Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
ICWSM is an interdisciplinary conference that brings together researchers and industry leaders interested in creating and analyzing social media. Past conferences have included technical papers from areas such as computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology, multimedia, and semantic web technologies. The Third International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media was held on May 17–20, 2009, in San Jose, California, USA.
The social and community-driven aspects of our digital lives continue to increase rapidly, resulting in transformative behaviours and, significantly, publishing and distributing huge amounts of fascinating data. The International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media met once more in 2009 to discuss the latest research analyzing and leveraging this resource. As with previous meetings, we brought together a wide range of researchers and industry practitioners from many disciplines providing a unique opportunity for sharing ideas and collaboration in this space.
Disciplines that are relevant to our meeting include computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology, multimedia, and semantic web technologies. The following were key areas of interest:
- Psychological, personality-based, and ethnographic studies of social media
- Analyzing the relationship between social media and mainstream media
- Centrality/influence of social media publications and authors both within genres and between genres of data
- Ranking/relevance of blogs; web page ranking based on blogs
- Data acquisition: crawling/spidering and indexing
- Human computer interaction; social media tools; navigation and visualization
- Multimedia: tools and techniques for distribution, sharing, and analysis of social activity with/around multimedia.
- Semantic analysis; cross-system and cross-media name tracking; named relations and fact extraction; discourse analysis; summarization
- Semantic web; unstructured knowledge management; collaborative creation of structured knowledge
- Subjectivity in textual data; sentiment analysis; polarity/opinion identification and extraction
- Social network analysis; communities identification; expertise and authority discovery; collaborative filtering
- Text categorization; topic recognition; demographic/gender/age identification
- Trend identification and tracking; time series forecasting; measuring predictability of phenomena based on social media
- New social media applications, interfaces, and interaction techniques
- Trust; reputation; recommendation systems
Data Challenge
ICWSM-09 is planning to release a large blog dataset in conjunction with the conference. This data will include the full content and markup of the blog post as well as extracted text. The conference invites researchers to explore the dataset and submit their findings as technical papers. Information on obtaining the dataset is available.
Keynote Speakers And Tutorial Speakers
The keynote speaker for ICWSM-09 was Jon Kleinberg (Cornell University, USA). Lillian Lee (Cornell University, USA) and Duncan Watts (Columbia University and Yahoo! Research), along with other renowned experts to be announced at a later date, will present invited talks.
Conference Committee
General Chairs
William W. Cohen, Carnegie Mellon/Google
Nicolas Nicolov, J. D. Power and Associates, McGraw-Hill
Program Chairs
Natalie Glance, Google
Matthew Hurst, Live Labs, Microsoft
Data Chairs
Ian Soboroff, NIST
Akshay Java, UMBC
Local Chair
Cameron Marlow, Facebook
Program Committee
Lada Adamic (University of Michigan, USA)
Navot Akiva (Pudding Media, Israel)
Noor Ali-Hasan (Microsoft, USA)
Chris Brooks (University of San Francisco, USA)
Claire Cardie (Cornell University, USA)
Steve Cayzer (HP Labs, UK)
Lili Cheng (Microsoft, USA)
Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Thierry Declerck (DFKI GmbH, Germany)
Brian Dennis (Lockheed Martin Corporation, USA)
Chris Diehl (The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, USA)
Joan Morris DiMicco (IBM Research, USA)
Nathan Eagle (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
Miriam Eckert (J.D. Power and Assoc., McGraw-Hill, USA)
Raymond Elferink (RayCom B.V., The Netherlands)
Tim Finin (University of Maryland, Baltimore, USA)
Andrew Fiore (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
Michael Gamon (Microsoft, USA)
Kathy E Gill (University of Washington, USA)
Scott Golder (Cornell University, USA)
Sam Gosling (University of Texas, USA)
Marko Grobelnik (J. Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
Michelle Gumbrecht (Palo Alto Research Center, USA)
John Henderson (MITRE, USA)
Nancy Ide (Vassar College, USA)
Steliana Ivanova (Umbria Inc., USA)
Heng Ji (The City University of New York, USA)
Anupam Joshi (University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA)
Jussi Karlgren (Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Sweden)
Jason Kessler (Indiana University, USA)
Laura Knudsen (OSC, USA)
Pranam Kolari (Yahoo!, USA)
Christian Konig (Microsoft, USA)
Moshe Koppel (Bar-Ilan University, Israel)
Gueorgi Kossinets (Google, USA)
Andrea La Pietra (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
Thomas Lento (Facebook, USA)
Kristina Lerman (University of Southern California, USA)
Jure Leskovec (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Naohiro Matsumura (Osaka University, Japan)
Charles Mi (Opinmind, USA)
Rada Mihalcea (University of North Texas, USA)
Gilad Mishne (Yahoo!, USA)
Paola Monachesi (Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands)
Mor Naaman (Rutgers University, USA)
Kate Niederhoffer (Nielsen, USA)
Scott Nowson (Appen, Australia)
Manabu Okumura (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan)
Livia Polanyi (Powerset/Microsoft, USA)
John Prager (IBM Research, USA)
Stephan Raaijmakers (TNO ICT, The Netherlands)
Drago Radev (University of Michigan, USA)
Laura Ripamonti (Universita degli Studi di Milano, Italy)
Tamas Sarlos (Yahoo!, USA)
Jonathan Schler (Peer39, Israel)
David A. Shamma (Yahoo! Research, USA)
James G. Shanahan (USA)
Xiaolin Shi (University of Michigan, USA)
Sanjay Sood (allvoices, USA)
Ellen Spertus (Google, USA)
Siddharth Suri (Yahoo!, USA)
Hideaki Takeda (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)
Zeynep Tufekci (University of Maryland, Baltimore, USA)
Jiang Yang (University of Michigan, USA)
Cheng Zhai (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
Jun Zhang (University of Michigan, USA)
Ding Zhou (Facebook, USA)
For More Information
For general information regarding ICWSM-09, please visit the ICWSM-09 website.