[agents] Final CFP (deadline extended to 17 August): SocialCom'11 workshop on Social Object Networks (SocialObjects'11)

[Jerome Picault]

** submission deadline extension until 17 August **

[Apologies if you receive this more than once]
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International Workshop on
Social Object Networks (SocialObjects 2011)
organised in conjunction with
the 3rd IEEE International Conference on
Social Computing (SocialCom2011)
Boston, MA, USA, 9th or 11th October 2011
Paper submission deadline: 17th August 2011 (extended)
http://ir.ii.uam.es/socialobjects2011
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DESCRIPTION
The Web has become the de facto space where we run many of our daily 
activities, such as shopping, reading news and books, listening to 
music, watching videos, sharing our views on current topics and objects, 
connecting and chatting to friends, etc. The availability of such 
activities in a digital form has been fueling social-network related 
research and development for decades, where such social connections are 
abstracted to large networks of nodes (i.e., people) and edges (i.e., 
types of social connections), and then exploited in various ways and for 
various purposes, such as for web science,  consumer analysis, business 
intelligence, and targeted marketing, to name just a few.
The nuclei of most of these social networks are "Social Objects"; which 
are the objects around which people interact. Examples of such social 
objects include pictures on Flickr, songs on Last.fm, tags on Delicious, 
places on Foursquare, posts on Twitter, goods on Amazon, etc. Hence 
anything that allows people to connect, whether directly or indirectly, 
can be regarded as a social object, and can produce a social network 
graph. The different examples convey the breadth of object types around 
which we interact with others on a regular basis.
Most current works, however, seem to flatten such multi-dimensional 
networks, where the social objects are often left out of the networks 
and analysis, and replaced with direct edges between the people in 
question (e.g. people who watched the same film on Netflix are 
represented as two directly connected nodes in a graph).
With more social networking sites becoming more open (e.g. through APIs, 
exportable profiles, 3rd party applications), it is now possible to 
generate very rich cross-community social networks that capture social 
connections in many different forms and around many different social 
objects. This raises a series of new questions and research challenges 
that this workshop is trying to highlight, such as:
* What impact do the type and properties of a social object have on 
the   particular social connection it generates?
* How do social connections and networks around heterogeneous social 
objects   compare in terms of their dynamics and transitivity?
* What are the risks and opportunities associated with acquiring such 
multiple dimensional graphs?
* What technical challenges exist for acquiring, representing and 
analyzing such social-object centered networks?
* What new knowledge can be extracted from such rich object-centered 
social networks?
* How can social connections and interactions around specific social 
objects be fostered and exploited more intelligently for commercial and 
scientific purposes?
* What kind of new services and applications do knowledge captured 
through social objects networks enable?
* How do social object networks impact privacy of individuals and groups?
SUBMISSIONS
We invite two main types of contributions: short papers (max. 6 pages) 
and posters (max. 2 pages). Both types of contributions could be new 
research ideas, position statements, critiques of existing approaches, 
or experiment reports.
Submitted papers will be evaluated according to their originality, 
technical content, style, clarity, and relevance to the workshop. Each 
paper will be reviewed by at least three independent referees.
TOPICS
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
* Typology and representation of social objects
* Generation and analysis of objects centered networks
* Dynamics and patterns of social networks with different social objects
* Properties of social objects: value as social connectors, forms of 
social connections they enable, longevity of their social connections, etc.
* Social objects as connectors between cross-domain social 
networks/communities
* Semantics of social objects-based links
* Characteristics of social interactions w.r.t type and properties of object
* Building interaction profiles around social objects
* Identifying interests and social connections through social objects
* Privacy and ethical issues to do with social object networks 
acquisition and analysis
* Augmentation of social object knowledge based on social interactions
The above are just a few examples of the multi-disciplinary questions 
that this workshop will raise, by inviting researchers and practitioners 
from a wide range of backgrounds and expertise to contribute and attend 
the event.
IMPORTANT DATES
* Papers due: 17th August 2011 (extended)
* Notification of acceptance: 22nd August 2011
* Camera-ready: 29th August 2011
* Workshop: 9th or 10th October 2011
ORGANIZERS
* Jérôme Picault, Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, France
* Myriam Ribière, Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, France
* Iván Cantador, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
* Harith Alani, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
* Ching-Man Au Yeung, NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan
* Nitin Agarwal, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, USA
* Pablo Castells, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain
* Manuel Cebrián, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
* Fabien Gandon, INRIA, France
* Tom Heath, Talis, UK
* Geert-Jan Houben, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
* Gabriella Kazai, Microsoft Research, UK
* Dimitre Kostadinov, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, France
* Peter Mika, Yahoo! Research, Spain
* Alexandre Passant, DERI, Ireland
* Haggai Roitman, IBM Research, Israel
* Mathias Wagner, DoCoMo Labs, Germany