The International Conference on Management of Emergent Digital EcoSystems (MEDES 2011)

The International Conference on Management of Emergent Digital

EcoSystems (MEDES 2011)

In-Cooperation with ACM, ACM SIGAPP and IFIP WG 2.6

http://sigappfr.acm.org/MEDES/11/

November 21-24, 2011

San Francisco, California

Description and Objectives
---------------------------
In the world of the Internet, the rapid growth and exponential use of
digital medias leads to the emergence of virtual environments namely digital
ecosystems composed of multiple and independent entities such as
individuals, organizations, services, software and applications sharing one
or several missions and focusing on the interactions and inter-relationships
among them. The digital ecosystem exhibits self-organizing environments,
thanks to the re-combination and evolution of its "digital components", in
which resources provided by each entity are properly conserved, managed and
used. The underlying resources mainly comprehend data management, innovative
services, computational intelligence and self-organizing platforms. Due to
the multi-disciplinary nature of digital ecosystems and their
characteristics, they are highly complex to study and design. This also
leads to a poor understanding as to how managing resources will empower
digital ecosystems to be innovative and value-creating. The application of
Information Technologies has the potential to enable the understanding of
how entities request resources and ultimately interact to create benefits
and added-values, impacting business practices and knowledge. These
technologies can be improved through novel techniques, models and
methodologies for fields such as data management, web technologies,
networking, security, human-computer interactions, artificial intelligence,
e-services and self-organizing systems to support the establishment of
digital ecosystems and manage their resources.
The International ACM Conference on Management of Emergent Digital
EcoSystems (MEDES) aims to develop and bring together a diverse community
from academia, research laboratories and industry interested in exploring
the manifold challenges and issues related to resource management of Digital
Ecosystems and how current approaches and technologies can be
evolved and adapted to this end. The conference seeks related original
research papers, industrial papers and proposals for demonstrations.

Topics
-------
In this call, we solicit original research and technical papers not
published elsewhere. The papers can be theoretical, practical and
application oriented on the following themes (but not limited to):
- Digital Ecosystem Infrastructure
- Web Technologies
- Service systems and Engineering
- Emergent Intelligence
- Data & Knowledge Management Systems
- Multimedia Information Retrieval
- Ontology Management
- Social Networks
- Game Theory
- Networks and Protocols
- Green computing
- Security & Privacy
- Standardization and Extensible Languages
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Business Intelligence
- E-Services , E-Learning, E-Humanities and E-Government
- B2B, B2C, B2A, E-Commerce, E-Business, E-Marketing and E-Procurement
- Digital Library
- Open Source

Paper Submission
----------------
Submissions must be in an electronic form as PDF format and should be
uploaded using the conference website.
The submitted paper should be at most 8 ACM single-space printed pages.
Papers that fail to comply with length limit will be rejected. Submissions
will be peer-reviewed by at least 3 peer reviewers. After the preliminary
notification date, authors rebut by evidence and arguments all reviewer
inquiries and their comments. Based on the rebuttal feedback, reviewers
notify authors with the final decision. Selection criteria will include:
relevance, significance, impact, originality, technical soundness, and
quality of presentation.
Preference will be given to submissions that take strong or challenging
positions on important emergent topics related to Digital Ecosystems. At
least one author should attend the conference to present the paper.
The conference Proceedings will be published by ACM and indexed by the ACM
Digital Library and DBLP.
Important Dates
----------------
- Submission Date: June 20th, 2011
- Preliminary Notification of Acceptance: September, 5th 2011
- Rebuttal Date: September 15th, 2011
- Final Notification of Acceptance: September, 20th 2011
- Camera Ready: September 30th, 2011
- Conference Dates: November 21-24, 2011
Special issues and Journal Publication
---------------------------------------
Extended versions of the selected papers will be published in one of the
following reviewed journals.
-International Journal on Subject-Centric Computing (IJSCC)
-International Journal of Organizational and Collective Intelligence (IJOCI)
-International Journal of Internet and Enterprise Management (IJIEM)
General Chair
--------------
William Grosky, University of Michigan, USA
Xiaohua Tony Hu, Drexel University, USA
Program Chair
--------------
Youakim Badr, INSA de Lyon, France

International Advisory Board Members
------------------------------------
Asanee Kawtrakul, NECTEC, Thailand
Janusz Kacprzyk, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
Philippe De Wilde, Heriot-Watt University, Scotland
Yasuo Matsuyama, Waseda University, Japan
Albert Zomaya, The University of Sydney, Australia

Steering Committee Members
--------------------------
Fernando Ferri, IRPPS-CNR, Italy
Frederic Andres, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
Richard Chbeir, University of Bourgogne, France
Hiroshi Ishikawa, Shizuoka University, Japan
Asanee Kawtrakul, NECTEC, Thailand
Dominique Laurent, University of Cergy-Pontoise, France
Epaminondas Kapetanios, University of Westminster, UK

Keynote Speakers
----------------
Paul Hofmann, VP Office of the Chief Scientist at SAP Labs
Ruoyi Zhou, Senior Manager at IBM Almaden Research Center

Publicity Chair
----------------
Ezendu Ariwa, London Metropolitan University, UK

Publication Chair
----------------
Richard Chbeir, University of Bourgogne, France

International Program Committee:
--------------------------------
(Please check the web site for the full list)

HICSS 45: Learning Analytics and Networked Learning

Workshop and Minitrack on Learning Analytics and Networked Learning

A workshop and minitrack on Learning Analytics will be held at the 45th
Hawaii International Conference of the System Sciences, January 4-7, 2012,
Grand Wailea, Maui http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_45/apahome45.htm>.
Learning analytics is an emerging area of research that addressses the
measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and
their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and
the environments in which it occurs. The workshop CFP is below.
Workshop submissions are due **November 30, 2011** (see appended call),
but to maximize your return on investment for this trip you may want to
submit to one of the HICSS mini-tracks that are on related topics. Mini-track
papers are due **June 15, 2011**. Of particular relevance is the Learning
Analytics and Networked Learning minitrack.
Questions about the workshop should be sent to Dan Suthers
(suthers@hawaii.edu )
Questions about the minitrack should be sent to Caroline Haythornthwaite
(c.haythorn@ubc.ca)


LEARNING ANALYTICS & NETWORKED LEARNING
* technology or system design to analyze, support, and/or create learning
and learning environments ... particular interest are papers that capture,
analyze and show novel use of data produced from online learning
environments, develop and/or test methodologies for analyzing online
learning, address automated data collection and analysis in support of
learning, professional development and knowledge creation, and discuss
[related] issues and opportunities ...
* http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_45/45in.htm#IN5
* Chairs: Haythornthwaite, de Laat, Dawson
Other related minitracks …
ADVANCES IN TEACHING AND LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES:
* technology and its support of improving teaching and learning ... Special
interest continues to focus on innovative ways of using social media to
facilitate learning. ... all aspects of teaching and learning technologies from
the original inceptions of theories and tools through the measurement of
learning outcomes
* Chairs: Spencer & Santanen
* http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_45/45cl.htm#CL1
COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL NETWORKS
* Communication network analysis identifies the communication structure
shaped by the flows of information or other material/nonmaterial resources.
... the current minitrack focuses on the structures and patterns of association
that emerges from the flow of information, broadly defined, and is
particularly well suited for dynamic network data. Units of analysis and form
of flow are scaleable, and this track welcomes a wide range of
communication network conceptualizations.
* http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_45/45os.htm#os5
* Chairs: Rosen & Barnett


SOCIAL MEDIA IN SOCIAL INFORMATICS
* Explore the impacts of social media, such as BBS, Wiki, blog, SNS, twitter
and so on, with respect to human behavior and choices in everyday life.
Develop the concepts and technologies, such as knowledge creation, data-
mining, and so on, for effective sharing of information and knowledge
among people by the social media.
* http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_45/45dm.htm#DM5
* Chairs: Ohta, Okada, Yamamoto, Suwa

SOCIAL NETWORKING AND COMMUNITIES
* social media and their interrelations with communities (online and offline)
in the context of work, personal life, and education ... address issues of
social networking and online communities of practice, inquiry and interest;
political, social, and gaming communities ...
* http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_45/45in.htm#IN7
* Chairs: Nahon & Haythornthwaite

SOCIAL NETWORKS AND COLLABORATION
* explore social networks, the social graph and social influence ... explore
unusual ways of modelling social networks ... open to analysis of collective
intelligence web sites, new knowledge creation, collaboration, persuasive
technology, analysis of social graphs, crowd-sourcing as well as ad hoc social
networks formed in response to pressing social needs ...
* http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_45/45cl.htm#CL13
* Chairs: Steiny, Oinas-Kukkonen, Nickerson


----- LEARNING ANALYTICS WORKSHOP -----
The Learning Analytics workshop description follows, and is also available in
PDF at <http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_45/45swt/WS/Learning-
Analytics-Web.pdf>
Learning analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of
data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and
optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs.
Advances in knowledge modeling and representation, the semantic web, data
mining, analytics, and open data form a foundation for new models of
knowledge development and analysis. The technical complexity of this
nascent field is paralleled by a transition within the full spectrum of learning
(education, work place learning, informal learning) to social, networked
learning. These technical, pedagogical, and social domains must be brought
into dialogue with each other to ensure that interventions and organizational
systems serve the needs of all stakeholders.
This workshop will focus on online or technology mediated settings in which
learner interaction data can be collected automatically. The growth of this
kind of data currently surpasses the ability of organizations to make sense of
it. This concern is particularly pronounced in relation to knowledge, teaching,
and learning in educational, work place, and informal settings. Learning
institutions and corporations make little use of the data learners generate in
the process of accessing learning materials, interacting with educators and
peers, and creating new content. Tools that build on theoretical and
methodological principles of learning analytics, and that harness the rapidly
emerging developments in analytics in general, promise important
applications in educational planning, whether for change at course and
institutional levels, or for generating insights for the learning sciences. Such
applications also extend beyond educational institutions as corporations face
pressure for increased competitiveness and productivity, a challenge that
requires important contributions in organizational capacity building from
workplace, formal, informal, and non-formal learning. Also, as we witness
the expansion of learning and knowledge work beyond formal institutional
boundaries onto the Internet, we will also find that myriad platforms in the
cloud that host learning activity by individuals as a core or side consideration
will be able to make use of learning analytics applications and ideas.
This will be a "working-shop", not a mini-conference of paper presentations.
We will begin with introductions and two or three presentations that frame
the emerging area of Learning Analytics. The rest of the day will include brief
presentations on key issues and substantial opportunities for panel, full
group and small group discussion. The final format and schedule will be
determined based on participant proposals. Our objective is twofold: 1) to
recruit members of the HICSS community to this new international
community initiative, and 2) to further identify and organize research strands
around which future collaborations might form. The workshop will also
prepare participants for the Learning Analytics & Networked Learning
minitrack and related minitracks, in terms of both content and familiarity
with each other.

All interested participants are welcome. We ask participants to prepare a 1-
page paper summarizing their backgrounds and interests in attending this
workshop. Optionally, a second separate page may be added to propose
activities participants would like to engage in at the workshop, and their role
in these activities. Submissions should be sent to the lead workshop
organizers, George Siemens (gsiemens@gmail.com) and Dan Suthers
(suthers@hawaii.edu) by November 30, 2011. The background/interest pages
will be circulated to all participants at the workshop, and used to frame
presentations and discussions.
Workshop Organizers:
Dan Suthers
Professor, Department of Information and Computer Sciences
Chair, Communication and Information Sciences PhD Program
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
(808) 956-3890 voice
(808) 956-3548 fax
Email: suthers@hawaii.edu
George Siemens
Researcher, Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute
Athabasca University
Email: gsiemens@gmail.com
Caroline Haythornthwaite
Director and Professor
School of Library, Archival & Information Studies
University of British Columbia
Email: c.haythorn@ubc.ca
Maarten de Laat
Director, Networked Learning Program,
Management Ruud de Moor Centre,
Open University of the Netherlands
Email: maarten.delaat@ou.nl
Erik Duval
Professor, Computer Science
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Email: Erik.Duval@cs.kuleuven.ac.be
Shane Dawson
Director, Arts Instructional Support and Information Technology
University of British Columbia
Email: sdawson@exchange.ubc.ca

Postdoc Position in Social Network Analysis, Tartu, Estonia

Postdoc Position in Social Network Analysis

Software Technology and Applications Competence Centre

The Estonian Competence Centre on Software Technology and Applications
(http://www.stacc.ee) is a consortium of ten companies and two
universities conducting industry-focused research in the fields of
data mining and service engineering.
The centre is seeking applications for a Postdoctoral Researcher
position in the field of social network analysis. The successful
candidate will work as part of a project involving Skype Technologies.
The goal of the project is to develop and apply scalable methods to
analyze highly dynamic social networks consisting of hundreds of millions
of users.

The ideal candidate will have a PhD in a relevant field, previous
research experience in very large social network analysis, and a
promising publication track record. Experience in industry-linked
research projects and ability to supervise research students and
research engineers is highly desirable.
The position will be fixed-term for two years. The salary will be
competitive by international standards. The starting date is negotiable.
The position will be based in Tartu, Estonia.

Applications should include a CV, list of publications and a research
statement outlining the candidate's previous and/or ongoing research
experience in social network analysis. Applications should be submitted
by e-mail to info [Št] stacc.ee with the subject line "Postdoc Position
in Social Network Analysis". Enquiries can be directed to Marlon Dumas
(marlon.dumas [Št] ut.ee). The deadline for applications is 1 August 2011.

Fully funded PhD position: geoprofile-driven social network enrichment, TU Twente, The Netherlands

PhD position geoprofile-driven social network enrichment

The challenge
Internet technologies have created a fabric for information exchange far
beyond the original intent to share information between humans. It has
become a landscape where entities (people, sensors, devices, observatories)
generate events bound in time and by location, carving out event
trajectories within a domain of activity. We are especially interested in
serving space/time understanding in social networks. The proper
characterization of the where-and-when of social network member activity in
geoprofiles allows the optimization of communication between the members.
Collecting, archiving and annotating these trajectories forms the basis for
knowledge extraction and management and for the organization of social
communities by mutual interest.
The PhD project aims to provide a toolset for building support systems for
a networked community whose members display similar activities in similar
locations and want to share content, valuations and experiences about
those. Scientific challenges encountered include geo-referenced entity
resolution, automatic data integration for content enrichment, information
extraction, uncertainty management and data quality improvement,
domain-of-activity specification, understanding user activities and routes
(geoprofiling), and spatial data processing. An XML-based ETL-architecture
will be developed that is based on a spatially enhanced XML DBMS and that
includes a toolset to provide for development support with the above
challenges when focusing on user-volunteered content.

An important point of focus of this research project is to adequately
address accuracy, completeness, ambiguity, conflicts, and trust in
volunteered information, geo-referencing of not explicitly geo-referenced
information, and matching this against known spatial information.
Volunteered spatial-temporal data will come to us in large quantities as
semi-structured reports describing local context. These volunteers may not
have positioning devices, or the objects described may not have been
collocated with such a device, and thus such data may lack precise
geo-reference. In temporal and thematic details, the reports may be
similarly imprecise.

The objective of this PhD research project is to establish and validate a
framework for geoprofile-driven content enrichment and data quality
improvement on the basis of user-volunteered content and open spatial data
services. The research is part of a larger national research project on
Spatio-Temporal Data Warehousing. Validation of the framework is to be
organized and executed in co-operation with the company EuroCottage (see
http://www.eurocottage.com) in the domain of community building and holiday
home location profiling. Co-operation with a concurrently running project
on neogeography offers a second domain for validation: international
development collaboration in agriculture.

The Database Group of the University of Twente offers a PhD position in the
Dutch national project COMMIT, a 100M Euro project involving 10
universities and 70 companies. The program brings together leading
researchers in search engines, parallel computing, databases, interaction
in context, embedded systems and knowledge technology.


Our offer
We offer a full-time PhD position in a dynamic and international
environment. The duration of the contracts is four years. The gross salary
will range from €2.042,00 in the first year to €2.612,00 per month in the
fourth year. Additionally, the University of Twente provides excellent
facilities for professional and personal development. In addition, we offer
a holiday allowance (amounts to 8%) and an end-of-year bonus of 8.3% (which
is approximately an extra month of salary) and a number of additional
benefits. The labor agreements are in accordance with the CAO-NU for Dutch
universities.


Your profile
We are looking for a candidate with an MSc. degree in computer science,
databases, geo-informatics, human media interaction, software engineering,
or an equivalent degree. The work involves both theory and practice
(implementing a research prototype and evaluation). Affinity with web
technology, user-generated content, data mining, and/or geographic
information systems (GIS) is desirable. The candidate must be a team player
and have good communication skills, in writing as well as oral. Your main
task will be to do research, but you will be given opportunities to acquire
some teaching experience.
Please use these email addresses only for obtaining Information!
- Dr.ir. Maurice van Keulen, email m.vankeulen@utwente.nl, and
- Dr.ir. Rolf de By, email deby@itc.nl.
If you can meet the above mentioned requirements, you are invited to submit
your application letter together with:
- curriculum vitae
- a list of publications
- a list of courses you have followed (with grades)
- the names and addresses of two referees
- one or two of your research papers and/or your MSc thesis
before June 6, 2011, through the application link:
http://www.utwente.nl/vacatures/en/


The Organisation
The University of Twente. We stand for life sciences and technology. High
tech and human touch. Education and research that matter. New technology
which drives change, innovation and progress in society. The University of
Twente is the only campus university in the Netherlands; divided over six
faculties we provide more than fifty educational programmes. The University
of Twente has a strong focus on personal development and talented
researchers are given scope for carrying out pioneering research.
In the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
(EWI) is the place where these three disciplines shape Information and
Communication Technology at the University of Twente. ICT is more than
communication. In almost every product we use mathematics, electronics and
computer technology are present, and ICT now contributes to all of
societies' activities. It is no longer about gadgets that we do or do not
want to use. The real integration of ICT is just beginning. What we need is
more intelligence in our systems and improvement of their natural
interaction with humans.

ICWL 2011 Call for Workshop Proposals

 CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS

The 10th International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL 2011)

8-10 December 2011, Hong Kong

Website: http://www.cs.cityu.edu.hk/~icwl2011/

The International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL) 2011 organizing committee invites proposals for workshops to be held in conjunction with the conference.
The purpose of a workshop is to provide participants with the opportunity to present and discuss novel research ideas related to active and emerging topics in web-based learning.
>From the 8th-10th of December, 2011, the tenth ICWL 2011 will be held in Hong Kong.

All workshop papers of ICWL 2011 will be published as a separate volume in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), which will be indexed by EI.
In order to give the authors an opportunity to revise their papers in the light of the feedback they might receive during the discussions of their papers upon presentation of their works,
all accepted workshop papers will be published as a second post-proceeding volume after the meeting. This will also allow workshop organizers have more time to attract more good papers.

The ICWL Program Committee invites researchers from industry and academia to take this opportunity and submit WORKSHOP PROPOSALS on hot topics in the scope of the conference.
All proposals will be reviewed and evaluated by the ICWL Organizing Committee. Workshop attendees have to register and pay for the full ICWL conference.

IMPORTANT DATES
Workshop Proposals Submission Deadline: July 1, 2011.
Notification of acceptance: July 15, 2011.
Workshop author registration deadline: Oct 8, 2011.
(proposed workshop paper submission deadline: Sept 1, 2011; proposed notification of acceptance: Sept 20, 2011)

ICWL 2011 conference: December 8-10, 2011

WORKSHOPS REQUIREMENTS FOR SUBMISSION
Workshop proposals should be no longer than 4 pages and should include the following information:

* General information:
- Name of the workshop
- Names, affiliations, and a short bio of the organizers (we encourage international teams of organizers from different institutions)

* A description of the workshop:
- Workshop topic
- Relevance of the workshop to the conference
- Target audience: who might be interested in the workshop and why
- Expected number of participants
- Goals and format (oral presentations, posters, discussion groups, etc.)

* A draft of the workshop's call for papers:
- A list of specific topics of interest
- Important dates
- URL of site to host the workshop
- Preliminary list of the Program Committee with their affiliation
- A description of the paper reviewing and selection process
- Expected duration of the workshop (half a day or a full day)

SUBMISSION
Please email your proposal as a PDF attachment directly to the workshop chairs
- Dickson K.W. Chiu, Dickson Computer Systems, Hong Kong. (dicksonchiu@ieee.org)
- Maggie M.H. Wang, Faculty of Eductation, University of Hong Kong. (magwang@hku.hk)

Special Issue of Internet Computing on Social Networking Infrastructures

IEEE Internet Computing

Call for Papers: 

Special Issue on Infrastructures for Online Social Networking Services (May/June 2012)

Final submissions due 1 September 2011

Please email the guest editors a brief description of the article you plan to submit by 15 August 2011
Guest Editors: Anwitaman Datta, Marios D. Dikaiakos, Seif Haridi, and Liviu Iftode (ic3_2012@computer.org)

The proliferation of rich social media, online communities, and collectively
produced knowledge resources has accelerated the convergence of
technological and social networks, resulting in a dynamic ecosystem of
online social networking (OSN) services, environments, and applications. OSN
sitesÕ success is reshaping the InternetÕs structure, design, and utility.
Furthermore, itÕs creating numerous challenges and opportunities for the
development, deployment, management, and operation of scalable, secure,
interoperable OSN infrastructures that can sustain a cycle of innovative
application development, improved end-user experience, high-quality service
provision, privacy protection, and a healthy market expansion.
This special issue seeks recent research results in systems, software, and
services that provide novel ubiquitous, scalable, secure, and trustworthy
OSN infrastructures. Topics of interest include

* architectures, algorithms, and protocols for scalable and trustworthy OSN infrastructures;
* infrastructure support for security, privacy, and personalization;
* software platforms for social-networking-centric applications and services;
* storage systems and data management issues;
* infrastructures for mining OSN data and social interactions;
* infrastructures for measuring and monitoring social networks and activities;
* OSN infrastructures for mobile devices, vehicular networks, and location-based services;
* innovative social-networking-centric applications and services; and
* adaptivity and self-management in OSN infrastructures and services.

Submission Guidelines
All submissions must be original manuscripts of fewer than 5,000 words,
focused on Internet technologies and implementations. All manuscripts are
subject to peer review on both technical merit and relevance to ICÕs
international readership Ñ primarily system and software design engineers.
We do not accept white papers, and we discourage strictly theoretical or
mathematical papers. To submit a manuscript, please log on to ScholarOne
(https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com:443/ic-cs) to create or access an account,
which you can use to log on to ICÕs Author Center and upload your
submission.

Contextualized Usage and Attention Metadata: Towards Unobtrusive Context Creation and Usage in enriched Platforms (TUCCUP)

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

Contextualized Usage and Attention Metadata: Towards Unobtrusive Context

Creation and Usage in enriched Platforms (TUCCUP)

Karlsruhe, Germany, 26-27 September 2011

Organised by the 7th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling

and Using Context 2011

http://www.gast.it.uc3m.es/tuccup/

AIM & TOPICS

Recent years have brought advances in content analysis techniques for
multimedia content. However, the "semantic gap" is still present. The levels of
performance obtained for text-based search and recommendation are not yet fully
scalable to more complex interactive environments including multiple
applications, devices or resource types such as image/audio/video. To currently
understand the nature, quality and/or relevance of a resource in a specific
context, analyzing the content alone might not be sufficient. Other sources of
information have to be taken into account as well. This includes the context of
resources, attention paid to it and actions taken on it by users.

Information about the attention users give to resources and how they are used
(e.g. number of streaming accesses on a video in a period, the type of tasks
being executed while using a resource, at which time a resource is accessed,
whether a video is watched completely or not, from which country ratings are
made, etc.) can be used to improve retrieval relevance, to help recommend
resources, or simply to identify the respect context of the user in which the
task is being carried out. To be useful, this information needs to be first
systematically collected into potentially large datasets. There are open
challenges on how to store this information, how to aggregate and merge it over
heterogeneous systems, how to distill the data into information and then into
knowledge about the resources and how to use this knowledge to build or enhance
multimedia applications.

The objective of this workshop is to research content- and user-centric as well
as context-aware methodologies, technologies and systems for tracking and
managing usage and attention metadata from different applications.

The workshops invites papers dealing with the following topics. Please note
that, as the research field has by no means reached a mature state, papers of
ongoing work are very much welcome!

Topics of interest for the workshop include, but are not restricted to: Capture
and aggregation of usage and attention metadata for resources; Recommender
systems to assist users in finding relevant content based on usage and
attention metadata; Frameworks for the management of usage and attention
metadata for heterogeneous resources; Creating semantic information from user
attention; Contextualization of multimedia resources; Social aspects, such as
ownership, privacy and business models for the capture and use of usage and
attention metadata; Applications that use usage and attention metadata,
including but not limited to applications in science, engineering, humanities,
business, public safety, commerce, and technology enhanced learning.

Regarding usage and attention metadata itself, this workshop is aimed also to
be a place to discuss the technological and social challenges in capturing,
storing and using attention information. Efficient and scalable ways in which
this information could be shared between different tools and systems is one of
the main technological issues to be dealt with. On the social side, the
acceptance that different ownership/exploitation approaches have with end users
and investors will determine the success or failure of attention metadata-based
applications. Researchers and practitioners confronting these topics are among
the desired attendance of this workshop.

IMPORTANT DATES

20 June 2011: Submissions
16 July 2011: Notifications
1 August 2011: Camera-ready of accepted papers
26/27 September 2011: TUCCUP Workshop in Karlsruhe


SUBMISSIONS

The Workshop accepts a variety of submission types:
Full papers: 12 pages
Short papers: 6 pages
System/service demos: 2 pages

Papers should be original and not previously submitted to other venues. But
papers may describe ongoing work, thereby enabling the discussion of research
activities not yet mature for presentation at a conference.

Submission will be available through the EasyChair submission system:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tuccup11

If you haven't an EasyChair account yet, you'll be asked to create it before
you can access the TUCCUP'11 page.

PUBLICATION

Accepted papers will be published online as part of the CEUR Workshop
proceedings series. CEUR-WS.org is a recognized ISSN publication series, ISSN
1613-0073.

In addition, authors of best full papers will be invited to submit a revised
version of their manuscripts for a Special Issue in a prestigious international
journal such as the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems.

CO-CHAIRS

Martin Wolpers (Fraunhofer FIT, Germany)
Abelardo Pardo (University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain)
Katrien Verbert (KU Leuven, Belgium)

Program Committee (Tentative)

Erik Duval (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Ralf Klamma (RWTH Aachen, Germany)
Stefanie Lindstaedt (Technische Universität Graz. Austria)
Martin Memmel (DFKI Kaiserslautern, Germany)
Peter Scott (Open University, Great Britain)
Xavier Ochoa (ESPOL University, Ecuador)
Christoph Rensing (TU Darmstadt, Germany)
Hendrik Drachsler (OUNL, The Netherlands)

ABOUT Context 2011

The Seventh International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and
Using Context (CONTEXT'11) will provide a forum for presenting and discussing
high-quality research and applications on context. The conference invites
researchers and practitioners to share insights and cutting-edge results from
the wide range of disciplines concerned with context, including: the Cognitive
Sciences (Linguistics, Psychology, Computer Science, Neuroscience), the Social
Sciences and Organizational Sciences, and all application areas, including
Medicine and Law.  See http://context-11.teco.edu/ for details.

6th International Workshop on Systems Software Verification (SSV 2011)

6th International Workshop on

Systems Software Verification (SSV 2011)

Real Software, Real Problems, Real Solutions

August 26-27 2011, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

https://es.fbk.eu/events/ssv2011

Industrial-strength software analysis and verification has advanced in
recent years through the introduction of model checking, automated and
interactive theorem proving, and static analysis techniques as well as
correctness by design, correctness by contract, and model-driven
development. However, many techniques are working under restrictive
assumptions which are invalidated by complex (embedded) system
software such as operating system kernels, low-level device drivers or
microcontroller code.
The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers and
developers from both academia and industry, who are facing real
software and real problems to find real, applicable solutions. By
"real" we mean problems such as time-to-market or reliability that the
industry is facing and is trying to fix in software that is deployed
in the market place. A real solution is one that is applicable to the
problem in industry and not one that only applies to an abstract,
academic toy version of it. This forum will discuss software
analysis/development techniques and tools; it will also serve as a
platform to discuss open problems and future challenges in dealing
with existing and upcoming systems level code.

Topics include (but are not limited to):
* model checking
* automated and interactive theorem proving
* static analysis
* model-driven development
* embedded systems development
* automated testing
* programming languages
* verifying compilers
* software certification
* software tools
* experience reports

Submissions must be made electronically through the EasyChair
system [1] until May 29 2011, 23:59h Samoan time. Papers should
be up to 15 pages in pdf format and formatted in LNCS style [2].
Additional details may be included in a clearly marked appendix,
which will be read at the discretion of the program committee.
All will be subject to peer review under normal conference
standards. Experience reports and papers on work in progress are
welcome as long as there is a clear contribution. Submissions
which are based or discuss a non-trivial piece of software are
required to make all those non-standard software parts available,
which a referee may need, in order to check the claims of the
submission.
Submitted papers must not have previously appeared in a journal
or conference with published proceedings and must not be
concurrently submitted to any other peer-reviewed workshop,
symposium, conference or archival journal. Any partial overlap
with any such published or concurrently submitted paper must be
clearly indicated.
The workshop proceedings are planned to be published in the form
of post-proceedings in the Springer series Lecture Notes in
Computer Science (LNCS).
Important dates
May 29 2011 Abstract Registration Deadline
June 03 2011 Paper submission deadline
June 30 2011 Notification of accepted papers
July 15 2011 Final version
August 26-27 2011 Workshop

The workshop is organized as a two-day workshop (August 26-27 2011).

Location
The workshop will be held in Nijmegen, The Netherlands in conjunction with the
2nd International Conference on Interactive Theorem Proving (ITP 2011).

Program Chair
Jörg Brauer (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
Marco Roveri (FBK-irst, Italy)
Hendrik Tews (TU Dresden, Germany)

Steering Committee
Ralf Huuck (NICTA, Australia)
Gerwin Klein (NICTA, Australia)
Bastian Schlich (ABB Corporate Research, Germany)

Program Committee
Dirk Beyer (University of Passau, Germany)
Jörg Brauer (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
Adam Chlipala (Harvard, USA)
Ansgar Fehnker (NICTA, Australia)
Alexey Gotsman (IMDEA, Spain)
Chris Hawblitzel (Microsoft Research, USA)
Andy King (University of Kent, UK)
Stefan Kowalewski (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
Thomas Kropf (Bosch, Germany)
Kim G. Larsen (Aalborg University, Denmark)
Wolfgang Reif (University of Augsburg, Germany)
Marco Roveri (FBK-irst, Italy)
Axel Simon (TU Munich, Germany)
Nishant Sinha (NEC Labs, USA)
Hendrik Tews (TU Dresden, Germany)
Michael Whalen (UMSEC -- University of Minnesota, USA)
Kwangkeun Yi (Seoul National University, Korea)

Invited Speakers
Following a tradition established over the past iterations of
SSV, this years workshop will feature at least two keynote talks.
The invited speakers will be announced soon.
[1] http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ssv2011
[2] http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0

Third International Conference on Computational Aspects of Social Networks (CASoN 2011)

Third International Conference on Computational Aspects of Social Networks (CASoN 2011)

Salamanca, Spain

October 19-21, 2011

WWW: http://www.mirlabs.net/cason11

http://www.mirlabs.org/cason11

Technically Sponsored by:
IEEE Systems Man and Cybernetics Society - Spanish Chapter
IEEE Spain
IEEE IEEE Systems Man and Cybernetics Society (pending approval)

Technically Supported by:
Technical Committee on Soft Computing of IEEE Systems Man and
Cybernetics Society
Publication: IEEE

Objective:
The International Conference on Computational Aspects of Social Networks organized in Salamanca,
Spain brings together an interdisciplinary venue for social scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, computer users, and students to exchange and share their experiences, new ideas, and research results about all aspects (theory, applications and tools) of intelligent methods applied to Social Network, and to discuss the practical challenges encountered and the solutions adopted. Industrial Workshop/Tutorials and conference sessions will allow individuals interested in the theory, methods, or applications of social network analysis to share ideas and explore common interests.
Welcome to Salamanca, Spain and we look forward to seeing you during CASoN 2011!
We solicit original research and technical papers not published elsewhere. The papers can be theoretical, practical and application, and cover a broad set of  intelligent methods, with particular emphasis on Social Network computing. Methods such as (but not restricted to) :
Neural Networks and Connectionist Models
Evolutionary Algorithms
Fuzzy Logic
Knowledge Management
Multi-valued Logic
Semantic Networks
Rough Sets
Intelligent Agents
Ontologies
Reinforcement Learning
Applications on Social Networks:
Network evolution
Network evolution and growth mechanisms.
Online communities and computer networks.
Information diffusion in social networks.
Detection of communities by document analysis.
Topology of real networks.
Recommendation
Information diffusion in social networks.
Recommendations for product purchase, information acquisition and establishment of social relations.
Impact of recommendation models on the evolution of the social network.
Classification models and their application in social recommender systems.
Advertisement models
Economical impact of social network discovery.
Social advertising.
Use of social networks for marketing.
Search in network
Web page ranking informed by social media.
Search algorithms on social networks.
Collaborative Filtering.
Security
Anomaly detection in social network evolution.
Data protection inside communities.
Crime data mining and network analysis.
Modeling trust and reputation in social networks.
Misbehavior detection in communities.
Network geography
Geographical clusters, networks, and innovation.
Social geography.
International Collaborations in e-Social network.
Web
Automatic discovery and analysis of Web based social networks.
Link Topology and Site Hierarchy.
Web mining algorithms.
Web communities.
Web-Based Cooperative Work.
Evaluation
Test collection.
Benchmark creation.
Measures and methodologies.

We invite you to submit a:
* Full Paper (Upto 6 pages): Oral Presentation is required
* Short Paper (Upto 4 pages): Poster Presentation

Author Guidelines:
Submission of paper should be made through the submission link: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cason2011
Please refer to the conference website for guidelines to prepare your manuscript. All accepted papers will be compiled in conference proceedings published by the IEEE. It is mandatory at least an author
registers for every paper that is included in the conference proceedings. Proceedings will be made available during the conference. Expanded versions of CASoN 2011 selected papers will be published in special issues of internationally referred journals.

Important Dates:
Paper Submission: June 01, 2011
Notification of acceptance: July 20, 2011
Camera-ready of accepted papers: August 20, 2011

Call for Events:
Your idea of CASoN events, such as special sessions, workshops, competitions, panel discussions,
demonstration booths, and any others, are welcome. Please describe how to realize, schedule for
preparation, estimated cost, and others in a proposal form in free format and submit to the Special
Event Chair. They are reviewed taking account of necessary space, cost, time, attractive effects, and
others and approved.

Event Proposal Due: May 15, 2011

CASoN 2011 Organizing team:

Honorary Chairs
D.Carolina Blasco - Director of Telecommunication, Regional Government of Castilla y León, Spain
Manuel Castro - IEEE Sección España (Chairman), Spain
Jacinto Canales, President of CCII-Spain, Colegios de Ingeniería en
Informática, Spain

General Chairs
Ajith Abraham, Machine Intelligence Research Labs, EU
Emilio Corchado, University of Salamanca, Spain

Program Chairs
Redda Alhaj, University of Calgary, Canada
Vaclav Snasel, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic

Special Events Chair
Kasia Wegrzyn-Wolska, ESIGETEL, France

Information Contact:
Dr. Emilio Corchado
Plaza de la Merced,s/n
Faculty of Science.
CP. 37008
University of Salamanca.
Salamanca, Spain
Phone: 0034 616 44 9888
email: escorchadousal.es

Springer WWWJ Special Issue on Social Networks & Social Web Mining

CALL FOR PAPERS

World Wide Web Journal (WWWJ) - Springer

http://www.springer.com/computer/database+management+%26+information+retriev

al/journal/11280

Special Issue on

Social Networks & Social Web Mining

CFP in PDF:

http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/CFP-11280-

20110218.pdf?SGWID=0-0-45-1083637-p35553315

===================================================
Background and Scope
===================================================
Nowadays the emergence of web-based communities and hosted services such as
social networking sites ¨C Facebook, LinkedIn, wikis ¨C Wikipedia,
microblogging - Twitter and folksonomies ¨C Delicious, Flickr and so on,
brings in tremendous freedom of Web autonomy and facilitate collaboration
and sharing between users. And along with the interactions between users and
computers, social Web is rapidly becoming an important part of our digital
experience, ranging from digital textual information to rich multimedia
formats.

Social networks have played an important role in different domains for about
one decade, particularly involved in a broad range of social activities like
user interaction, establishing friendship relationships, sharing and
recommending resources, suggesting friends, creating groups and communities,
commenting friends activities and opinions and so on.
These aspects and characteristics form the most active and challenging parts
of Web 2.0. a large amount of challenges and opportunities have arisen with
the propagation and popularity of new applications and technologies. A
prominent challenge lies in modeling and mining this vast volume of data to
extract, represent and exploit meaningful knowledge, and to leverage
structures and dynamics of emerging social networks residing in the social
Web, especially social media. Social networks and social Web mining combines
data mining with social Web computing as a promising direction and offers
unique opportunities for developing novel algorithms and tools ranging from
text and content mining to link mining and community detection and so on.
The primary goal of this special issue is to showcase the cutting edge
research advances on the intersection of Social Web, Social Network and Data
mining, in order to provide a landscape of research progresses and
application potentials in related areas. We are interested in not only, the
papers with strong algorithmic innovations, but also the works with solid
application-oriented experiment evaluations. More specialized topics within
Social Web Mining and Social Networks include, but are not limited to the
following:
? Computational models for social media
? Graph and matrix methods for computational social science
? Probabilistic models for computational social science
? Information acquisition and establishment of social relations
? Data management in collaborative open applications
? Collaborative filtering and content ranking using social media
? Group interaction, collaboration, and recommendation
? Web2.0 and Collaborative Tagging
? Link analysis and network structure discovery
? Community detection and evolution
? Search in social networks and social media
? Interoperability among social applications and social media
? Techniques for social network analysis/mining and for the analysis of social media phenomena
? Blog search and retrieval
? User behaviour modeling
? Social media analysis
? Social aspects of Blogosphere
? Web mining algorithms and Web communities
? Semantic Web
? Semantic Web Mining
? Adversarial blogging and counter measures
? Contextual advertising
? Opinion mining
? Sentiment and Search
? Social navigation and visualization
? Application of social Web mining
? Applications of social network analysis

===================================================
Important Dates:
===================================================
Submission deadline: July 1, 2011
Notification: September 1, 2011
Final Version due: November. 1, 2011
Publication: Early 2012
===================================================
Submission Guidelines
===================================================
Manuscript preparation: Instructions for Authors:
http://www.springer.com/computer/database+management+%26+information+retriev
al/journal/11280
Manuscript submission: http://www.editorialmanager.com/wwwj/
When submitting, select SI: Social Networks & Social Web Mining.

===================================================
Guest Editors
===================================================
Guandong Xu, Victoria University, Australia, guandong.xu@vu.edu.au
Jeffrey Xu Yu, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, yu@se.cuhk.edu.hk

International Conference on Multimedia Modeling 2012 (MMM 2012) - Call for Special Session Proposals

MMM 2012 Call for Special Session Proposals

International Conference on Multimedia Modeling 2012

Jan. 4-6, 2012, Klagenfurt, Austria

http://www.mmm2012.org

The International MultiMedia Modeling Conference (MMM) is a leading
international conference for researchers and industry practitioners to
share their new ideas, original research results and practical
development experiences from all MMM related areas. MMM2012 welcomes
proposals for special sessions focusing on specific new challenges in
multimedia research. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
* 3D object and face retrieval
* Annotation and multimedia metadata
* Cross-modal and cross-media analysis and modeling
* Events and actions in multimedia
* Multimedia in interactive entertainment
* Music and audio content analysis
* Modeling user context in multimedia retrieval
Also the topics mentioned in the conference call for papers in the
fields of multimedia content analysis, multimedia signal processing and
communications, and multimedia applications and services (see also
http://mmm2012.org/call-for-papers/) are of interest for the special
session.
A typical MMM special session features 5-6 contribution discussing the
proposed topic. The proposal should include the following information:
* Tentative title of the proposed special session
* Names and affiliations of the organizers (including brief bio and
contact information)
* Session abstract (statement of the significance of topic)
* List of potential contributors (together with tentative paper titles)
who agree to submit a paper if the proposal is accepted

Proposals will be evaluated based on the timeliness and significance of
the topic, as well as the qualifications of the organizers and the
tentative papers proposed.
Papers of accepted special sessions need to be submitted using the
MMM2012 conference submission system. Special session organizers will be
responsible for managing the review process of the papers submitted to
their special sessions. All special session papers will be included in
the conference proceedings.

Important dates:
================
* Proposal submission: June 6, 2011
* Notifications: June 20, 2011
* Papers submission: July 22, 2011

Special session chairs:
=======================
* Marco Bertini, Università di Firenze, Italy, bertini@dsi.unifi.it
* Mathias Lux, Klagenfurt University, Austria, mlux@itec.uni-klu.ac.at

For more information, please visit http://www.mmm2012.org/

MTAP Special Issue on "Multimedia on the Web"

MTAP Special Issue Theme: Multimedia on the Web

Guest Editors: Harald Kosch, Ernesto Damiani, Florian Stegmaier, Mathias Lux, Ralf Klamma

Theme and Scope

Streaming video has recently surpassed peer-to-peer networks in terms of network
capacity hunger. Reports estimate a share of 40% of peak network capacity dedicated to
entertainment, mostly streaming video. A large share of this traffic originates from web
based services. YouTube alone takes up to 8% of the prime time internet traffic. So
multimedia on the web is currently a big issue. While transmission currently works in a
best effort system, multimedia information systems on the web are far from being perfect.
Retrieval, annotation, validated and useful metadata, reliable and trusted services, and
user interaction and context-based adaptation are still under discussion and allow
improvement. Currently, the Web itself faces dramatic changes, looking for example at
the spread of social networks, Linked Data or the impact of HTML5 or WebM. These
activities also have a deep effect on multimedia data and content provider. This special
issue shall collect high quality papers from applied and basic research as well as
applications for multimedia on the web.

Submissions have to relate to multimedia on the web, or more specifically on the following topics:
· Annotation of multimedia for the Web
· Multimedia databases and metadata models
· Multimedia & metadata adaptation
· Multimedia in the social Web
· Multimedia user communities
· Multimedia semantics & ontologies for the Web
· Proactive delivery and recommender systems
· Semantic multimedia information services
· User interaction & context
· Web based emergence and self-organization
· Web based multimedia search and retrieval

The Importance of the Theme that this Special Issue will focus on:
During the past decade, the information society entered in the information explosion era.
We have witnessed an explosion in the amount of multimedia information accessed by
the general public over the Web. At the same time the Web itself changes drastically,
looking for example at the spread of social networks, Linked Data or the impact of
HTML5 or WebM. These activities also have a deep effect on multimedia data and
content provider. This leads to many challenging and interesting research problems,
addressing the proper and effective use, presentation, processing, accessing,
personalizing, describing and delivering multimedia on the Web. The emphasis of the
proposed issue is to present to the readers of MTAP the latest developments and research
results and issues in multimedia on the Web.

Estimated Number of Articles to be published:
Fifteen

Timetable
Special Issues Advertisement: May – October 30, 2011
Submission Deadline: October 30, 2011
Notification of First Round of Review: January 15, 2012
Submission of the Revised Manuscript: March 1, 2012
Notification of Final Acceptance: April 30, 2012
Publication Date: First available issue

All the papers should be full journal length versions and follow the guidelines set out by Multimedia Tools and Applications (http://www.springer.com/computer/information+systems/journal/11042). Manuscripts should be submitted online at https://www.editorialmanager.com/mtap/ choosing "Multimedia on the Web" as article type, no later than October 30th, 2011.

Information about the manuscript (title, full list of authors, corresponding author's contact, abstract, and keywords) should also be sent to the corresponding editor Prof. Harald Kosch (harald.kosch (at) uni-passau.de). All the papers will be peer-reviewed following the MTAP reviewing procedures.

Contact information of the special issue editors:

Prof. Dr. (ENS Lyon) Harald Kosch, Florian Stegmaier
Chair for Distributed Information Systems
University of Passau, Germany
Tel.: 0049/851/509-3060
Fax.: 0049/851/509-3062
E-Mail: Harald.Kosch@uni-passau.de

Prof. Ernesto Damiani,
Dept. of Computer Technology,
University of Milan, Italy.
Tel.: 0039-02 503.02503 30064
Fax.: 0039-02 503.30010
E-mail: ernesto.damiani@unimi.it

Dr. Ralf Klamma
Lehrstuhl für Informatik 5,
RWTH Aachen, Germany
Tel.: 0049/241/80-21513
Fax: 0049/241/80-22321
E-Mail: klamma@dbis.rwth-aachen.de

Dr. Mathias Lux
Institute for Information Technology
Klagenfurt University, Austria
Tel.: 0043/463/2700-3615
Fax.: 0043/463/2700-99-3615
Email: mlux@itec.uni-klu.ac.at

The 5th International Workshop on Social Network Mining and Analysis (SNAKDD 2011)

The 5th International Workshop on Social Network Mining and Analysis (SNAKDD 2011)

(http://www.snakdd.com)

August 21, 2011,

San Diego CA, USA

At the 17th ACM SIGKDD International Conference 

on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2011)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Important Dates

o May 25 , 2011: Electronic submission of full papers
o June 14, 2011: Author notification
o June 24, 2011: Submission of Camera-ready papers
o August 21, 2011: Workshop

Description
In recent years, social network research has advanced significantly, thanks to the prevalence of the online social websites and instant messaging systems as well as the availability of a variety of large-scale offline social network systems. These social network systems are usually characterized by the complex network structures and rich accompanying contextual information. Researchers are increasingly interested in addressing a wide range of challenges residing in these disparate social network systems, including identifying common static topological properties and dynamic properties during the formation and evolution of these social networks, and how contextual information can help in analyzing the pertaining social networks. These issues have important implications on community discovery, anomaly detection, trend prediction and can enhance applications in multiple domains such as information retrieval, recommendation systems, security and so on.
The fifth SNA-KDD '2011 aims to bring together practitioners and researchers with a specific focus on the emerging trends and industry needs associated with the social Web and other forms of social networking systems. Both theoretical and experimental submissions are encouraged.
The interesting topics include (1) data mining advances on the discovery and analysis of communities, on personalization for solitary activities (like search) and social activities (like discovery of potential friends), on the analysis of user behavior in open fora (like conventional sites, blogs and fora) and in commercial platforms (like e-auctions) and on the associated security and privacy-preservation challenges; (2) social network modeling, scalable, customizable social network infrastructure construction, dynamic growth and evolution patterns identification and discovery using machine learning approaches or multi-agent based simulation.

The fifth SNA-KDD '2011 solicits contributions on social network analysis and graph mining, including the emerging applications of the Web as a social medium. Papers should elaborate on data mining methods, issues associated to data preparation and pattern interpretation, both for conventional data (usage logs, query logs, document collections) and for multimedia data (pictures and their annotations, multi-channel usage data). Topics of interests include but are not limited to:

Communities discovery and analysis in large scale online and offline social networks
Personalization for search and for social interaction
Recommendations for product purchase, information acquisition and establishment of social relations
Data protection inside communities
Misbehavior detection in communities
Web mining algorithms for clickstreams, documents and search streams
Preparing data for web mining
Pattern presentation for end-users and experts
Evolution of patterns in the Web
Evolution of communities in the Web
Dynamics and evolution patterns of social networks, trend prediction
Contextual social network analysis
Temporal analysis on social networks topologies
Search algorithms on social networks
Multi-agent based social network modeling and analysis
Application of social network analysis
Anomaly detection in social network evolution

Workshop organizers :
* Lee Giles Pennsylvania State University
* Rong Yan Facebook
* John Yen Pennsylvania State University
* Haizheng Zhang StarMerx LLC

Contact: Rong Yan (rongyan@fb.com) or Haizheng Zhang (hzhang@starmerx.com)

IEEE International Workshop on Business Applications of Social Network Analysis (BASNA 2011)

Call for Papers

IEEE International Workshop on Business Applications of Social Network Analysis (BASNA 2011)

Collocated with IMSAA 2010, 12th December 2011, Bangalore, India 

Workshop homepage: http://www.basna.in 

The aim of this workshop is to encourage multidisciplinary discussions related to novel ideas and applications geared towards analyzing social network data. By bringing together researchers in the fields of Social Network Analysis (SNA), data mining, and management studies, the workshop will focus on identifying areas of collaboration among respective disciplines:
•The role of management research in guiding data mining efforts and SNA metrics development towards theoreticallygrounded discoveries about social network emergence.
• The role of Social Network Analysis in developing and applying metrics and tools for the mapping, evaluation, visualization, and design of social relations in organizations.
• The role of data mining techniques in identifying scalable methods for the extraction and organization of social relations for management research and business practice

BASNA is seeking original research work which is not yet published or not submitted in any other conferences, journals or magazines. Accepted papers of the workshop would be available via IEEE Xplore digital library. Extended versions of the best BASNA papers would be invited for publication in the following journals: Journal of Information Science and Technology, International Journal of Knowledge-Based Organizations, and the International Journal of Social Network Mining

Topics of Interest:
• Applications of social network data mining to address a real
• Knowledge Management (identifying experts, fostering world business scenario
• Algorithms for data mining social networks, graphs, links
• Anomaly detection in network based applications like intrusion or fraud detection in telecommunication
• Mobile social networks, Social semantic web
• Application of scale-free networks
• Data mining applications for micro-blogging (real time mining)
• Community discovery in social networks
• Data mining on large graphs
• Mining Wikipedia like graph/network structure
• Data mining applications for viral marketing
• Behavioral analysis in social networks
• Privacy issues, recommendations & contextual applications in social networks
• Tracking Terrorism and Criminal networks knowledge exchange and integration, creating and developing communities of practice)
• Marketing (identifying new customers, customer relationship management)
• Innovation Support (enhancing innovation capacity, supporting new product development teams)
• Change Management (managing change, post-merger integration, identifying key enablers)
• Talent Management (hiring and career development)
• Leadership Development (decision-making, identifying leaders)
• Intra-Organizational Coordination (supporting coordination and information flows among organizational members and units)
• Inter-Organizational Coordination (supporting collaboration in consortia, industrial districts, interorganizational alliances)

Important Dates:
Deadline of Submission of Papers 1st September, 2011
Paper Review Notification 11th October, 2011
Final Camera Ready Paper Due 31st October, 2011
BASNA Workshop 12th December, 2011

Organizing Committee:
• Suresh Bhagavatula, IIM Bangalore, India
• Marenglen Biba, University of New York
• Roberto Dandi, Luiss Business School, Italy
• Avik Sarkar, IBM India

Technical Program Committee:
• Vineet Chaoji, Yahoo! Labs
• Ramasuri Narayanam, IBM Research
• Samit Paul, Intuit

Contact email: basna.workshop@gmail.com

Postdoc/assistant professor position, computer science, Aarhus University, Denmark

A postdoc/research assistant professor position is available in the Data-Intensive Systems group at Aarhus University.

The Data-Intensive Systems group (http://cs.au.dk/research/areas/data-intensive-systems/) is a new and
expanding research group in the Department of Computer Science. Since it was founded, in August 2010, the group has established a portfolio of research activities that currently includes 6 externally funded projects.
The department employs some 150 members of staff and has about 1000 students. The department is strong in both theoretical and experimental research, and it it is recognized internationally for its contribution
within theory as well as the practice of computing. To encourage a multi-disciplinary attitude to research, no firm dividing lines are drawn between the various subjects, and there is lively interaction among subjects.
Aarhus University has in excess of 40,000 students. Among over 17,000 universities world-wide, it is ranked in the top 100 by several influential rankings. Aarhus is the second-largest city in Denmark and is situated by
the sea in East Jutland. Aarhus is a "young" city due to its disproportionally large population of young inhabitants.
The postdoc position is at the level of research assistant professor. Successful applicants must demonstrate an ability to publish their work in top-ranked database research outlets. Key topics of interest include
spatio-temporal databases, data management for mobile services, query processing and indexing.
The responsibilities include research on the above topics in collaboration with other staff, along with modest teaching and service tasks. The position is expected to start August 1, 2011 or soon thereafter. The
position is initially for one year, but may be extended based on mutual agreement. The annual salary is approximately EUR 60,000 (inclusive of pension contributions and pre taxes). Applicants should send a letter of interest, a CV, and the names of two references to Professor Christian S. Jensen (at csj@cs.au.dk). The
application deadline is Sunday, June 5, 2011. Applications will be considered as they are received and until the position is filled.

AIB 2011-11: Hierarchical Counterexamples for Discrete-Time Markov Chains

The following technical report is available from http://aib.informatik.rwth-aachen.de:

Hierarchical Counterexamples for Discrete-Time Markov Chains
Nils Jansen, Erika Ábrahám, Jens Katelaan, Ralf Wimmer, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Bernd Becker
AIB 2011-11

In this paper we introduce a novel counterexample generation approach for discrete-time Markov chains (DTMCs) with two main advantages:
(1) We generate *abstract* counterexamples, which can be refined in a *hierarchical* manner.
(2) We aim at minimizing the number of states involved in the counterexamples, and compute a *critical subsystem* of the DTMC, whose paths form a counterexample.
Experiments show that with our approach we can reduce the size of counterexamples and the number of computation steps by orders of magnitude.

First international workshop on "Collaborative usage and development of models and visualizations" at ECSCW 2011

2nd Call for Papers:

First international workshop on "Collaborative usage and development of models

and visualizations" at ECSCW 2011

Date: 24 or 25 September 2011

Submission deadline: 15 June 2011 (Abstracts due in 1 June 2011)

Website: http://www.imtm-iaw.rub.de/events/ecscw/index.html.en

Contact/Submissions: collabviz@iaw.rub.de

---Organizers---
Alexander Nolte, Michael Prilla, Thomas Herrmann; University of Bochum, Germany
Stephan Lukosch, Gwendolyn Kolfschoten; TU Delft, Netherlands

---Workshop Content---
In the workshop, we want to bring together researchers and practitioners reporting on the usage and development of shared visualizations, be it e.g. process models or others. The workshop is intended to provoke discussion and generate new impulses for practice and research. The usage of graphical representations of work and business process such as process models can be considered a common practice in modern organizations. As their development can become a complex task it is reasonable to draft them
collaboratively. Also they become increasingly useful when used by larger groups throughout an organization. However despite modeling being a popular approach in practice, models are hardly used by non-experts and have little impact on the people actually working in these processes. This raises questions such as why there is so little use of models after their creation, how this usage can be increased and which kind of tools and modes of interaction are suitable for non-modeling experts. Furthermore as collaborative modeling most of the time remains restricted to collocated facilitated workshops. This approach however is not feasible as processes have to be rapidly adjusted to changing conditions inside and outside of an organization. Given the increasing
usage of graphical representations in organizations, their collaborative use and creation is of vital interest for the CSCW community and therefore this workshop can be a starting point in forming a research community.

---Topics---
The workshop welcomes different kind of contributions, including the description of case studies and other empirical work on model usage and development, position papers e.g. describing future research and educational experiences with collaborative models usage and development. Topics of the workshop include but are not restricted to the following:
- Collaborative development of and interaction with models in different settings such as:
- Processes and approaches of collaborative modeling
- Processes and settings of collaborative usage of process models
- Overcoming barriers for collaborative use and creation of models and visualizations
- The influence of users on models (e.g. collaborative modeling participants on models) and the influence of models on users (e.g. users discussing a model and behavior changes)

---Submission---
We will accept contributions in two different formats:
- Short papers such as reports of best practices or position papers which may not exceed 3 pages.
- Long papers of such as reports of empirical studies or research in progress which may not exceed 6 pages.
All contributions have to be formatted according to the ECSCW formatting instructions and must be submitted in PDF format via eMail to collabviz@iaw.rub.de. Author kits and paper templates are available at the ECSCW website (http://www.ecscw2011.org). All accepted paper will be published electronically at CEUR Workshop Proceedings.

For more information on the workshop please visit:
http://www.imtm-iaw.rub.de/events/ecscw/index.html.en

---Important Dates---
01.06. Abstract submission
15.06. Full paper submission
31.06. Acceptance notification

---Program committee---
Joseph Barjis, TU Delft, Netherlands
Kawtar Benghazi, University of Granada, Spain
Vojtech Merunka, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Czech Republic
Manuel Noguera García, University of Granada, Spain
Selmin Nurcan, University Paris, France
Carsten Ritterskamp, adesso AG, Germany
Irina Rychkova, University Paris 1 Pantheon – Sorbonne, France
Stefan Strecker, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

---Venue---
The ECSCW 2011 conference will be held at Aarhus University, Denmark from 24 to 28 September 2011. ECSCW is a bi-annual, international conference series. Since 1989, it has engaged researchers and scholars from academia and industry with high quality presentations and intense discussions (www.ecscw.org). ECSCW is interested in cooperative settings in the workplace, in everyday life, and the civic society, and across boundaries between these spheres of life. Submissions should address the unfolding practices of everyday work and life, and the application of computing technologies in these practices. Papers may also focus on design of such technologies or on historical accounts of use. With design is meant processes, methods, and outcoming artefacts. ECSCW solicits reports reflecting a rich variety of quantitative and qualitative research methods, including field studies and participatory approaches.

Contextualized Usage and Attention Metadata: Towards Unobtrusive Context Creation and Usage in enriched Platforms (TUCCUP 2011)

 FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

Contextualized Usage and Attention Metadata: Towards Unobtrusive Context

Creation and Usage in enriched Platforms (TUCCUP)

Karlsruhe, Germany, 26-27 September 2011

Organised by the 7th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling

and Using Context 2011

http://www.gast.it.uc3m.es/tuccup/

AIM & TOPICS

Recent years have brought advances in content analysis techniques for multimedia content. However, the "semantic gap" is still present. The levels of performance obtained for text-based search and recommendation are not yet fully scalable to more complex interactive environments including multiple applications, devices or resource types such as image/audio/video. To currently understand the nature, quality and/or relevance of a resource in a specific context, analyzing the content alone might not be sufficient. Other sources of information have to be taken into account as well. This includes the context of resources, attention paid to it and actions taken on it by users.

Information about the attention users give to resources and how they are used (e.g. number of streaming accesses on a video in a period, the type of tasks being executed while using a resource, at which time a resource is accessed, whether a video is watched completely or not, from which country ratings are made, etc.) can be used to improve retrieval relevance, to help recommend resources, or simply to identify the respect context of the user in which the task is being carried out. To be useful, this information needs to be first systematically collected into potentially large datasets. There are open challenges on how to store this information, how to aggregate and merge it over heterogeneous systems, how to distill the data into information and then into knowledge about the resources and how to use this knowledge to build or enhance
multimedia applications.

The objective of this workshop is to research content- and user-centric as well as context-aware methodologies, technologies and systems for tracking and managing usage and attention metadata from different applications.

The workshops invites papers dealing with the following topics. Please note that, as the research field has by no means reached a mature state, papers of ongoing work are very much welcome!

Topics of interest for the workshop include, but are not restricted to: 

Capture and aggregation of usage and attention metadata for resources; 

Recommender systems to assist users in finding relevant content based on usage and attention metadata;

Frameworks for the management of usage and attention metadata for heterogeneous resources; 

Creating semantic information from user attention; 

Contextualization of multimedia resources; 

Social aspects, such as ownership, privacy and business models for the capture and use of usage and

attention metadata; 

Applications that use usage and attention metadata, including but not limited to applications in science, engineering, humanities, business, public safety, commerce, and technology enhanced learning.

Regarding usage and attention metadata itself, this workshop is aimed also to be a place to discuss the technological and social challenges in capturing, storing and using attention information. Efficient and scalable ways in which this information could be shared between different tools and systems is one of the main technological issues to be dealt with. On the social side, the acceptance that different ownership/exploitation approaches have with end users and investors will determine the success or failure of attention metadata-based applications. Researchers and practitioners confronting these topics are among the desired attendance of this workshop. 

IMPORTANT DATES

20 June 2011: Submissions
16 July 2011: Notifications
1 August 2011: Camera-ready of accepted papers
26/27 September 2011: TUCCUP Workshop in Karlsruhe


SUBMISSIONS

The Workshop accepts a variety of submission types:
Full papers: 12 pages
Short papers: 6 pages
System/service demos: 2 pages

Papers should be original and not previously submitted to other venues. But papers may describe ongoing work, thereby enabling the discussion of research activities not yet mature for presentation at a conference.

Submission will be available through the EasyChair submission system:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tuccup11

If you haven't an EasyChair account yet, you'll be asked to create it before you can access the TUCCUP'11 page.

PUBLICATION

Accepted papers will be published online as part of the CEUR Workshop proceedings series. CEUR-WS.org is a recognized ISSN publication series, ISSN 1613-0073.

In addition, authors of best full papers will be invited to submit a revised version of their manuscripts for a Special Issue in a prestigious international journal such as the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems.

CO-CHAIRS

Martin Wolpers (Fraunhofer FIT, Germany)
Abelardo Pardo (University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain)
Katrien Verbert (KU Leuven, Belgium)

Program Committee (Tentative)

Erik Duval (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Ralf Klamma (RWTH Aachen, Germany)
Stefanie Lindstaedt (Technische Universität Graz. Austria)
Martin Memmel (DFKI Kaiserslautern, Germany)
Peter Scott (Open University, Great Britain)
Xavier Ochoa (ESPOL University, Ecuador)
Christoph Rensing (TU Darmstadt, Germany)
Hendrik Drachsler (OUNL, The Netherlands)

ABOUT Context 2011

The Seventh International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT'11) will provide a forum for presenting and discussing high-quality research and applications on context. The conference invites researchers and practitioners to share insights and cutting-edge results from the wide range of disciplines concerned with context, including: the Cognitive Sciences (Linguistics, Psychology, Computer Science, Neuroscience), the Social Sciences and Organizational Sciences, and all application areas, including
Medicine and Law.  See http://context-11.teco.edu/ for details.

IEEE Transactions on Multimedia; Special Issue on Learning Semantics from Multimedia Web Resources

CALL FOR PAPERS

IEEE Transactions on Multimedia

Special Issue on Learning Semantics from Multimedia Web Resources

Important Dates:

Paper submission due:                                 16-June-2011

First-round acceptance notification:             18-Sep-2011

Revision Due:                                                 16-Oct-2011

Second-round review completed:                  1-Dec-2011

Final manuscript due:                                     26-Jan-2012

Due to Production date:                                   March 2012

Publication date:                              June 2012 (expected)

URL: http://www.ieee.org/organizations/society/tmm/docs/LearningSemantics.pdf

Summary

Rapid advances in technology for capturing, processing, distributing, storing, and presenting visual data has resulted in a proliferation of multimedia in the World Wide Web. This is reflected in the success of many social websites, such as Flickr, Youtube, and Facebook, which dramatically increased the volume of community-shared media, including images and videos. These websites allow users not only to create and share media but also to rate and annotate them. Thus significant amounts of meta-data associated with the media, such as user-provided tags, comments, geo-tags, capture time, and EXIF information, are available in the Web. What are needed are methods to organize and understand these data.

Although the multimedia research community has widely recognized the importance of learning effective models for organizing and understanding, it has failed to make rapid progress due to the insufficiency of labeled data, which typically comes from users in an interactive labor-intensive manual process. In order to reduce this manual effort, many semi-supervised learning or active learning approaches have been proposed. Nevertheless, there is still a need to manually annotate a large set of images or videos to bootstrap and steer the training. The rich meta-data associated with the media in the Web offer a way out. If we can learn the models for semantic concepts effectively from user-shared media by using their associated meta-data as training labels, or if we can infer the semantic concepts of the media directly from the data in the Internet, the manual effort in multimedia ann! otation can be reduced. Consequently, semantic-based multimedia retrieval can greatly benefit from community contributions.

There is, however, a problem in using the associated meta-data as training labels: they are often very noisy. Thus how to remove the noise in the training labels or how to handle the noise in the learning process are important research topics.

Besides modeling media (e.g. images or video), the Web is an incredible resource for modeling users, through the aggregation of users’ traces on social media sites (e.g. the images they upload, the tags they use, the people whose content they comment on). So in addition to modeling media only, modeling people’s behaviors or events is also important.

Recently, more and more research effort has been dedicated to the aforementioned challenges and opportunities. Particularly within the last year, many papers on this topic have been published in ACM MM, SIGIR, WWW and CVPR. Therefore, we propose a special issue named Learning Semantics from Multimedia Web Resources. The goals of this special issue will be threefold: (1) introduce novel research in learning from resources in the Internet; (2) survey on the progress of this area in the past years; (3) discuss new applications based on the newly learned models.

Scope:

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

 

·         Novel learning methods that learn multimedia semantics from the web media using the meta-text as training labels.

·         Regularization strategies to handle the noise in the meta-text for the learning process.

·         Inferring semantics of multimedia data directly from the media in the Web.

·         Web media-based knowledge mining, such as building a lexicon/ontology from tags, extracting the relations among the semantic concepts, and learning the similarity metrics.

·         Web media analysis and organization, including grouping, classification, indexing, and navigation.

·         Web media tagging, including new tagging interfaces, tag recommendation, tag classification, tag correction, and automatic tagging.

·         Training set construction from the multimedia resources in the web.

·         Multimedia benchmark dataset creation from the web media, such as semi-automatic label correction with active learning.

·         Social media user and community modeling to improve semantic relevance of tags.

Submission Procedure:

Submissions should follow the guidelines set out by IEEE Transaction on Multimedia (http://www.ieee.org/organizations/society/tmm/author_info.html). Prospective authors should submit high quality, original manuscripts that have not appeared, nor are under consideration, in any other journals. Manuscripts should be submitted electronically through the online IEEE manuscript submission system at (http://tmmieee.manuscriptcentral.com/).

Organization:

All papers will be reviewed by at least three independent reviewers. Invited papers will be solicited first through white papers to ensure the quality and relevance to the special issue. The accepted invited papers will be reviewed by the guest editors and expect to account for about one fourth of the papers in the special issue.

Guest Editors:

Qi Tian, University of Texas at San Antonio, USA, email: qitian@cs.utsa.edu

Jinhui Tang, National University of Singapore, Singapore, email: tangjh@comp.nus.edu.sg

Marcel Worring, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, email: m.worring@uva.nl

Daniel Gatica-Perez, Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland, email: gatica@idiap.ch

 

Please address all correspondences regarding this special issue to the Guest Editors.