Delft University of Technology is a multifaceted institution offering education and carrying out research in the technical sciences at an internationally recognized level. Education, research, and design are strongly oriented towards applicability. TU Delft develops technologies for future generations, focusing on sustainability, safety, and economic vitality. At TU Delft you will work in an environment where technical sciences and society converge. TU Delft comprises eight faculties, unique laboratories, research institutes and schools.

The faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS) is known world wide for its high academic quality and social relevance of its research programs. The faculty’s excellent facilities accentuate its international position in teaching and research. The faculty offers an interdisciplinary setting for its 500 employees, 350 PhD students and 1700 undergraduates.

The Department of Software Technology comprises the EEMCS Faculty research groups working on core Computer Science topics. The department is responsible for a large part of the curriculum of the BSc and MSc programmes in Computer Science, including the master program on Information Architecture. The department’s research mission is to perform excellent research at an internationally recognised level in the design, construction and analysis of complex concurrent and co-operative computer and information systems. Inspiration for the research topics is derived largely from technical ICT problems in industry and society.
The department is building next to the existing groups on Software Engineering, Parallel and Distributed Systems, and Algorithms, a new group on Web Information Systems (WIS) that is involved in the education in Computer Science and Information Architecture and that concentrates in its research on large-scale information systems, specifically information systems that involve Web and Semantic Web technology.

For this new WIS group the Department of Software Technology has a vacancy for an

Assistant/Associate Professor in Web Information Systems

Job description:
The candidate’s primary responsibilities include conducting research in the field of Web information systems, assisting in the supervision of PhD students in this field, acquiring external research funding, teaching and developing new curricula at the undergraduate and graduate levels in Computer Science and Information Architecture, and performing department and university management tasks. Important topics of research include methods, techniques and tools for designing and developing Web information systems and handling distributed data. The applicant’s specific areas of interest might include, but are not limited to, technical aspects of the (Semantic) Web, Web engineering, Linked Open Data, semi-structured data and XML, and data distribution and interoperability.

Requirements:
The successful candidate has obtained a PhD in the research field, has proven knowledge and experience in the field, preferably demonstrated through a strong publication record, and is an enthusiastic team player with the ambition to strengthen and expand the research of the new group. The candidate has teaching experience at the university level and the ability to obtain research funding through the acquisition of national or international research projects.

Conditions of employment:
This is a full-time, tenure-track position. The starting salary of the Assistant Professor, depending on education and experience, varies from scale 11 to 12 with a minimum of € 3195 and a maximum of € 4,970 gross per month. The salary of an Associate Professor position varies, depending on education and experience, from scale 13 to 14, from € 4428 up to € 5920 gross per month. TU Delft offers an attractive benefits package, including a flexible work week, free high-speed Internet access from home, and the option of assembling a customized compensation and benefits package (the ‘IKA’). Salary and benefits are in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities. TU Delft sets specific standards for the English competency of the teaching staff. TU Delft offers training to improve English competency.

Information and application:
For more information about this position and instructions how to apply, please visit www.wis.ewi.tudelft.nl for the link to the official TU Delft vacancy text, or contact Prof. Dr. Ir. G.J. Houben, e-mail: g.j.houben@ewi.tudelft.nl.

Back from an intense and interesting time at the Interface 2009 conference. This was my first experiment with live micro-blogging (yes, Tweeting) from an event.  Interface prooved to be a dynamic symposium and a real credit to the Humanities and Computer Science hosts and organisers.  The Keynotes and speakers included Dame Wendy Hall, Google Geographer and ex-e-Government man Ed Parsons, Willard McCarty (who delivered a very erudite critique of inter-disciplinary machinations) alongside Sarah Porter (JISC), Stephen Brown (DMU) and others. 

It was great to meet so many people from the hard Arts (such as Theology, Literature and Archaeology) critically applying new technologies.  As an English graduate with a secret passion for medieval literature, I was genuinely delighted by demonstrations of research and tools opening up internet access to documents and information hundreds of years old.  But this is just one of many areas where new possibilities and networks were exposed.

If you would like to find out more about Interface, delegate ‘lightning’ papers are now available on Scribd, so click if you’d like to browse the papers visit the Scribd pages. I’ve embedded my short paper on Aversive Disablism and the Internet below (click through, or adjust the settings as you like), but if Scribd isn’t for you here is the Word Version.

(((Also Erik is organising a workshop at the EC-TEL 2009 conference. Please submit!)))

SCOPE

In Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), the use of web2.0 technologies is now actively being researched, under banners such as “Personal Learning Environments” or “Open Learning Environments” and the like. In this workshop, we want to discuss how we can leverage the same opportunities for our research on TEL. Indeed, as researchers in Technology Enhanced Learning we already know how to include things like blogs, wikis and forums into the heart of our work to enhance collaborative working, but a full “Science 2.0″ framework might provide us with a much more powerful framework to make our research more effective. This workshop aims to bring together all those who want to turn a vision of the e-scholar and e-scientist of the 21st Century into reality in our own domain of TEL.

The core of significant development in a “2.0 world” is

* leveraging web2.0 technologies (that rely on the “social graph”) for improving the effectiveness and efficiency of how we conduct science;
* the capacity to share and reuse data, and to benchmark scientific activity in the international community.

Key questions for this workshop include:
* How do we mesh social web2.0 technologies with the scientific workflow?
* How do we share the data of our activity wider in our community?
* How do we visualize that data and how do we provide researchers with powerful new frameworks for their scientific endeavor?

Early generic tools for science2.0 are beginning to appear:

* http://www.scivee.tv/,
* http://www.academiccommons.org/,
* http://www.academia.edu/,
* http://www.researchgate.net/,
* http://www.mendeley.com/,
* http://www.escidoc.org/,
* http://www.authormapper.com/,
* http://www.surfspace.nl/wiki/display/widgetswetenschappers/Home,
* http://www.plos.org/,
* http://www.openwetware.org/,
* http://www.galaxyzoo.org/,
* http://bosch.informatik.rwth-aachen.de:5080/AERCS/
* http://www.rkbexplorer.com/
* http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/edmedia/
* etc.

However, most of these focus more on the sciences. There is some discussion in blogosphere about how we could make use of science2.0 opportunities for TEL. Yet, there has not been a dedicated workshop or conference on this theme. That is the missing piece that this workshop wants to fill in, in the hope of moving forward this idea and accelerating the evolution that has considerable promise of improving how we conduct research on TEL.

FORMAT

The workshop will be highly interactive: presentations will be clustered and presenters will not only discuss their own work, but also to explicitly comment on the work of the other presenters in their session. We will make all the papers available beforehand, so as to facilitate this.

Participants will also be asked to do a 5 min vlog posting to the workshop web site before the event. (This will be a requirement for registration!) We will ask the editors of the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies to host a special issue of the re-worked papers after the workshop.

ORGANISATION

This half-day workshop is supported by the STELLAR EU Network of Excellence in Technology Enhanced Learning; http://stellarnet.eu The workshop is organized by

* Erik Duval (K.U.Leuven, Belgium)
* Peter Scott (Open University, UK)
* Stefanie Lindstaedt (KnowCenter, Austria)
* Nicolas Balacheff (UJF, France)

SUBMISSIONS

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished research as papers (4-8 pages). Including demonstrations is explicitly encouraged. All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by at least three members of the program committee for originality, significance, clarity, and quality. All questions and submissions should be sent to: erik.duval@cs.kuleuven.be

IMPORTANT DATES

* Paper Submission: July 5, 2009
* Results Notification: July 20, 2009
* Camera Ready Submission: September 1, 2009
* Workshop Date: September 29 or 30, 2009

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

* Martin Ebner (Technische Universitat Graz, Austria)
* Jean Marie Favre (Universite Joseph Fourier, France)
* Barbara Kieslinger (Zentrum fur Soziale Innovation, Austria) (tbc)
* Chad J. Kainz (University of Chicago, USA) (tbc)
* Ralf Klamma (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
* Erica Melis (Deutsche Forschungszentrum fur Kunstliche Intelligenz, Germany)
* Xavier Ochoa (Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral, Ecuador)
* Andreas Schmidt (Forschungszentrum Informatik, Germany)
* George Siemens (University of Manitoba, Canada)
* Katrien Verbert (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
* Martin Weller (The Open University, UK)
* Fridolin Wild (The Open University, UK)
* Martin Wolpers (Fraunhofer-Institut fur Angewandte Informationstechnik, Germany)

ABOUT EC-TEL09

After three successful EC-TEL conferences in 2006, 2007, and 2008, the Fourth European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning provides a unique forum for all research related to TEL, among them education, psychology, and computer science. The contributions will cover the design of innovative environments, the implementation of new technological solutions, results of empirical studies on socio-cognitive processes in learning, and field studies regarding the use of technologies in context.

EC-TEL is a competitive and broad forum for TEL research in Europe and beyond. In its specialised accompanying workshops and the highlighting main conference programme, EC-TEL09 provides unique networking possibilities for participating researchers throughout the week and includes project meetings and discussions for ongoing and new research activities supported by the European Commission. See http://www.ectel09.org/ for details.

This is a major update of my favourite social network analysis and complexity book list. 2009 is a great year for fascinating books about network analysis, complexity and related topics. You find all these books also on my Shelfari shelf.

1. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
2. Weak Links: Stabilizers of Complex Systems from Proteins to Social Networks by Peter Csermely
3. Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks by Mark Buchanan
4. The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You by Mark Buchanan
5. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts
6. Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness by Duncan J. Watts
7. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky
8. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
9. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

1. Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications by Stanley Wasserman, Katherine Faust
   This is the mother of all SNA books
2. Models and Methods in Social Network Analysis by Peter J. Carrington, John Scott, Stanley Wasserman
3. Social Network Analysis: A Handbook by John P Scott
   My students like this and the next one (they are quite short)
4. Introducing Social Networks by Alain Degenne, Michel Forse
5. The Development of Social Network Analysis: A Study in the Sociology of Science by Linton C. Freeman
   This is interesting for historians
6. Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek by Wouter de Nooy, Andrej Mrvar, Vladimir Batagelj
   This is for Pajek fans
7. Advances in Social Network Analysis: Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences by Stanley Wasserman and Joseph Galaskiewicz
8. Social Network Analysis (Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences) by David Knoke, Song Yang

1. Network Science: Theory and Applications by Ted G. Lewis
2. Handbook of Graphs and Networks: From the Genome to the Internet by Stefan Bornholdt, Heinz Georg Schuster
3. Complex Graphs and Networks by Fan Chung, Linyuan Lu
   Nice but hard to read
4. Scale-Free Networks: Complex Webs in Nature and Technology by Guido Caldarelli
   This is easy most of the time. Beautiful figures and printed in colors.
5. Complex Social Networks by Fernando Vega-Redondo
   Has a nice introduction and is getting tough soon.
6. Social and Economic Networks by Matthew O. Jackson
7. Connections: An Introduction to the Economics of Networks by Sanjeev Goyal

1. The Structure and Dynamics of Networks by Mark Newman, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Duncan J. Watts
   This is a wonderful collection of original papers
2. Dynamic Social Network Modeling and Analysis: Workshop Summary and Papers by Kathleen M. Carley, Philippa Pattison, Ronald L. Breiger
   Here I learned much about dynamic analysis. This is all so fresh still.
3. Brownian Agents and Active Particles: Collective Dynamics in the Natural and Social Sciences by Frank Schweitzer
   More oriented to dynamic and emergent issues in the natural and the social sciences. This is the second book from the Springer Complexity Series. Springer sent this to me for reviewing a book proposal. Thank you.
4. Cities and Complexity: Understanding Cities with Cellular Automata, Agent-Based Models, and Fractals by Michael Batty
5. Complex and Adaptive Dynamical Systems: A Primer by Claudius Gros
   This is from the new Springer Complexity Series. A first reader.
6. Computational and Mathematical Modeling in the Social Sciences by Scott De Marchi
7. Dynamical Processes on Complex Networks by Alain Barrat, Marc Barthélemy, Alessandro Vespignani
8. Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling (Princeton Studies in Complexity) by Joshua M. Epstein
9. Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity) by John H. Miller, Scott E. Page
10. Repeated Games and Reputations: Long-Run Relationships by George J. Mailath, Larry Samuelson
11. Agent-Based Models (Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences) by Nigel Gilbert
12. A Structural Theory of Social Influence (Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences) by Noah E. Friedkin
13. Social Emergence: Societies As Complex Systems by R. Keith Sawyer

As usual, when making notes of a conference like WWW2009, in Madrid, one has only a partial view. This is all the more true for a conference of the size of WWWW2009 with around 1000 attendees and with 5-6 parallel tracks. I must admit that I usually have difficulties with so many tracks at the same time; I obviously loose some of the events happening, which is a source of unavoidable frustration. With this caveat, just some of the topics that I will probably remember…

The power of Twitter. Although this was not a “topic” of the conference, this was the first WWW conference where twitter was king. Twitter was everywhere, the #www2009 topic was getting several new entries per second (it even got spammed:-(, and other twitter tags were used for some of the specialized events (like #w3ctrack or #ldow2009) One could get a glimpse of what was happening elsewhere just by following these topics. In fact, this report is much more sketchy than usual simply because my own tweetes from the conference or, of course, all tweetes of the #www2009 topic can very well replace some of the notes I wrote in blogs in earlier years.

Social networks. Going beyond twitter, the ubiquitous presence of social networks, their effect on just about anything is still a major topic, like the continuous flow of papers trying, eg, to extract semantics from tag clouds (eg, the paper of Benjamin Markines et al) or the Googles and Yahoo!-s of this World trying to exploit these tags to improve their search results. (Yahoo’s experimental tag explorer is a good example trying to exploit these further.) Nothing radically new here, but progress is reported on all conferences, and this one was no exception. One of the keynotes, by Pablo Rodriguez from Telefonica, actually claimed that the needs of social networks in terms of network infrastructure are so different that they are bound to require changes on the hardware/firmware level of networks. Posting, for example, a video on a social site may create a sudden peak of high volume access (for example if posted by a “celebrity”) that makes it very different from the more steady flow of data that more traditional sites provide and require. For example local caching in routers might be needed. I am no expert in this at all (anything that is close to hardware is sort of a black box to me) so I cannot judge these statements but it was interesting to hear. Another interesting point he made was that “celebrities” of a specific network may (not necessary intentionally) start a dos attack against a site: think of the amount of http requests flowing to a site mentioned by one of these social network stars!

Web Science. There was a panel (organized by Nigel Shadbold, with Tim Berners-Lee, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, and Mike Brodie). The whole topic is still fairly open (at least for me): what exactly is Web Science and where are the boundaries? What types of research belongs to WS, and what is better kept outside to be handled by other disciplines? What type of abstractions would be necessary to study the Web as a whole (just as chemistry can be seen as a set of abstractions on top of physics)? What type of interdisciplinary research groups should be established? As far as I am concerned, I do not have a response to any of these questions:-( What I could see happening is that under the banner “Web Science” many different sub-disciplines will appear very soon and gain independent life without too much relationships among themselves. As far as I am concerned, I would be more interested by the relationship between the Web and society at large than by the technical aspects, but that is only me. An interesting practical point for the future is that there are plans to combine (eg, co-locate) future WWW conferences with Web Science events; that would really be a gain for both event series in my view.

Computing cloud. Yep, this comes up more an more often. Obviously a big deal in the keynote of Alfred Spector, from Google, but came up elsewhere, too. The a mini-tutorial on Hadoop, MapReduce, and Hive, given by Tom White as part of the Developers’ track, was really interesting and instructive for me. We know that the computing cloud has a great interest for the Semantic Web community; it may indeed be a tool to handle the significant amount of data out there. The LOD data is already available on the Amazon services (thanks to OpenLink), Chris Bizer and friends’ Mobile DBpedia makes use of cloud facilities, the LarKC project also makes use of massively parallel computing (I am not sure they use the cloud), too. Something to keep an eye on, that is for sure; I am sure the topic will gain more importance in future conferences. (And one more technology I should familiarize myself with…)

Power of data. Issues around search have become the dominating theme of the WWW conferences, and this one was no exception. Many research try to exploit the sheer amount and variety of data that has been accumulated by the big search engines, for example. I have heard several talks over the years coming from Google’s R&D lab (including a keynote at this conference). I must admit the overall impression I get from these is that a more or less straightforward exploitation of a huge amount of data is used like a sledgehammer for all problems. (I am probably unfair.) Ricardo Baeza-Yates (from Yahoo!) also reported some work in his keynote on, eg, analyzing the search queries themselves, ie, the paths of different searches performed by users between the time they begin some search and the time they find what they were looking for. (Interesting stuff! By the way, there is also a conference on weblogs and social media, ICWSM; one more conference coming up around Web technologies.) I also listened to a presentation on Yahoo!’s Boss by Ted Drake (again on the Developers’ track): what is interesting is that one can access to (a part of) Yahoo!’s accumulated indexes to build, eg, one’s own search engines but, I presume, one could also use this data for other type of research exploiting the data. Power of data for the masses? (I have heard of Boss before and I would have welcome more technical details at the presentation but, well…)

Web of data, a.k.a. Semantic Web. The conference started by a great workshop on Linked Data. I again rely on twitter notes and the general twitter notes for more details, no need to repeat them here. Suffices it to say that, beyond the individual papers, there were a general “buzz” in the air, a general enthusiasm that was reflected by the high number of participants (over 100). For anybody interested, it is worth looking at all the papers, they were good! Having said that, what I am really waiting for is to see many real application of the LOD (and not only experimental, university usage) but that takes its time; there were no really breathtaking news on that at the workshop.

But, of course, the workshop was for the converted; what was more interesting is to see that the Linked Data concept, and the Semantic Web in general, created more and more interest at the conference proper and not only for the long time Semantic Web adepts. Jim Hendler did a surprise presentation at the Developers’ track (surprise, because a announced speaker could not come, so he took his place) talking to non-Semantic Web developers about what can be done already today with this technology, about the excitement that is out there, about the companies that have already picked up this technology. It was good to get these messages out there again and again. Georgi Kobilarov did also a great presentation on DBpedia at the track; there were several people I talked to afterward who were really carried away by the possibilities opened up by having access to a huge amount of data through the unifying abstraction of RDF, RDFS, and possibly (a little bit of:-) OWL.

I also went to the Semantic Web referreed paper track, obviously. I must admit I was a little bit disappointed because lots of colleagues that I would typically see on such event that were not around. I presume ISWC has now become major competition to WWW in this area and when money is tight, people have to make a choice. In earlier years ISWC was considered to be much more theoretical while WWW had more practical papers, but the last few ISWC’s I attended seemed to indicate that this is changing. I think any of the WWW papers could have been presented at the ISWC without any problems. As a consequence, I guess many people decided that ISWC is a better place to be. It will be interesting to see how things will evolve in future; it is not impossible that Semantic Web, as a topic, will gradually move away from WWW to ISWC. (I would expect specifically Linked Data papers to appear at ISWC very soon!)

That being said: it was nice to see a paper on DERI Pipes (by Danh Le-Phuoc et al) or on Triplify (by Sören Auer et al). This is not the first time I heard about these but it is good to have them more widely published. There was a paper on a rule system benchmark (by Senlin Liang et al); although I am no expert on this, with the advancement of RIF it will be good to have such benchmarks being put forward. The paper of Philippe Cudré-Mauroux et al on the disambiguation of ID’s on linked data issue caught my attention: with the advancement of linked data we enter (as the presenter put it) an “ID Jungle” with tons of URI-s referring, more or less, to the same concept (eg, a specific person), and a simple owl:sameAs is not an ideal solution to handle this. The idMesh system provides a mean to analyze relationships among those ID-s. I must admit I did not follow all details of the paper but it is certainly one of the papers I will have to study in more details when I get to it!

W3C’s “camps”. W3C tried another model this year, replacing the more traditional W3C tracks by two ‘camps’ on mobile web and on social web. But… this is where the large number of parallel track backfired: I could not go to any of them:-( There were all kinds of overlaps with other presentations (eg, the social web camp fully coincided with the Semantic Web paper track). Pity, because the feedback I heard from participants was very positive. Sigh. Well, actually, courtesy of Fabien Gandon, I was present on the social web camp virtually, witness this slide…

It was a slightly exhaustive but good week!

Pour regarder cette vidéo en mode plein écran, c’est par là !

Version anglaise, c’est ici…

[An imaginary question session if time permitted]
” Sir Tim Berners-Lee, welcome to Athens and thanks for yet another thought provoking speech about the launch of Web Science as a new scientific discipline. Here are a few questions that propped up in my mind while listening to you:

1. Hari Seldon, the greatest psychohistorian thet ever lived (well, in Asimov’s mind at least) was able to develop a probabilistic theory of prediction of human behaviour based on the law of large numbers assumption. Can we now say that Web Science, by tapping into collective intelligence, could serve the same goal  in a manner hitherto unknown?
    
2. Thomas Kuhn indicated that science progresses via revolutions -the paradigm shifts – which essentially are sudden disruptions of the dominant paradigm, rather than linear progress. Can we say that web science will form a new paradigm and if yes what does it replace? 
    
3. You said that 10¹¹ is the number of pages on the web today, which is comparable to the number of neurons in the human brain. Since I assume that even a human embryo has the same number of neurons, and that we have over 6bill humans alive today, what does that tell us for the web?
    
4. Theory precedes practice. This is a known fact for natural sciences (astronomy being the obvious example). Today, what we observe with the web, is that practice threatens to overthrow old practices and models. So, we either had a theory but didn’t recognize it as such, or a theory is long overdue. Which is true?
    
5. It is known that birds fly in flocks by following their peers in their immediate viccinity. Essentially, no single bird has an overall perspective of direction although there must be a Darwinian “higher purpose”. If the web facilitates flocking behaviour, where does the purpose come from? (flock simulator here)
    
6. You said that web science must be multidisciplinary. Of course, science does not progress in this way, its applications do. Considering that philosophers are the only true “multidisciplinarists”,  wouldn’t it be more apt to call it WebPhilosophy?
    
7. On a practical note about the Open Linked Data project: Do we really need or want access to some ill-designed, botched-up spreadsheet of a bored trainee in the accounting dept of a toothpaste manufacturer? In other words, how do we ensure the credibility of linked data? (or maybe I am missing the point…) “

[Note: Yesterday, Sir Tom Berners-Lee opened the WebSci'09 conference in Athens, an occasion which he considers to be the kick-off for "Web Science", a new science discipline to be pursued through his WSRI initiative. In the presence of seminal personalities, one is challenged to "rise above water" and this is our greatest gain. Thank you Sir Tom for this wonderful opportunity]. 

Την Τετάρτη 18/3/2009 και για 3 ημέρες, η Αθήνα θα φιλοξενήσει ένα μοναδικό συνέδριο.

Όλοι εμείς που έχουμε παρακολουθήσει την εξέλιξη του διαδικτύου – από ένα “επιστημονικό πείραμα” στο CERN, στην 4η διάσταση του φυσικού μας κόσμου – αισθανόμαστε βαθιά συγκίνηση όταν συνειδητοποιούμε ότι σημαντικοί άνθρωποι μεταξύ των οποίων ο Tim Berners-Lee θα συζητήσουν με ανοικτές τις πόρτες για το πως το διαδίκτυο επηρεάζει την ζωή μας.

Το συνέδριο Web Science 2009, διοργανώνεται στον χώρο “THEATRON” – Ίδρυμα Μείζονος Ελληνισμού ( οδό ς Πειραιώς 254, Ταύρος).

Ακολουθεί το αναλυτικό πρόγραμμα.

Conference Program

^(*) Evening sign-in procedure will be completed exactly at 18:30, so you are kindly requested to arrive at the venue in time.

A. KEYNOTE SPEECHES

 ALL Keynote Speeches (Nigel Shadbolt, Jacques Bus and Noshir Contractor) will be hosted at Room “ANTIGONE” of the “THEATRON”.

B. WORKSHOPS

 “Second Web Science Curriculum Workshop (WSCW2)”

Room “Ifigeneia 2”

 “Workshop on Understanding The Impact of the Web on Scholarly Communication (UIWoSC)”

Room “Ifigeneia 2”

C. PAPER SESSIONS

Paper Session (1) “Teaching and Learning” [top]

Room: “IFIGENEIA 2”

Chair

 Helen Margetts

Speakers

 Julià Minguillón. Web and education, a successful open entanglement [Abstract]

 Thanassis Tiropanis, Hugh Davis, David Millard & Mark Weal. Semantic Technologies for Learning and Teaching in the Web 2.0 era – A survey [Abstract]

 Carl Lagoze. The oreChem Project: Integrating Chemistry Scholarship with the Semantic Web [Abstract]

Discussion

Paper Session (2) “Trust and Distrust” [top]

Room: “IFIGENEIA 3”

Chair

 Daniel Weitzner

Speakers

 David Karpf. Why Bowl Alone When You Can Flashmob the Bowling Alley?: Implications of the Mobile Web for Online-Offline Reputation Systems [Abstract]

 Patricia Victor, Chris Cornelis, Martine De Cock & Ankur Teredesai. Trust- and Distrust-Based Recommendations for Controversial Items [Abstract]

 Kieron O’Hara & David Stevens. The Devil’s Long Tail: Religious Moderation and Extremism on the Web [Abstract]

Discussion

Paper Session (3) “Openness vs. Control” [top]

Room: “IFIGENEIA 2”

Chair

 Guss Schreiber

Speakers

 Alison Powell. Lessons from the Net Neutrality Lobby: Balancing openness and control in a networked society [Abstract]

 Inma Rodríguez-Ardura, Francisco J. Martínez-López & Paula Luna. The consumer and the Web: a critical revision of the contributions to Web science from the marketing and the consumer behaviour discipline [Abstract]

 Sadie Creese & Koen Lamberts. Can cognitive science help us make information risk more tangible online? [Abstract]

 Wolf Richter. Designing effective regulation for the “Dark side” of the Web [Abstract]

Discussion

Paper Session (4) “Tags and Search” [top]

Room: “IFIGENEIA 3”

Chair

 Deborah McGuiness

Speakers

 Ching Man Au Yeung, Michael Noll, Nicholas Gibbins, Christoph Meinel & Nigel Shadbolt. On Measuring Expertise in Collaborative Tagging Systems [Abstract]

 Gavin Smith and Helen Ashman. Evaluating implicit judgements from Image search interactions [Abstract]

 Lorraine Warren. Ephemeral emergents and anticipation in online connected creativity [Abstract]

 Alexandre Passant, Matthias Samwald, John Breslin & Stefan Decker. Federating Distributed Social Data to Build an Interlinked Online Information Society [Abstract]

Discussion

Paper Session (5) “Social Networks” [top]

Room: “IFIGENEIA 2”

Chair

 Dave De Roure

Speakers

 Milena Mihail, Yorgos Amanatidis & Stephen Young. Kernel Models For Complex Networks [Abstract]

 Jean Burgess and Joshua Green. Making Sense of YouTube: The Challenges of Complexity and Scale [Abstract]

 Lei Zhang & Wanqing Tu. Six Degrees of Separation in Online Society [Abstract]

 Barbie Clarke. BFFE (Be Friends Forever): the way in which young adolescents are using social networking sites to maintain friendships and explore identity [Abstract]

Discussion

Paper Session (6) “Web of Data” [top]

Room: “IFIGENEIA 3”

Chair

 Les Carr

Speakers

 Yuzhong Qu, Weiyi Ge, Gong Cheng & Zhiqiang Gao. Class Association Structure Derived From Linked Objects [Abstract]

 Harry Halpin. Social Meaning on the Web: From Wittgenstein To Search Engines [Abstract]

 Lynda Hardman, Jacco van Ossenbruggen & Raphael Troncy. Interactive Information Access on the Web of Data [Abstract]

 Mathias Schindler & Denny Vrandecic. Introducing new features to Wikipedia – Case studies for Web science [Abstract]

Discussion

Paper Session (7) “Government, Citizens, Law and the Web” [top]

Room: “IFIGENEIA 2”

