza-Yates , Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain
Bhaskar Mehta , Google Zurich, Switzerland
Jurgen Van Gael, Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK
Qiang Yang, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China
Oral and Poster Presentation: details coming soon
Submission and Key Dates:

We use the EasyChair for paper submission. The paper format is the same as that of IJCAI 2011 ( Click here for details ), and the maximum number of pages is 10. Please note that a selection of workshop papers will be invited to a special issue of ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology.
Submission deadline: 5 April 2011
Author notification: 5 May 2011
Camera ready: 25 May 2011
Workshop date: 18 July 2011

Program Co-Chair:

Francesco Bonchi, Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain
Wray Buntine, NICTA - ANU, Australia
Ricard Gavalda, Technical University of Catalonia, Spain
Shengbo Guo, Xerox Research Centre Europe, France

Program Committee:

Tiberio Caetano, NICTA - ANU, Australia
Wei Chen, Microsoft Research Asia, China
Peter Christen, Australian National University, Australia
Nello Cristianini, University Of Bristol, UK
Hakim Hacid, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, France
Jian Huang, Google Pittsburgh, USA
Jure Leskovec, Stanford University, USA
Ernesto William De Luca, Technical University of Berlin - DAI-Labor, Germany
Sherif Sakr, NICTA - UNSW, Australia
Scott Sanner, NICTA - ANU, Australia
Fabrizio Silvestri, ISTI CNR, Italy
Julia Stoyanovich, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Aixin Sun, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Antti Ukkonen, Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain
Jie (Jessie) Yin, CSIRO, Australia
Yi Zhang, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
Onno Zoeter, Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France

Workshop Contact:

Email: Shengbo (dot) Guo@xrce.xerox.com
+33 (0)4 76 61 50 47 (Phone)
+33 (0)4 76 61 50 99 (Fax)
Mailing address: 6, chemin de Maupertuis, 38240 Meylan, France