The8th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2014)

THE 8TH INTERNATIONAL AAAI CONFERENCE ON WEBLOGS AND SOCIAL MEDIA (ICWSM-14)

SPONSORED BY THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

* Abstracts Due: January 15, 2014 (by 11:59 pm PST)

* Full Papers Due: January 22, 2014 (by 11:59 pm PST)

* Acceptance Notification: March 10, 2014

* Conference: June 1-4, 2014 in Ann Arbor, Michigan

The International AAAI Conference on Weblogs 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 eighth 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 of 20% for full-length research papers published in the proceedings by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). 

For ICWSM-14, 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-14 will also hold a day of workshops and tutorials in addition to the main conference.

SUMMARY SUBMISSION GUIDELINE

Full paper format: Full paper submissions to ICWSM are recommended to be 8 pages long, and must be at most 10 pages long, including figures and references. The final camera-ready length (between 8-10 pages) for each full paper in the proceedings will be at the discretion of the program chairs. All papers must follow AAAI formatting guidelines.

Poster and demo paper format: Poster paper submissions to ICWSM must be 4 pages long, including figures and references. Demo paper submissions to ICWSM must be 2 pages long, including figures and references. All papers must be follow AAAI formatting guidelines.

Anonymity: Paper submissions to ICWSM must be anonymized.

Social science track with only abstracts in the proceedings: We will be continuing the “social science” track at ICWSM-14 following its successful debut in 2013. This option is for researchers in social science who wish to submit full papers without publication in the conference proceedings. While papers in this track will not be published, we expect these submissions to describe the same high-quality and complete work as the main track submissions. Papers accepted to this track will be full presentations integrated with the conference, but they will be published only as abstracts in the conference proceedings.

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 and graphical models

   * 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

TYPES OF SOCIAL MEDIA include

* Weblogs (posts, comments, and/or social shares)

* 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 (BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO)

* 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; web page ranking based on weblogs 

* 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

CONFERENCE WEBSITE

http://icwsm.org/2014/

General Co-Chairs

Eytan Adar, University of Michigan

Paul Resnick, University of Michigan

PROGRAM Co-Chairs

Munmun De Choudhury, Microsoft Research

Bernie Hogan, Oxford Internet Institute

Alice Oh, KAIST

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Deadline Extension - Workshop on Text-Based Information Retrieval (TIR'13)

Extended Deadline: April 20, 2013

TIR'13 - 10th International Workshop on Text-Based Information Retrieval

In conjunction with the DEXA 2013

24th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications

Prague, Czech Republic, August 26 - August 30

http://tir.webis.de

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About this Workshop:
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Intelligent algorithms for mining and retrieval are the key technology to
cope with the information need challenges in our media-centered
society. Methods for text-based information retrieval receive special
attention, which results from the important role of written text, from the
high availability of the Internet, and from the enormous importance of Web
communities.

Advanced information retrieval and extraction uses methods from different
areas: machine learning, computer linguistics and psychology, user
interaction and modeling, information visualization, Web engineering,
artificial intelligence, or distributed systems. The development of
intelligent retrieval tools requires the understanding and combination of
the achievements in these areas, and in this sense the workshop provides a
common platform for presenting and discussing new solutions.

The following list organizes classic and ongoing topics from the field of
text-based IR for which contributions are welcome:

- Theory. Retrieval models, language models, similarity measures, formal
analysis

- Mining and Classification. Category formation, clustering, entity
resolution, document classification, learning methods for ranking

- Web. Community mining, social network analysis, structured retrieval
from XML documents

- Information Quality. Quality assessment, information diffusion in
social media

- NLP. Text summarization, keyword extraction, topic identification

- User Interface. Paradigms and algorithms for information visualization,
personalization, privacy issue

- User Context. Context models for IR, context analysis from user
behavior and from social networks

- Multilinguality. Cross-language retrieval, multilingual retrieval,
machine translation for IR

- Evaluation. Corpus construction, experiment design, conception of user
studies

- Semantic Web. Meta data analysis and tagging, knowledge extraction,
inference, and maintenance

- Software Engineering. Frameworks and architectures for retrieval
technology, distributed IR


The workshop is held for the tenthe time. In the past, it was characterized
by a stimulating atmosphere, and it attracted high quality contributions
from all over the world. In particular, we encourage participants to
present research prototypes and demonstration tools of their research
ideas.


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Important Dates:
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• Apr 20, 2013, 24:00 (CET): Deadline for paper submission (extended)
• May 13, 2013: Notification to authors (extended)
• May 23, 2013: Camera-ready copy due

Contributions will be peer-reviewed by at least two experts from the
related field. Accepted papers will be published as IEEE proceedings by
IEEE CS Press.