Chair

 Michalis Vafopoulos

Speakers

 Albert Batlle, Ana Waksberg & Eduard Aibar. Is web-based interaction reshaping the organizational dynamics of public administration?: A comparative empirical study on eGovernment [Abstract]

 Ethan Katsh. Online Dispute Resolution: Designing new Legal Processes for Cyberspace [Abstract]

 Helen Margetts & Peter John. Experiments for Web Science: Examining the Effect of the Internet on Collective Action [Abstract]

Discussion

Paper Session (8) “Life On-line” [top]

Room: “IFIGENEIA 3”

Chair

 Hugh Davis

Speakers

 Jonathon Hare, Adrian Osmond, Yang Yang, Gary Wills, David De Roure, Judith Joseph, Lucy Yardley & Mark Weal. LifeGuide: A platform for performing web-based behavioural interventions [Abstract]

 Michel van Eeten and Johannes Bauer. Securing Cyberspace: Realigning Economic Incentives in the ICT Value Net [Abstract]

 Leslie Carr & Stevan Harnad. Cognition, Cognitive Technology and the Web [Abstract]

Discussion

D. THEMATIC PANELS & SESSIONS

 Business Panel “Society On-Line: The Business Approach” [top]

Room: “ANTIGONE”

Chair

 A. Oikonomou, Journalist

Welcome Addresses

 K. Hatzidakis, Minister of Development

 A. Diamantopoulou, Member of Greek Parliament (PASOK)

 K. Michalos, President of EVEA

Speakers

 Ch. Tsangos, Microsoft Hellas Managing Director

 Dr. N. Koulouris, Vice President of EETT (Hellenic Telecommunications & Post Commission)

 Th. Fessas, President & Managing Director of Info-Quest

 Legal Panel “What can Web Science do for the Privacy of Data Subjects?: Law, Privacy and Data Retention in a Post 9/11 World?” [top]

Room: “IFIGENEIA 2”

Chair

 L. Edwards, Professor (Sheffield University, UK)

Speakers

 J. Rauhofer, Lecturer (UCLAN)

 A. Matwyshyn, Assistant Professor (University of Pennsylvania)

 Dr. I. Brown (Oxford Internet Institute)

 “Trust on the Web” (co-organized with EC) [top]

Room: “ANTIGONE”

Chair

 J. Bus, Head of Unit F5 “Trust and Security”

Speakers

 Professor K. Rannenberg, T-Mobile Chair for Mobile Business and Multilateral Security at Goethe University Frankfurt

 Professor P. Spirakis, Director of Research Academic Computer Technology Institute (CTI)

 Ann Cavoukian, PhD, Information & Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada

 “Cultural Convergence and Digital Technology” (organized by FHW) [top]

Room: “ANTIGONE”

Chair

 N. Xydakis, Editor in Chief of “Kathimerini” – Art Critic

Intervention

 M. Damanaki, Member of Greek Parliament (PASOK)

Speakers

 K. Bita, Artist, Musician, Composer, Performer

 M. Marmarinos, Actor & Theater Director

 O. Pozeli, Actor & Theater Director

 “Politics on the Web” (organized by OMEGA Research Center, Dpt of Psychology, Panteion University) [top]

Room: “IFIGENEIA 2”

Chair

 K. Koskinas, Associate Professor (OMEGA Research Center, Dpt of Psychology, Panteion University – Member of Hellenic Sociological Association (SEK)

Welcome Address

 S. Kouloglou, Journalist & TVXS.gr Director

Speakers

 G. Alexias, Assistant Professor (OMEGA Research Center, Dpt of Psychology, Panteion University). Greek Political Parties and the Web

 I. Athanasiadis, MSc, PhD (Constantinos Caramanlis Institute for Democracy). New Era in Political Communication

 A. Priftis, ΜΑ (Andreas Papandreou Institute). Beyond the Medium is the Message: Internet as a Policy Making Incubator

 P. Pantos, ΜΑ (Member of Nikos Poulantzas Institute Board of Directors). The Internet as a new Public Sphere: From Virtual Reality to Collective Action

 Ch. Vernardakis, Assistant Professor of Political Science (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki – AUTH) & Scientific Consultant of VPRC. Internet – Platforms for Social Networking and Political Research

 “Socio-Psychology of the Web” (co-organized by OMEGA Research Center, Dpt of Psychology, Panteion University and Athenian Institute of Anthropos – AKMA) [top]

Room: “ANTIGONE”

Chair

 M. Polemi-Todoulou, Ph.D, C.G.P., E.C.P., Psychologist-Psychtherapist, President of Hellenic Association for Systemic Therapy (HELASYTH)

Speakers

 B. Davou, Professor (Dpt of Media and Communication Studies, University of Athens) & M. Savrami, M.Sc (Laboratory for Psychological Applications and Communication Planning, University of Athens). From Real Life to Virtual Friendships: The Facebook Case

 S. Sirmakessis, Associate Professor (Dpt of Applied Informatics in Administration and Economy, Technological Education Institute of Messolonghi). The impact of visual design on Web Interaction

 I. Katerelos, Associate Professor (Dpt of Psychology, Panteion University). Social networks as infrastructure containing social dynamics: a variable social geometry?

 E. Papanis, Assistant Professor (Dpt of Sociology, University of the Aegean). Pedophilia and the Greek Internet

 M. Koletsi, MA (Administrator of Research Institute for the Development and Promotion of Digital Access). Social Inequalities and the Web

Intervention

 S. Arsenis, “OMEGA” Research Center

Greetingz all! My codes for processing mauritian blogs and their inter-links is now ready! The next step will be to feed in a list of mauritian blogs. Selven and I have compiled a preliminary list through google docs and I have posted a copy below. If your blog or friends’ blogs are not listed below, you are welcome to contribute to the list.

Go to google-docs here or send your links as comments to this post. Thanks

Greetingz all. There has been some buzz lately about the launch of a bloggers’ club in Mauritius. This initiative has been on-going for some time now, primarily through the Mauritius Blog Tracker, and also The Mauritius Blog Brethen, both of which had their moments of glory but the light soon dimmed out (not completely). Although the intentions were good, I think the basement was not strong enough (mostly due to the small number of mauritian bloggers) and the timing was not appropriate.

But in the Web arena, things change rapidly, and we now have an ever-growing community of bloggers in the country, coupled with the decreasing cost of broadband, we can confidently expect the number of Mauritian blogs to rise in the near-future.

For the time being, We will be focussing on the links among mauritian blogs, who is linking to who and come up with a graph of the Mauritian blogosphere. With time, we will analyse the morphing of that graph and understand its implication for the mauritian society.

As pre-requisite for this experiment, I will require an up-to-date list of all Mauritian Blogs.  I think Yashvin must be compiling such a list currently. But anyone of you already having a list can mail it to me on roushdat [AT] gmail [DOT] com preferably in the form of a datasheet with 2 columns: Name, URL

Check out Yashvin’s post to learn more about the on-going iniative

2009 seems to be a great year for social network analysis and computer science. Here is a list of conferences I am aware of. Please comment to add other conferences. What is your favorite SNA conference?

