About the Workshop

The digital era creates new possibilities for observing humans’ behaviour, especially the one expressed on the Internet, but we also leave traces during everyday activity by making phone calls, using GPS devices or using any kind of transportation. People who meet together or communicate over the Internet or other channels constantly exchange information, rumours, spread opinions and attitudes. Sometimes it is just an information that is being passed from one to another, but it may also become the beginning of a huge change, either of an individual or even of the whole society – but in both cases it starts with becoming influenced or influencing others. Social influence is the process of a complex nature which involves our location in social network, the network structure and dynamics, time and psychological and sociological factors. At the level of an individual it is rather a psychological process but at the network scale it is strongly dependent on the network structure and its dynamics. Hence, studying social influence is a challenging interdisciplinary task, which, if succeeded, leads to better understanding of the surrounding world.

The goal of this workshop devoted to the social influence process is to present the research on:

how the social influence occurs in society at the level of an individual and at the network level (empirical research),
how to simplify or find theoretical representation for this complex phenomenon (models),
how to target the society to maximize the spread of influence or innovations diffusion (heuristics, analytical solutions),
how to influence individuals (psychological and sociological factors, the impact of social media on the influence),
how to achieve different goals related to social influence, like minimizing the cost of change or slowing down or speeding up this process.

As the era of static networks analysis is now moving towards dynamic networks analysis, it is a topic of great importance to observe the dynamics of the networks as well as the dynamic processes like the spread of influence in order to better understanding of the human behaviour. Here, the dynamics is being observed at two levels – the social network itself changes and this network becomes a transmission layer for another dynamic process – spread of influence. This is why there is still the open debate what plays more important role – the underlying layer or the social influence process itself. By organizing this workshop we would like to bring us closer to the answer on this question.

This workshop aims to gather researchers studying the phenomenon of social influence in networks and it is indented to be a cross-domain knowledge exchange. That is why we are willing to present the state of the art and current research in this area from different perspectives: sociology, computer science, psychology as well as mathematics and physics, making this event interdisciplinary. We believe that only by taking the advantage of all the above mentioned fields it is possible to move forward in understanding how this complex works and how the society may benefit from understanding it better.

Call for papers

The globalization has enabled the exchange of information in a previously unseen scale. The enormous popularity of the Internet and the evolution of social media create new areas for observing and modelling processes related to social sciences, such as social influence or diffusion of innovations. Moreover, the electronic environment creates the possibility to track marketing activity, the traditional one as well as viral marketing. Now it is possible to evaluate different strategies of targeting people and observing the outcome of the process, since social graphs and social activity logs are definitely easier to obtain than two decades before. In this area several interesting topics can be distinguished, such as modelling the spread of influence, implementing and evaluating epidemiological models, tracking dynamics of diffusion processes or designing new algorithms towards these processes prediction or optimisation.

This workshop aims to connect research related to both social and technical systems and one of key topics is social influence in socio-technical systems. During the workshop we would like to address the questions like:

How does influence spread and how do individuals become influential or influenced?
How to maximize or speed-up the spread of influence or diffusion of innovations?
What makes people successful? How is the social position correlated with success and performance?
Can we model and predict the "career paths" of users?
Can we use social network analysis to measure or predict success of an individual in the society?

This workshop associated with the SocInfo 2014 conference is targeted to researchers involved in modelling diffusion of information in social networks as well as theoretical models with key topics related to:

social influence
diffusion of information and innovations
influence maximization
graphical voter models
evolutionary graph theory

epidemic models on graphs
data-driven approaches
temporal networks
seeding strategies
optimization of dynamic processes in networks

We would like to invite researchers from various interdisciplinary areas related to sociology, computer science, physics, statistics, epidemiology with innovative research related to above topics with connection with social informatics. This workshop welcomes new analytical approaches and the usage of machine learning methods in the above topics. We are interested in the research related to individuals’ change (social influence) as well as the network change (spread of influence).

Formatting

Submitted works have to present original research contributions not concurrently submitted elsewhere and they can come as either full 12-page research papers or 8-page demo papers. The purpose of the demo paper is to demonstrate novel phenomena occurring in the domain of social influence. Some of the full paper submissions can be accepted as short papers based on the decision of the Program Committee.

All submitted papers must:

be written in English;
not contain author names, affiliations, and email addresses or any other information that will allow to reveal the authors’ names during the review process;
be formatted according to the Springer LNCS paper formatting guidelines;
be submitted as PDF files.

It is the authors’ responsibility to ensure that their submissions adhere strictly to the required format. Submissions that do not comply with the above guidelines may be rejected without review.

Submission

Paper submission is handled by the EasyChair system and it is available here. For any questions about the call for papers please contact [email protected].

Publication

Accepted papers will be published in the Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (LNCS). Yet, the authors can choose to publish their papers along with the main conference LNCS proceedings, or withhold such publication for future work considerations. Springer's LNCS template is located here. Workshop proceedings will be indexed in Thomson Reuters Web of Science, Scopus, DBLP and other.

Journal Special Issue

Authors of best selected papers will be invited to submit extended versions of their manuscripts to the special issue of Springer's Social Networks Analysis and Mining journal (with a separate review process).

Presenting

Full papers will be given 30 minutes and demo papers 15 minutes for presentations including questions and discussion.

Download the call for papers

Program

Workshop date and time:	10^th November 2014, 9:00 - 13:00
Workshop venue:	Barcelona, Carrer de Roc Boronat 138, room 52S31 (underground) - details

Program:	9:00 - 9:50	Invited talk - Dr. Diego Garlaschelli, University of Leiden, The Netherlands Reconciling long-term cultural diversity and short-term collective social behaviour
	9:50 - 10:20	Michael Maes and Lukas Bischofberger Web Personalization and Opinion Polarization - BEST PAPER AWARD
	10:20 - 10:30	Zhongyuan Ruan, Janos Kertesz, Gerardo Iniguez Gonzalez and Marton Karsai The kinetics of cascading diffusion of innovations (demo paper)
	10:30 - 11:00	coffee break
	11:00 - 11:30	Despoina Antonakaki, Iasonas Polakis, Elias Athanasopoulos, Sotiris Ioannidis and Paraskevi Fragopoulou Think before RT: An Experimental Study of Abusing Twitter Trends
	11:30 - 12:00	Albert Trias Mansilla, Mingming Chen, Boleslaw K. Szymanski and Josep Lluís de la Rosa Esteva Naming Game Dynamics on Pairs of Connected Networks with Competing Opinions
	12:00 - 12:30	Michał Wojtasiewicz and Krzysztof Ciesielski Identifying Bridges for Information Spread Control in Social Networks
	12:30 - 12:50	Tieying Liu, Kai Chen and Yang Zhong Threshold of Herd Effect for Online Events in China
	12:50 - 13:00	Radosław Michalski Summary of the Workshop on Social Influence 2014, best paper award

Submission deadline:	~~10^th September 2014~~ ~~(23:59 Hawaii HST, firm)~~
Notification of acceptance:	~~29^th September 2014~~
Camera-ready due:	3^rd October 2014 (23:59 Hawaii HST)
Workshop date:	10^th November 2014
SocInfo 2014 conference dates:	10-13^th November 2014

About the Workshop

Call for papers

Program

Important dates

Paper submission: here

Workshop/conference registration: here

Organization

Workshop chairs

Radoslaw Michalski

Paulo Shakarian

Ingo Scholtes

Jaroslaw Jankowski

Program Committee

Renaud Lambiotte, University of Namur, Belgium

José Fernando Mendes, University of Aveiro, Portugal

Frank Schweitzer, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Reda Alhajj, University of Calgary, Canada

Huan Liu, Arizona State University, United States

Naoki Masuda, University of Bristol, United Kingdom

Kiran Lakkaraju, Sandia National Labs, United States

György Korniss, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, United States

Przemysław Kazienko, Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland

Patrick Roos, University of Maryland, United States

B. Aditya Prakash, Virginia Tech, United States

Luis E C Rocha, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden

David García, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Feng Xia, Dalian University of Technology, China

Ricardo Colomo-Palacios, Østfold University College, Norway

Dariusz Król, Bournemouth University, United Kingdom and WrUT, Poland

Peter-Paul van Maanen, Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, The Netherlands

Katarzyna Musiał, King's College London, United Kingdom

Piotr Bródka, Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland

Tomasz Kajdanowicz, Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland

Matthias Hirth, University of Würzburg, Germany

Michał Kozielski, Silesian University of Technology, Poland

Juwel Rana, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden

Wojciech Filipowski, Silesian University of Technology, Poland

Luca Tummolini, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Italy

Organizing Committee

Paweł Knuth, Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland