Call or papers: Workshop on Social Object Networks - SocialObjects 2011

1st International Workshop on Social Object Networks (SocialObjects 2011)
                                        http://ir.ii.uam.es/socialobjects2011/

               Collocated with 3rd International Conference on Social Computing
                             Boston, US.   http://www.iisocialcom.org/conference/

*Important dates*
Papers due: 5th August 2011
Notification of acceptance: 22nd August 2011
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?
*Topics of interest*
 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
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.
Organizing committee

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

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