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 detect, quantify and prevent content manipulation aimed at influencing individuals,
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 ASONAM 2021 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
content manipulation

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 should be submitted as full 8-page research papers (maximum page limit).

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 IEEE two-column template;
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 IEEE CS digital library. IEEE template is located here. Workshop proceedings will be indexed in Thomson Reuters Web of Science, Scopus, DBLP and other scholar databases.

Presenting

Full papers will be given 20 minutes for presentation including questions and discussion.

Workshop date and time:	8^th November 2021, 16:10 - 17:30 CET
Workshop venue:	Online (Zoom platform), room Tehran (access details sent to registered participants)

Program:
	16:10 - 16:30	Ninghan Chen, Xihui Chen, Zhiqiang Zhang and Jun Pang From #Jobsearch to #Mask: Improving COVID-19 Cascade Prediction with Spillover Effects
	16:30 - 16:50	Sarvenaz Sadeghi and Pooya Moradian Zadeh A Novel Knowledge-based Multi-Population Framework for Studying Opinion Dynamics of Migrated Individuals
	16:50 - 17:10	Abida Sadaf, Luke Mathieson and Katarzyna Musial-Gabrys Network Structure Measures and Number of Driver Nodes: An Insight
	17:10 - 17:30	Fabián Riquelme, Francisco Muñoz and Rodrigo Olivares Social influence under improved multi-objective metaheuristics

Submission deadline:	25^th August 2021 (23:59 American Samoa Zone - UTC-11, strict)
Notification of acceptance:	10^th September 2021
Camera-ready due:	10^th October 2021 (23:59 American Samoa Zone - UTC-11)
Workshop date:	8^th November 2021
ASONAM 2021 conference dates:	8^th - 11^th November 2021

Welcome to SI 2021, the Workshop on Social Influence.
The workshop will be held online in conjunction with the 2021 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2021) on 8^th of November 2021.

About the Workshop

Call for papers

Program

(page 12)

Important dates

Paper submission: here

Organization

Workshop chairs

Radoslaw Michalski

Jaroslaw Jankowski

Paulo Shakarian

Program Committee

Frank Schweitzer, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Omar Lizardo, University of California Los Angeles, United States

Feng Xia, Federation University Australia

Abhinav Bhatnagar, TrueCaller, United States

Piotr Bródka, Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Poland

Li Huang, University of South Carolina, United States

Dariusz Król, Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Poland

Radu Tanase, University of Zurich, Switzerland

Sen Pei, Columbia University, United States

Tao Jia, Southwest University, China

Mateusz Nurek, Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Poland

Sebastiano Delre, Montpellier Business School, France

Marcin Waniek, New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE

Organizing Committee

Mateusz Nurek, Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Poland

Patryk Pazura, West Pomeranian University of Technology, Poland