Update: Sunbelt XXX

• SNA2009 – International Conference on Social Network Analysis and Applications,
  January 28-29 , 2009, New Delhi, India
  The schedule/proceedings of this event are available online. However, there is room for improvement.
• COMPLEX 2009 – The First International Conference on Complex Systems:
  Theory and Applications, February 23-25, 2009, Shanghai, China
  The programme is available here.
• Sunbelt XXIX – The Annual Meeting of the International Network for Social Network Analysis, March 10-15, 2009, San Diego, USA (Sunbelt XXX will be in Trento, Italy!)
• M3SN – Workshop on Modeling, Managing, and Mining of Evolving Social Networks in conjunction with the 25th International Conference on Data Engineering ICDE’09,
  March 29, 2009, Shanghai, China
  The programme is available here.
• Convention on Adaptive and Emergent Behaviour and Complex Systems, April 6-9, 2009, Edinburgh, UK
• WWW 2009 – Social Networks and Web 2.0 track, April 20-24, 2009, Madrid, Spain
• NetSciCom 2009 – First IEEE International Workshop on Network Science
  For Communication Networks in conjunction with IEEE Infocom 2009 , April 24, 2009 – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• German Conference “Visualisierung von Netzwerken“, May 1-2, 2009, Munich, Germany
• ACM GROUP 2009, May 10 – 13, 2009, Sanibel Island, USA
• GameNets 2009 – International Conference on Game Theory for Networks
  13-15 May 2009, Istanbul, Turkey
• dg.o 2009 – 10th International Digital Government Research Conference “Social Networks: Making Connections between Citizens, Data & Government”, May 17-20, 2009, Puebla, Mexico
• ICWSM 2009 – 3rd Int’l AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, May 17 – 20, 2009, San Jose, California
• CASoN 2009 – International Conference on Computational Aspects of Social Networks, June 24 – 27, 2009, Fontainebleau, France
• Hypertext 2009 – The Twentieth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, June 29 – July 1, 2009, Torino, Italy
• KDD-2009 – The Fifteenth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD’09), June 28 – July 1, 2009, Paris, France
• ISSI 2009 – 12th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics
  July 14-17, 2009, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
  ASONAM 2009 – The 2009 International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Data Mining, July 20-22, 2009 Athens, Greece
• MSNDS 2009 – The First International Workshop on Mining Social Networks for Decision Support (MSN-DS 2009) (in conjunction with ASONAM 2009), July 20-22, 2009, Athens, Greece
• The 2009 International Conference on Data Mining – Session on Data Mining in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, July 13-16, 2009, Las Vegas, USA
• AMCIS 2009 -Minitrack “Social Network Analysis in IS Research” at 15th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2009) August 6-9 2009, San Fransisco, USA
• SocialCom-09 – The 2009 IEEE International Conference on Social Computing, Ausgust 29-31, 2009, Vancouver, Canada
• DAMIEN -Workshop DAta MIning for the EvolviNg Web in conjunction with the 13th East European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS2009), September 7th 2009, Riga, Latvia
• WIKISYM 2009 – The International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, October 25-27 in Orlando, Florida, USA

As part of the Foundations of Web Science Module, we were tasked to investigate the Web Graph by building up a crawler that goes through a page, extract links, follow these links and loop…and ultimately generate a graph showing each link as a node pointing to other nodes.

One of the minor obstacle we encountered was about dealing with relative links since extracting relative links from a webpage and trying to download the content pointed by that link will lead nowhere since stand-alone, the relative link is not really pointing to anything concrete in the Web.

Lazy as we are…my friend Deyan and I tried search for some c# codes online that can convert that…Couldn’t find it. So we had to code it ourselves and thought about sharing it with other lazy people. All you have to do is to create a library in c#, copy paste the code below, build it. In your project, you can then refer to the .dll file generated for that library.

/*A humble request, please include these comments if you use this code, part of it or it is helpful to you somehow.This piece of code is free to use, modify and share. Original Authors: Roushdat Elaheebocus & Deyan Karaivanov, University of Southampton, March 2009. Part of the Web Graph project, Foundations of Web Science. */
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Data;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using System.Net;
using System.Web;

namespace RelToAbsConverter
{
    public class RelToAbs
    {

        public string GetAbsoluteUrl(string sourceUrl,string relUrl)
        {
            int countOfDots = relDotCount(relUrl);
            relUrl = relUrl.TrimStart('.');
            relUrl = relUrl.TrimStart('/');
            return convertRelToAbs(sourceUrl, relUrl, countOfDots);
        }

        private string convertRelToAbs(string sourceUrl, string relUrl, int countOfDots)
        {
            WebRequest req = WebRequest.Create(sourceUrl);
            Uri uri = req.RequestUri;
            int countOfParts = uri.Segments.Count();
            string collectedParts = "http://" + uri.Host;
            for (int i = 0; i < (countOfParts - countOfDots); i++)
            {
                collectedParts += uri.Segments[i];
            }
            collectedParts += relUrl;
            return collectedParts;
        }

        private int relDotCount(string relUrl)
        {
            int dotCount = 1;
            if (relUrl[0].Equals('.'))
            {
                dotCount = 1;
                for (int i = 1; i < 10; i++)
                {
                    if (relUrl[i].Equals('.'))
                        dotCount++;
                    else
                        break;
                }
            }
            return dotCount;
        }
    }
}

2009 seems to be a great year for social network analysis and computer science. Here is a list of conferences I am aware of. Please comment to add other conferences. What is your favorite SNA conference?

Update: DAMIEN

• SNA2009 – International Conference on Social Network Analysis and Applications,
  January 28-29 , 2009, New Delhi, India
  The schedule/proceedings of this event are available online. However, there is room for improvement.
• COMPLEX 2009 – The First International Conference on Complex Systems:
  Theory and Applications, February 23-25, 2009, Shanghai, China
  The programme is available here.
• Sunbelt XXIX – The Annual Meeting of the International Network for Social Network Analysis, March 10-15, 2009, San Diego, USA
• M3SN – Workshop on Modeling, Managing, and Mining of Evolving Social Networks in conjunction with the 25th International Conference on Data Engineering ICDE’09,
  March 29, 2009, Shanghai, China
  The programme is available here.
• Convention on Adaptive and Emergent Behaviour and Complex Systems, April 6-9, 2009, Edinburgh, UK
• WWW 2009 – Social Networks and Web 2.0 track, April 20-24, 2009, Madrid, Spain
• NetSciCom 2009 – First IEEE International Workshop on Network Science
  For Communication Networks in conjunction with IEEE Infocom 2009 , April 24, 2009 – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• German Conference “Visualisierung von Netzwerken“, May 1-2, 2009, Munich, Germany
• ACM GROUP 2009, May 10 – 13, 2009, Sanibel Island, USA
• GameNets 2009 – International Conference on Game Theory for Networks
  13-15 May 2009, Istanbul, Turkey
• dg.o 2009 – 10th International Digital Government Research Conference “Social Networks: Making Connections between Citizens, Data & Government”, May 17-20, 2009, Puebla, Mexico
• ICWSM 2009 – 3rd Int’l AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, May 17 – 20, 2009, San Jose, California
• CASoN 2009 – International Conference on Computational Aspects of Social Networks, June 24 – 27, 2009, Fontainebleau, France
• Hypertext 2009 – The Twentieth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, June 29 – July 1, 2009, Torino, Italy
• KDD-2009 – The Fifteenth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD’09), June 28 – July 1, 2009, Paris, France
• ISSI 2009 – 12th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics
  July 14-17, 2009, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
  ASONAM 2009 – The 2009 International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Data Mining, July 20-22, 2009 Athens, Greece
• MSNDS 2009 – The First International Workshop on Mining Social Networks for Decision Support (MSN-DS 2009) (in conjunction with ASONAM 2009), July 20-22, 2009, Athens, Greece
• The 2009 International Conference on Data Mining – Session on Data Mining in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, July 13-16, 2009, Las Vegas, USA
• AMCIS 2009 -Minitrack “Social Network Analysis in IS Research” at 15th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2009) August 6-9 2009, San Fransisco, USA
• SocialCom-09 – The 2009 IEEE International Conference on Social Computing, Ausgust 29-31, 2009, Vancouver, Canada
• DAMIEN -Workshop DAta MIning for the EvolviNg Web in conjunction with the 13th East European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS2009), September 7th 2009, Riga, Latvia
• WIKISYM 2009 – The International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, October 25-27 in Orlando, Florida, USA

The Web evolves in many distinct ways: ét grows daily, it revolutionizes information circulation, it disseminates knowledge, it demands on the spot data management. Its role for people shifts gradually from that of a huge information source to that of a social environment. The topics discussed by people, the products preferred by them and the social networks to which they participate are also subject to constant change, as proven from the fast emergence of the Web 2.0 technologies.

This workshop is devoted to methods, techniques and practices for analyzing evolution in the Web. Data mining for the evolving Web world is indispensable for business applications.
The success of a recommendation engine depends on the validity of the models it builds upon and which are bound to a constant change as new products, new competitors and new spammers enter the market.
The behaviour and the interests of users change as the Web becomes more accessible to new social strata, as new social trends manifest themselves, as new languages for blogging and querying gain momentum and as people embrace new technologies for information exchange, collaborative tagging and social activities.
The evolving Web poses grand challenges to data analysis: Data about Web usage arrive as streams, data describing Web content evolve with respect to topics and terminology, meta-information is context-rich and ephemeral, preferences of users change in response to external influences, coming among else from their evolving social networks. In this workshop, we foster research advances on data mining methods, techniques and practices for analyzing evolving user behaviour and preferences, evolving content and evolving communities, and we strongly encourage the interchange of ideas among scholars that study evolution in the Web from different perspectives.

Topics of interest to DAMIEN’09 include, but are not limited to:

• Web data mining methodologies, techniques and practices
• evolving data analysis techniques
• user behaviour and preferences
• Web graph mining
• evolving content management
• Web 2.0 and social data mining
• Meta-information exploitation and knowledge extraction
• Evolving social networks.

Important dates

April 27, 2009: paper Submission deadline June 1, 2009: Notification of Workshop paper acceptance June 15, 2009: Submission deadline for camera-ready papers September 7, 2009: Workshop date

Paper submission and presentation

The submission should be formatted according to Springer-Verlag requirements which are summarized at ADBIS 2009 submission requirements (www.adbis2009.org). Information for LNCS Authors can be found at http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-72376-0
All prospective authors are asked to submit an electronic copy of their manuscript according to submission timetable through the following web site (EasyChair system):
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=damien2009.
Each paper will be reviewed by at least two Program Committee members.
Final papers shall not contain more than 8 pages in the format specified by Springer. Best papers accepted for publication will be published in the LNCS series of Springer Verlag, the others – in the ADBIS workshops proceedings.
presentation schedule : 15 min – presentation; 5 min – questions and comments

Chairs
Athena Vakali, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (avakali@csd.auth.gr)
Myra Spilopoulou, Otto-von-Guericke-Universitat Magdeburg, Germany (myra@iti.cs.uni-magdeburg.de)
Ernestina Menasalvas, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain (emenasalvas@fi.upm.es)

Program Committee (tentative)
Joao Gama, University of Porto, Portugal
Dimitris Katsaros, University of Thessaly, Greece
Ioannis Kompatsiaris, CERTH/ITI, Greece
Themis Palpanas, University of Trento, Italy
Yucel Saygin, Sabanci University, Turkey
Evimaria Terzi, IBM Almaden, USA

The Internet, Web 2.0, and computer-mediated communications (blogs, forums, social networking sites) have made citizen-, user-, and consumer-generated contents a tremendous asset for understanding various social phenomena, from extremism to social activism, and from consumer sentiment to marketing intelligence. The topic is positioned right at the intersection of humans and systems.

The special issue will seek advanced modeling and simulation, human organizational interactions, web spidering, digital archiving, cyber archeology, social network analysis, sentiment analysis, and data/text/web mining techniques and methodologies which can contribute to understanding the pulse of the society. Advanced computational and modeling methods and relevant system-oriented case studies are sought. Selected topics will include:

* Metrics and analytical tools for evaluation of social media, social interactions, and social activities
* Social media content spidering, collection, and archiving
* Modeling and simulation of social interactions
* Human-system interaction for social activities
* Cyber archeology and anthropology
* Web 2.0 and web mining for social activities
* Understanding fads and infectious ideas through social media
* Web sentiment analysis and trend prediction
* Cyber terrorism, extremism, and activism study
* Consumer-generated media analysis
* Marketing intelligence analytics and online brand communities
* Company, brand, and product sentiment analysis
* Public health and consumer health web surveillance

Important Dates:

Paper submission due: August 1, 2009
Completion of first-round review: December 1, 2009
Revised manuscript due: March 1, 2010
Final decision notification: May 1, 2010
Final version of the manuscript due: July 1, 2010

Guest Editors:

Hsinchun Chen, University of Arizona
Email: hchen@eller.arizona.edu

Christopher C. Yang, Drexel University
Email: chris.yang@ischool.drexel.edu

All papers should be submitted in PDF format to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/smca-ieee and the authors should state in their submission that “This manuscript is submitted for the special issue on Social Media Analytics: Understanding the Pulse of the Society (editors: H. Chen and C. C. Yang)”

All enquiries on this special issue should be sent to chris.yang@ischool.drexel.edu.

University of Southampton, Building 32, November 2008: That’s when I received my first insight about what Web Science: A new branch of science that researchers (including Sir Tim Bernes Lee aka TBL) from MIT and the University of Southampton have successfully convinced enough influential people about its necessity.

For a  more conventional explanation about what this new science is, check Professor Nigel Shadbolt’s podcast recorded in November 2008 here.

And for my veiled-view of Web Science, read on

Basically, with so many stuff in computer science nowadays, researchers have been overwelmed! And computer scientists have this modular approach of breaking things into smaller units. Combined with the trend of everything being web-based, why not distinguish the Web as a unit in itself…

Around two decades ago, most people’s vision was: computers at the centre of all aspects of our life. To a large extent, this is something that has happened (our parents got it right!). But then, here comes the TBL’s Web and all the stuff that was being done on a desktop has now been moved online, web-based services!