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Workshop Organization:
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Benno Stein, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Michael Granitzer, University of Passau
Maik Anderka, University of Paderborn


Contact: tir@webis.de
Information about the workshop can be found at http://tir.webis.de

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22 Funded Phd Studentships at CNGL in Trinity College Dublin

PhD Studentships - 22 Posts - Centre for Next Generation Localisation
Laboratories, Trinity College Dublin

Post Status: 3 year PhD Studentships
Department: Centre for Next Generation Localisation Laboratories, KDEG,
Trinity College Dublin
Benefits: Payment of tax free stipend and academic fees
Closing date for applications: 28th February 2013
General enquires concerning these posts can be addressed to
Dominic.Jones@scss.tcd.ie

Summary:
The Centre for Next Generation Localisation (www.cngl.ie) seeks to revolutionise the way people
interact with content, systems and each other to achieve unprecedented levels of content access,
process efficiency and user empowerment. Breakthroughs in the creation,  processing, unification and
integration of multilingual, multi-modal and multimedia content are needed to meet the needs of an
increasingly mobile and multilingual society across global markets. CNGL will enable content to be
created, discovered, translated and personalised, so as to efficiently and effectively deliver
natural and engaging web-mediated interactions between users, organisations and communities
regardless of language, device and preferences of the user.

CNGL is internationally renown for its strong, strategic mix of leading researchers in language,
adaptive content, interaction and knowledge engineering technologies and its tight engagement with
innovation-driven companies that work with content at a global level. CNGL has recently received
further multi-million funding from Science Foundation Ireland. As a result Trinity College Dublin
(TCD) is now offering 22 new PhD studentships in the areas of:

Text Analytics for managing large scale multilingual corpora.
Content-aware multilingual Search and Discovery technologies
Adaptive context-aware search
Intelligent slicing and adaptation of content
Social-aware, affective content adaptation
Constructing affective dialogue solutions
Interoperability and analytics for intelligent content processing chains

Requirements:
The successful candidate will have an excellent academic record (first
class or II.1 primary degree
or a postgraduate qualification, e.g. M.Sc.) in Computer Science, or a
related discipline. They will
be highly motivated, with strong written and oral communication skills and
a demonstrated
proficiency in software development. They must be eager to work in and
learn from multi-disciplinary
and multi-organisation teams. They should have English language
certification if English is not
their first language, the requirement being: IELTS: 7.0+, TOEFL iBT: 100+,
TOEFL pBT: 600+, CEF:
C1+, or equivalent.

Application Procedure:
For further information and informal contact, please refer to the PhD
topic details
found at: http://www.scss.tcd.ie/Dominic.Jones/cngl2-phd-details.pdf

Please directly contact the relevant supervisor, depending upon the
position you're interested in,
via email including:
A targeted cover letter (600-1000 words) expressing your suitability for a
position
A complete CV
Please also copy Dominic Jones - Dominic.Jones@scss.tcd.ie
Applicants may then be invited to apply via the TCD graduate studies
admission system.

Further Information:

Centre for Next Generation Localisation
CNGL is a €50M Academia-Industry partnership based in Ireland. It is
unique internationally in
addressing the integrated research and development of novel content,
knowledge and language
processing technologies for the global, multi-lingual web content and
services supply chain. Â It is
made up of over 100 researchers in labs integrated across Trinity College
Dublin (TCD), Dublin City
University (DCU), University College Dublin (UCD), University of Limerick
(UL), as well as ten
industrial partners, including SMEs, NGOs and multinationals such as
Microsoft, Symantec, Intel and
Welocalize. In addition to central funding from Science Foundation Ireland
(SFI), CNGL has a wide
portfolio of European FP7 projects and commercial projects. It therefore
offers unique opportunities
for international and industrial research collaboration at the highest
level in areas of language
technology, multi-lingual web and adaptive, personalised content. CNGL
provides a world class
collaborative research and innovation environment. It provides:
world-class PhD supervision by
integrated teams of leading academics; an experienced and supportive lab
community of postdoctoral
researchers and research programmers; excellent collaboration and
computing facilities; wide ranging
skills training opportunities; a dedicated management and administration
team and an active
commercialisation development pipeline.

Trinity College Dublin
Founded in 1592, Trinity College Dublin is the oldest university in
Ireland and one of the older
universities of Western Europe. On today's campus, state-of-the-art
libraries, laboratories and IT
facilities, stand alongside historic buildings on a city-centre 47-acre
campus. Based in the heart
of Dublin, TCD offers an exceptional working and social environment that
attracts students and
researchers from around the world. TCD's research impact is currently
ranked 44th in the World by
the Times Higher Education Ranking of World Universities and 10th in
Europe by the Leiden University
Ranking of World Universities based on research performance. As Ireland's
premier university, the
pursuit of excellence through research and scholarship is at the core of a
Trinity education. TCD
has an outstanding record of publications in high-impact journals, and a
track record in winning
research funding which is among the best in the country.

Equal Opportunities Policy
Trinity College Dublin is an equal opportunities employer and is committed
to the employment
policies, procedures and practices which do not discriminate on grounds
such as gender, marital
status, family status, age, disability, race, religious belief, sexual
orientation or membership of
the travelling community. See also:
https://www.tcd.ie/Graduate_Studies/Research2012.pdf

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