17.3320, Confs: General Ling/USA

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LINGUIST List: Vol-17-3320. Tue Nov 14 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.3320, Confs: General Ling/USA

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1)
Date: 10-Nov-2006
From: Nicolas Nicolov < nicolas_nicolov at yahoo.com >
Subject: International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2006 14:15:30
From: Nicolas Nicolov < nicolas_nicolov at yahoo.com >
Subject: International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media 
 

International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media 
Short Title: ICWSM 

Date: 26-Mar-2007 - 28-Mar-2007 
Location: Boulder, Colorado, USA 
Contact: Nicolas Nicolov 
Contact Email: info at icwsm.org 
Meeting URL: http://www.icwsm.org 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics 

Meeting Description: 

The International Conference on Weblogs and social
        media grew out of two events: the annual series of
        Workshops on the Weblogging Ecosystem (WWE 2006,
        WWE 2005, WWE 2004) held in conjunction with the
        International World Wide Web Conference and the
        Spring Symposium organized by the American
        Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
        on Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs
        (CAAW 2006). 

Recent years have seen a flourishing of social
        media - the promise of the WWW coming to fruition.
        Across the world, individuals can share opinions,
        experiences and expertise at the push of a button.
        There has been a fundamental shift thanks to
        significant advances in the ease of publishing
        content. Creating web content was for years the
        domain of tech-savvy people; now the barrier has
        been torn down.

        Perhaps the most visible among the successes of
        social media in recent years is the blogosphere.
        Tens of thousands of new blogs are created every day;
        blog content is becoming ubiquitous, surfacing
        in news portals, search results and corporate
        public relations. Even those who are unaware of the
        blogosphere are still influenced by its content.
        Although blogs are highly visible currently, other
        forms of conversational spaces continue to flourish,
        especially message boards, mailing lists, review
        sites and Usenet.

        Social media covers all forms of sharing: from
        photos, to videos, to recommendations. In the past
        few years, many examples of social media have
        become hugely successful. Flickr is a premier photo
        sharing site; del.icio.us has become a touchstone
        for sharing recommendations of websites; Web 2.0
        applications in general abound with newcomers in
        the social media space.

        One of the fascinating aspects of social media
        has been the drive from within to study the
        ecology as it evolves. People act at once as
        creators, observers and influencers of the space
        in which they participate. At the same time,
        businesses are quickly grasping the potential
        benefit to attending to the new space of social
        media. Monitoring the aggregate trends and
        opinions revealed by social media provides
        valuable insight to a number of business
        applications: marketing intelligence, competitive
        intelligence.

        The fast growing blogosphere and social media space
        is a fruitful area for investigations across many
        disciplines. For example:

          -Natural language processing and machine learning
            researchers study the extraction of factual
            information from text; can blogs be processed in
            a robust manner and can knowledge bases be
            populated with facts from blogs?
           -Social network researchers and graph theory
            researchers are concerned with inferring
            community structure; analyzing the linkage
            patterns among blog entries can provide explicit
            community structure; can we infer implicit
            communities through the content of the blogs?
          - Political scientists are looking at ways of
            identifying influencers in a community; who are
            the influential bloggers whose voice is echoed
            by others?
          - Multimedia researchers are attempting to
            categorize audio and video content, aggregate
            information from diverse sources (textual, audio,
            video); can visual & audio social media be stored
            in a way that allows search across different
            modalities?
          - Market analysis researchers are concerned with
            what people think of the products and services
            of a company; can we process blogs automatically
            and find consumer complaints and breaking reports
            about vulnerabilities of products; also when does
            a burst of blogging activity become a trend?
          - Social psychologists study the response to
            current events, including emotional and
            attitudinal dimensions as well as content and
            patterns of influence.

        Despite the growing relevance of blogs and social
        media, existing research has only begun to address
        the spectrum of issues that arise in their analysis.
        Blogs, for example, are a different kind of document
        than the relatively clean text that NLP research is
        based on. Such differences in term of structure,
        content and grammaticality will be a challenge
        considering that blogs will likely represent the most
        common way of publicly accessible personal expression.

        Areas of Interest

        The conference aims to bring together researchers
        from different subject areas (e.g., computer science,
        linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology,
        multimedia and semantic web technologies) and foster
        discussions about ongoing research in the following
        areas:

        [01] AI methods for ethnographic analysis through
             social media.
        [02] Blogosphere vs. mediasphere; measuring the
             influence of blogs on the media.
        [03] Centrality/influence of bloggers/blogs; ranking/
             relevance of blogs; web pages ranking based on
             blogs.
        [04] Crawling/spidering and indexing.
        [05] Human Computer Interaction; social media tools;
             navigation; web 2.0.
        [06] Multimedia; audio/visual processing; aggregating
             information from different modalities.
        [07] Semantic analysis; cross-system and cross-media
             name tracking; named relations and fact
             extraction; discourse analysis; summarization.
        [08] Semantic Web; unstructured knowledge management.
        [09] Sentiment analysis; polarity/opinion
             identification and extraction.
        [10] Social Network Analysis; communities
             identification; expertise discovery;
             collaborative filtering; graph methods.
        [11] Text categorization; gender/age identification;
             spam filtering.
        [12] Time Series Forecasting; measuring
             predictability of phenomena based on social
             media.
        [13] Trend identification/tracking.
        [14] Visualization, aggregation and filtering.
        [15] Wikis and collaborative content creation.

        Invited Speakers

            - Ev Williams, Obvious Corp.
            - Andrew Tomkins, Yahoo Inc.
            - Danah Boyd, Berkeley SIMS & Yahoo Inc.

        Weblog Dataset (10GB compressed)

            - So far 90 research groups have requested
              the dataset.
            - Discussions at the Yahoo Weblog Analysis Group:
              groups.yahoo.com | group | weblog_analysis_group

          Important Dates

        Submissions:  December 8, 2006
        Acceptance Notifications:  February 2, 2007
        Camera ready copies:  February 16, 2007
        Tutorials:  March 25, 2007
        Conference:  March 26-28, 2007

         Submission

        People interested in participating should submit
        through the conference website a technical paper
        (up to 8 pages), a short paper (up to 4 pages),
        a poster or demo description (up to 2 pages)
        by midnight (PST) of Dec 8, 2006. Each submission
        should, to the extent possible, indicate a list of
        relevant areas from the list above (e.g., 03, 04, 10).

             Chairs

          - Natalie Glance, Nielsen BuzzMetrics.
          - Nicolas Nicolov, Umbria Inc.

             Co-Chairs

          - Eytan Adar, Univ. of Washington.
          - Matthew Hurst, Nielsen BuzzMetrics.
          - Mark Liberman, Univ. of Pennsylvania.
          - Franco Salvetti, Univ. of Colorado at Boulder &
            Umbria Inc.

        Local Chair

          - James H. Martin, Univ. of Colorado at Boulder.

        Tutorials Chair

          - Belle Tseng, NEC Labs America, USA

        Local Coordinator

          - Assad Jarrahian, Univ. of Colorado at Boulder

           Program Committee

          - Paolo Avesani, ITC-irst, Italy
          - Bran Boguraev, IBM Research, USA
          - Chris Brooks, Univ. of San Francisco, USA
          - Claire Cardie, Cornell Univ., USA
          - Scott Carter, UC Berkeley, USA
          - Steve Cayzer, HP Labs Bristol, UK
          - Thierry Declerck, DFKI Language Lab, Germany
          - Donghui Feng, ISI, Univ. of Southern California, USA
          - Tim Finin, Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA
          - Kathy Gill, Univ. of Washington, USA
          - Michelle Gumbrecht, Stanford Univ., USA
          - John Henderson, MITRE, USA
          - Eduard Hovy, ISI, USC, USA
          - Assad Jarrahian, Univ. of Colorado at Boulder
          - Jussi Karlgren, SICS, Sweden
          - Laura Knudsen, OSC, USA
          - Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan Univ., Israel.
          - Cameron Marlow, Yahoo Research, USA
          - Lluis Marquez, Univ. Poli. de Catalunya, Spain
          - Rada Mihalcea, Univ. of North Texas, USA
          - Gilad Mishne, Univ. of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
          - Tomoyuki Nanno, Google Inc., Japan
          - Apostol Natsev, IBM Research, USA
          - Kamal Nigam, Google Inc., USA
          - Peter Norvig, Google Inc., USA.
          - Jon Oberlander, Univ. of Edinburgh, Scotland
          - Peter Pirolli, PARC, USA
          - Oana Postolache, Univ. of Saarland, Germany
          - John Prager, IBM Research, USA
          - Alessandro Provetti, Univ. of Messina, Italy
          - Drago Radev, Univ. of Michigan, USA
          - Jonathon Read, Univ. of Sussex, UK
          - Maarten de Rijke, Univ. of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
          - Laura Ripamonti, Univ. of Milan, Italy
          - Irina Rish, IBM Watson Research Center, USA
          - Dan Roth, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
          - James G. Shanahan, Turn Inc., USA
          - Emma Shen, OSC, USA
          - Suresh Sood, Univ. of Tech. Sydney, Australia
          - Savitha Srinivasan, IBM Research, USA
          - Carlo Strapparava, ITC-irst, Italy
          - V.S. Subrahmanian, Univ. of Maryland, USA
          - Belle Tseng, NEC Labs America, USA
          - Janyce M. Wiebe, Univ. of Pittsburgh, USA
          - Tong Zhang, Yahoo Research, USA
          - Liang Zhou, ISI, University of Southern California, USA
          - Ethan Zuckerman, Berkman Center, Harvard Univ. USA

          Sponsors

        ICWSM is proud to be supported by:

          - Google, Inc.
          - Microsoft Live Labs
          - NEC Labs America
          - Klostu
          - Sphere
          - Attentio SA
          - Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)

        and

          - Nielsen BuzzMetrics
          - Umbria, Inc.
          - University of Pennsylvania

         ICWSM is endorsed by:

          - IW3C2 (World Wide Web Conference Committee)
          - AAAI (American Association for Artificial Intelligence)





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