Web Science’s vision: The Web at the centre of all aspects of our life! IT services, Law, Sociology, Economy…you name it, it has something to do with the web. And the frightening thing is that if ever someone was to gain complete control over the Web, theoritically, he will be controlling of the planet! ( Is TBL trying to double-cross me???)

While Web Science will be a discipline of study and research for probably the next 10 years, I feel that it’s thunder will be stolen in a shorter timespan compared to it stealing that of computer science…(and what about pervasive computing…still hiding in the shadows?)

A small advertising for the university now (no, they won’t be paying me for this):

• New module introduced this year: Foundations of web science
• New MSc in Web Science, introduced for September 2009’s intake

I’ll be writing more about Web Science in the future…since i have to prepare a report on that :p (so for those of you having to write that report as well, make sure not to plagiarised the presidential writings…)

2009 seems to be a great year for social network analysis and computer science. Here is a list of conferences I am aware of. Please comment to add other conferences. What is your favorite SNA conference?

Update: ASONAM 2009 paper deadline extended until February 13, 2009

• SNA2009 – International Conference on Social Network Analysis and Applications,
  January 28-29 , 2009, New Delhi, India
• COMPLEX’2009 – The First International Conference on Complex Systems:
  Theory and Applications, February 23-25, 2009, Shanghai, China
• Sunbelt XXIX – The Annual Meeting of the International Network for Social Network Analysis, San Diego, USA, March 10-15, 2009
• M3SN – Workshop on Modeling, Managing, and Mining of Evolving Social Networks in conjunction with the 25th International Conference on Data Engineering ICDE’09,
  March 29, 2009, Shanghai, China
• Convention on Adaptive and Emergent Behaviour and Complex Systems, April 6-9, 2009, Edinburgh, UK
• WWW 2009 – Social Networks and Web 2.0 track, April 20-24, 2009, Madrid, Spain
• NetSciCom 2009 – First IEEE International Workshop on Network Science
  For Communication Networks in conjunction with IEEE Infocom 2009 , April 24, 2009 – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• German Conference “Visualisierung von Netzwerken“, May 1-2, 2009, Munich, Germany
• ACM GROUP 2009, May 10 – 13, 2009, Sanibel Island, USA
• GameNets 2009 – International Conference on Game Theory for Networks
  13-15 May 2009, Istanbul, Turkey
• dg.o 2009 – 10th International Digital Government Research Conference “Social Networks: Making Connections between Citizens, Data & Government”, May 17-20, 2009, Puebla, Mexico
• ICWSM 2009 – 3rd Int’l AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, May 17 – 20, 2009, San Jose, California
• Hypertext 2009 – The Twentieth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, June 29 – July 1, 2009, Torino, Italy
• KDD-2009 – The Fifteenth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD’09), June 28 – July 1, 2009, Paris, France
• ISSI 2009 – 12th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics
  July 14-17, 2009, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
  ASONAM 2009 – The 2009 International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Data Mining, July 20-22, 2009 Athens, Greece
• MSNDS 2009 – The First International Workshop on Mining Social Networks for Decision Support (MSN-DS 2009) (in conjunction with ASONAM 2009), July 20-22, 2009, Athens, Greece
• The 2009 International Conference on Data Mining – Session on Data Mining in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, July 13-16, 2009, Las Vegas, USA
• AMCIS 2009 -Minitrack “Social Network Analysis in IS Research” at 15th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2009) August 6-9 2009, San Fransisco, USA
• SocialCom-09 – The 2009 IEEE International Conference on Social Computing, Ausgust 29-31, 2009, Vancouver, Canada
• WIKISYM 2009 – The International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration,
  October 25-27 in Orlando, Florida, USA

The following is from Seed Magazine. Fascinating stuff. Barabási is giving the keynote on COMPLEX’09, Shanghai, China, February 23-25. We will present our paper “You never walk alone: Recommending Academic Events Based on Social Network Analysis” at the same conference. Before watching the video you have to watch the “sponsored message”

An interdisciplinary science which will focus on pattern and standardization of regulations for social as well as technical aspects of large scale applications like ecommerce web, collaborative networks by keeping a standpoint of user questions and requirements.

Why it is Important?

It is important because it will answer the socio-technical issues related to large scale applications. It is going to shift computer scientist analysis focus from single computer to decentralized web systems in universal usability, escalating technology shift and social computing.

What  are its Contributions?

Its contribution to our knowledge will be great as it will try to increase coupling between different field of sciences to utilize their scientist expertise and experiences to regularize the standards unanimously for new emerging technology applications like web 2.0 in businesses and user perspective so that these standards are followed for the new applications development in near future. It will be bringing intelligence in web by using innovative technologies like Semantic Web, Ontologies, Wikis and Blogs etc.

It is difficult to define due to its novelty. A lot of research is underway to fasten its contents to insist computer scientist to change their focus from pure technical issues to socio technical issues.

Due to its interdisciplinary nature it will be having links with Social science, ECommerce, Service science, Mathematics and Psychology.

Conclusion

It is an effort to come up with a stage for the involvement and interactions of scientist who are, some how impacting the web domain for making web technically and socially powerful place for people having different languages and cultures.

A lot is already said and done about what and how to assemble web but now its time to shift gear on how to use it.

References

1. B. Shneiderman .Web science: a provocative invitation to computer science, Communications of the ACM 50 25–27 (2007)

2. Video Interview of Berners-Lee URL: http://videolectures.net/iswc06_lee_itbl/

3. Lohr, Steve. “Group of University Researchers to Make Web Science a Field of Study”, The New York Times, November 2, 2006. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/technology/02compute.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

The 6th Annual European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2009) will present the latest results in research and applications of Semantic Web technologies. ESWC2009 will also feature a tutorial program, system descriptions and demos, a posters track, a PhD Symposium and a number of collocated workshops.

El auténtico poder económico de la Red no está -contrariamente a lo que pueda parecer- en el Marketing Online; ni en ser un terreno de investigación privilegiado para conocer los gustos de los consumidores; ni en los nuevos negocios nacidos en torno a las redes sociales. El verdadero poder está en las PERSONAS.

Un buen surfista puede anticiparse en el conocimiento de los gustos de su futuro cliente; de los puntos débiles de los que serán sus adversarios en una próxima reunión de negocios; o imaginar las preguntas con las que suspuestamente habría de sorprenderle el periodista al que ha de enfrentarse, leyendo lo que dicen; lo que publican, y sobretodo averigüando con quien se relacionan aquellos a quien que investiga.

Lejos de consdierarse una violación de la intimidad, casí empieza a ser poco profesional e irresponsable acudir a una reunión sin haber investigado previamente actuaciones, publicaciones o interéses de los asistentes.

En el arte de ocultarse ó presentarse se juegan hoy gran parte de las batallas y carreras empresariales. Dominar la red con las herramientas que la tecnología ofrece, con la flexibilidad mental de un adolescente, o dejarse arrastrar por la corriente es la elección a la cada día nos enfrentamos muchos ó todos.

Publicado Inicialmente en http://loquenoseve.wordpress.com/2008/10/08/el-petroleo-de-la-red/