The workshop aims to discuss key issues of searching and mining a special kind of increasingly important sources: Social Web and Social Networks (SWN).

There are a growing number of highly-popular user-centric applications, especially with the popularity of the Web 2.0. Such examples include blogs, folksonomies, wikis and Web communities in specific topics such as in academic research area. They have formed a new Web, Social Web and further formed social networks. SWN generates a lot of structured and semi-structured information. This information greatly enlarges the content of Web. At the same time, it introduces many interesting research issues (e.g., social web storage, search and mining, social network building, expertise oriented search and association search in social networks) and as well many real-world applications (e.g. web community detection and search, hot-topic detection in a specific web community). These research issues have been receiving in the recent years growing attentions.

This workshop solicits contributions on SWN search and mining including Webbased and Semantic Web-based social applications, the emerging applications of the Web as a social medium such as its typical application in the academic area. Workshop Papers will elaborate related methods, issues associated to SWN extraction, storage, search, and mining.

Edward Y. Chang
Director of Research, Google China
Title: Parallel Mining on Massive Social Networks
Abstract: Google/China has recently launched two social-network products: OpenSocial and Knowledge Search (laiba.tianya.cn and wenda.tianya.cn). This talk presents the OpenSocial vision of Google, depicts the Web-scale data mining algorithms (e.g., Parallel Support Vector Machines and Parallel Dirichlet Allocation) that power the products, and motivates convergence of Search and Social Networks.

Speaker Biography: Professor Edward Chang received his M.S. in Computer Science and PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in 1994 and 1999, respectively. He joined the department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at University of California, Santa Barbara, in September 1999. He received his tenure in March 2003, and was promoted to full professor of Electrical Engineering in 2006. His recent research activities are in the areas of machine learning, data mining, high-dimensional data indexing, and their applications to image databases, video surveillance, and Web mining. Recent research contributions of his group include methods for learning image/video query concepts via active learning with kernel methods, formulating distance functions via dynamic associations and kernel alignment, managing and fusing distributed video-sensor data, categorizing and indexing high-dimensional image/video information, and speeding up Support Vector Machines via parallel matrix factorization and indexing. Professor Chang has served on several ACM, IEEE, and SIAM conference program committees. He co-founded the annual ACM Video Sensor Network Workshop and has co-chaired it since 2003. In 2006, he co-chairs three international conferences: Multimedia Modeling (Beijing), SPIE/IS&T Multimedia Information Retrieval (San Jose), and ACM Multimedia (Santa Barbara). He serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and ACM Multimedia Systems Journal. Professor Chang is a recipient of the IBM Faculty Partnership Award and the NSF Career Award. He is currently on leave from UC, heading R&D effort at Google/China.

The workshop will provide a forum for researchers from all over the world to share information on their latest investigations in SWN search, mining and its application particularly in academic research area.

The broader context of the workshop can be related in some respects to the areas of Web Mining, Social Networks Analysis, Semantic Web, Information Retrieval, and Natural Language Processing. In addition to paper presentations and depending on time limitations, we will solicit an invited talk or a panel that will stress the interdisciplinary challenges of SWN search and mining.

Topics in SWN search and mining of interest include but are not limited to:

• Algorithms for SWN search
• Personalized search for social interaction
• User behaviour prediction
• Classification, clustering and knowledge extraction on SWN
• Large-scale graph algorithms
• Discovering social structures and communities
• Evolution of online social networks
• Social network extraction
• Temporal analysis on SWN topologies
• Topic detection and topic trend analysis
• Events/collaborators recommendation
• Name disambiguation and normalization
• Applications of SWN
• Integration of heterogeneous SWNs   

• Submission Deadline: Feb. 10th, 2008 Extanded to Feb. 15th, 2008
• Notification of Acceptance: Mar. 10th, 2008
• Camera Ready Due: Mar. 15th, 2008
• Workshop Date: Apr. 22th, 2008

Papers should be no longer than 8 pages, including all references and figures. Papers should be submitted in WWW2008 proceedings format, which can be found at: WWW2008 Proceedings Templates.

All papers must be submitted in either Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). Please ensure that any special fonts used are included in the submitted documents. Please use the following link to submit your paper: Easychair Submission System for SWSM2008. 

• Juanzi Li. Tsinghua University, China, ljz@keg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn
• Gui-Rong Xue. Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, grxue@apex.sjtu.edu.cn
• Michael R. Lyu. The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China, lyu@cse.cuhk.edu.hk
• Jie Tang. Tsinghua University, China, tangjie@keg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn
• Ying Ding. University of Innsbruck, Austria, fido.ding@gmail.com
• Zheng Chen. Microsoft Research Asia, China, zhengc@microsoft.com

• Harold Boley, Institute for Information Technology - e-Business of NRC, Canada
• Ling Chen, L3S Research Center, German
• Mingmin Chi, Fudan University, China
• Isaac Councill, the Pennsylvania State University, USA
• Stefan Decker, DERI galway, Ireland
• Li Ding, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
• Dingyi Han, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
• Yutaka Matsuo, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan
• Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts, USA
• Zaiqing Nie, Microsoft Research Asia, China
• Yue Pan, IBM China Research Lab, China
• Zhiyong Peng, Wuhan University, China
• Charles Petrie, Standford University, USA
• Dou Shen, Microsoft, USA
• Vaclav Snasel, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, CZ
• Zhong Su, IBM China Research Lab, China
• Wensi Xi, Google, USA
• Qiang Yang, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China
• Huajun Zeng, Microsoft Research Asia, China
• Hongyuan Zha, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA