Social Websites - Complex Dynamics and Structure October 4, 2007

CALL FOR PAPERS

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SoWeb2007 conference announcement
SOCIAL WEBSITES - COMPLEX DYNAMICS AND STRUCTURE
http://www.tagora-project.eu/outreach/eccs07

Dresden, October 5th, 2007

a satellite conference of
the European Conference on Complex Systems ECCS2007
http://vwitme011.vkw.tu-dresden.de/TrafficForum/dresden/

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DATES:

* first call for papers: April, 2007
* paper submissions: June 4 2007
* notification of acceptance: July 1, 2007
* camera ready deadline: July 31, 2007
* final program available: August 3, 2007
* conference: October 5, 2007

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SUBMISSIONS:

Paper submissions are managed using the EasyChair
conference management system. To submit your paper, visit
http://www.easychair.org/SoWeb2007/
If you don't have an EasyChair account, you must create a new one
and use it for your submission.
Submissions must be in PDF format, no more than 10 pages long.
The conference submissions will be reviewed by the Program Committee.
Authors of accepted papers will be invited to present
their work at the conference.

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PARTICIPATION:

Participation is free of charge, but requires registration
to the main ECCS07 conference. To register for ECCS07,
please visit the official ECCS07 registration page,
http://vwitme011.vkw.tu-dresden.de/TrafficForum/dresden/reg.html
and specify your interest in this satellite conference.
We would appreciate if you could also send email to
[email protected]
indicating your intention to participate.

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MOTIVATION:

A new kind of user-centered applications such as folksonomies,
recommendation systems, wikis and so on, now commonly referred to
as "Web 2.0" have gained considerable ground in the past 2 years.
As examples we can point to Flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube, BibSonomy,
Amazon.com and many more. In addition, the economic impact of these
websites is surging, as can be readily seen from the fact that Yahoo
acquired Flickr, Google bought MySpace and OpenBC went public in the
last few months. The collaborative character underlying many Web 2.0
applications puts them in the spotlight of complex systems science.
Modern web applications for organizing and sharing data are open-ended,
dynamically evolving, collaborative and therefore intrinsically social.
The huge popularity acquired by collaborative tagging systems,
for example, shows that the computer-mediated interaction of web users
can create valuable and complex information architectures.
These structures are genuinely emergent and early research
is reporting rich and often surprising features.
The problem of linking the low-level scale of user behavior
with the high-level scale of global applicative goals is a typical
problem tackled by the science of complexity: understanding how
an observed emergent structure arises from the activity and interaction
of many globally uncoordinated agents. At the same time, from the
viewpoint of Information Technology, this appears as an engineering
problem, and its solution lies in understanding and eventually
controlling the self-organized structures that arise in modern
web-based systems. The large number of users involved, coupled with the
fact that their activity is occurring on the web, provide for the first
time a unique opportunity to monitor the "microscopic" behavior
of users and link it to the high-level dynamics of applications,
by using formal tools and concepts from the science of complexity.

AIMS AND GOALS:

Our aim is to leverage the large popularity and scale of the ECCS07
conference to bring together researchers from Physics, the Semantic Web
community, the Social Network Analysis community, the Web 2.0 community
and other research areas. We plan to increase collaboration and exchange
of experiences, with a concrete focus on mathematical tools and models,
experimental data, and techniques for data analysis. Our goal is also
to start creating a network of researchers with a common base of
inter-disciplinary knowledge, as the basis of a new research community.
Finally, this research field is very young and there are only a few
European players. We would like them to become aware of each other,
also in view of the call for new projects in FP7, for which
the topics of this conference will be of high priority in the IST call.

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INVITED SPEAKERS:

* Prof. Gerd Stumme (confirmed)
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Kassel
http://www.kde.cs.uni-kassel.de/stumme

* Prof. Ulrik Brandes (confirmed)
Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Konstanz
http://www.inf.uni-konstanz.de/~brandes/

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PROGRAM COMMITTEE:

* Dr. Andrea Baldassarri
* Dr. Alain Barrat
* Dr. Markus Franke
* Dr. Andreas Geyer-Schulz
* Dr. Scott Golder
* Dr. Andreas Hotho
* Dr. Peter Mika
* Dr. Vito D.P. Servedio
[to be extended]

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ORGANIZERS:

* Dr. Bettina Hoser, University of Karlsruhe (TH)
* Dr. Ciro Cattuto, University of Rome "La Sapienza"

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CONTACT:

For any inquiries about the conference,
please send email to [email protected]

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Official Website: http://www.tagora-project.eu/outreach/eccs07