Fifth Social Networking Workshop at COMSNETS

Workshop Date: 7th January 2018

Social networking has changed the way people communicate. Online social networks (OSNs) support information and resource sharing, aid discovery of globally dispersed individuals, and even enable measurement of research impact. Several novel applications, diverse access interfaces, and a large economic system has developed around OSNs. Going past simple characterization of social media, the community has shown significant interest in addressing various research problems associated with the field. This workshop strives to bring together academia and industry to present developments on both research and engineering challenges associated with social networks.

This year, we plan to have a special theme of "credibility analysis". Social media content (or more generally, big data) has often been associated with the five V's: volume, velocity, variety, veracity and value. In recent years, there has been rising concern on the credibility, or the veracity aspect of the content spreading across social media. This is aggravated by the fact that recent publishing trends try to be the first source of information, leaving little time and resources for validating the truth or factuality of such content. Veracity directly affects the value of OSN content, while volume, velocity and variety make the problem even more challenging and necessitate the development of automated approaches for credibility assessment. This year's workshop invites original research on this relatively-understudied area, and will assemble thought leaders through the keynote and invited talks.

Topics of Interest:

The goal of this workshop is to facilitate cross-disciplinary discussions of relevance to social networking. Submissions should contain novel ideas and applications, and must be evaluated experimentally. This workshop provides an opportunity to compare and contrast human behaviour as known through sociology with Web-based evidence of social interactions. We welcome contributions from researchers working on the following topics of interest, including, but not limited to:

  • Automatic discovery and analysis of Web based social networks
  • Visualization of social networks
  • Social networks and social intelligence
  • Link topology and site hierarchy in social networks
  • Security, privacy and trust computational analysis of social networks
  • Web-based cooperative work
  • Knowledge community formation and support
  • Social network evolution and growth mechanisms
  • Information diffusion and knowledge transfer in social networks
  • Epidemics and rumours in social networks
  • Community question-answering
  • Anomaly and outlier detection in social network
  • Multiplex and interdependent social networks
  • Computational models and agent-based simulations of social networks
  • High dimensional social network analytics
  • Big data techniques for social networks
  • Game-theoretic strategies for social networks
  • Temporal and spatial social networks
  • HCI for social media
  • Credibility analysis of social media content

Accepted and presented papers will be published in the conference proceedings and submitted to IEEE Xplore as well as other Abstracting and Indexing (A&I) databases.

Submission Guidelines

  • Submissions must not exceed 6 pages (and not be less than 3 pages) in length including all figures, tables, and references.
  • Submission must be in PDF format.
  • Reviews will be single-blind: authors' names and affiliations should be included in the submission.
  • Submissions must follow the formatting guidelines as given on IEEE Website.
  • Submissions must be original work not under review at any other workshop, conference, or journal.

At least one author of every accepted paper should attend the workshop to present the research.

All workshop papers will appear in COMSNETS 2018 proceedings.

All deadlines are with respect to the AoE (Anywhere on Earth) time zone.

Submission Process

  • Create an account and login to EDAS.
  • Go to the EDAS new paper submission page for the workshop.
  • Enter your paper's title and abstract, check the box to add yourself as an author, and click on submit.
  • Add your co-authors and upload the paper pdf on the next screen.
  • Papers not adhering to style and length guidelines, and not in US Letter Size PDF, will be rejected without review.
  • If you have any questions, please contact the workshop chairs: Moumita Sinha ([email protected]) and Rishiraj Saha Roy ([email protected]).

Important Deadlines


Paper Submission 10th November 2017
Notification of Acceptance 8th December 2017
Camera-ready Submission 15th December 2017
Workshop Date 7th January 2018

Keynote Speaker

Prasenjit Mitra

Prasenjit Mitra

Pennsylvania State University, USA


Invited Speakers

Alpan Raval

Alpan Raval

LinkedIn, India

Manish Gupta

Manish Gupta

Microsoft R&D, India

Debasish Ganguly

Debasish Ganguly

IBM Research, Ireland


Workshop Schedule


Time Activity Content
09:00 AM - 09:10 AM Inauguration Opening Remarks
Session - 1
09:10 AM - 10:10 AM Keynote Social Networks: From No News to Fake News and Beyond
Prof. Prasenjit Mitra
Pennsylvania State University, USA
10:10 AM - 10:30 PM Paper - 1 Modeling Opinion Dynamics in a Social Network Using Markov Random Field
Kundan Kandhway (TCS Innovation Labs, Chennai, India))
10:30 AM - 11:00 AM Tea Break
Session - 2
Chair : Moumita Sinha
11:00 AM - 11:45 AM Invited Talk - 1 Content Relevance on LinkedIn
Dr. Alpan Raval
LinkedIn, India
11:45 PM - 12:05 PM Paper - 2 Knowledge based Community Detection in Online Social Network
Paramita Dey (GCECT Kolkata, India), Agneet Chatterjee (Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India), and Sarbani Roy (Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India)
12:05 PM - 12:25 PM Paper - 3 Design and Implementation of Small Multiples Matrix-based Visualisation to Monitor and Compare Email Socio-organisational Relationships
Mithileysh Sathiyanarayanan, Cagatay Turkay, and Odunayo Fadahunsi (City University of London, UK)
12:25 PM - 12:50 PM Paper - 4 A Novel Overlapping Community Detection Using Parallel CFM and Sequential Nash Equilibrium
Aparna Sarswat and Ram Mohana Reddy Guddeti (NIT Surathkal, India)
01:00 PM - 02:00 PM Lunch Break
Session - 3
Chair : Rishiraj Saha Roy
02:00 PM - 02:45 PM Invited Talk - 2 Applications of Deep/Representation Learning for Social Media Tasks
Dr. Manish Gupta
Microsoft R&D, India
02:45 PM - 03:40 PM Panel Discussion Credibility Analysis of Social Media Content
Panelists: Prasenjit Mitra, Manish Gupta, Alpan Raval, and Debasish Ganguly;
Moderator: Rishiraj Saha Roy
03:40 PM - 04:00 PM Paper - 5 TRAFAN: Road Traffic Analysis Using Social Media Web Pages
Akilesh B, Nagendra Kumar, Bharath Reddy and Manish Singh (IIT Hyderabad, India)
04:00 PM - 04:30 PM Tea/Coffee Break
Session - 4
Chair : Moumita Sinha
04:30 PM - 05:15 PM Invited Talk - 3 Inducing Personalization and Proactivity in Search Technologies with Deep Learning
Dr. Debasish Ganguly
IBM Research Dublin, Ireland
05:15 PM - 05:35 PM Paper - 6 Centralized and Epidemic Dissemination of Security Patches
Kundan Kandhway (TCS Innovation Labs, Chennai, India))
05:45 PM - 06:00 PM Closing Best Paper Decision and Valedictory

Workshop Co-Chairs

Moumita Sinha

Moumita Sinha

Adobe Research, India

Rishi Saha Roy

Rishiraj Saha Roy

MPI for Informatics, Germany


    Program Committee:

  • Srikantha Bedathur, IBM Research, India

  • Sanjukta Bhowmick, University of Nebraska, USA

  • Tanmoy Chakraborty, University of Maryland, USA

  • Joydeep Chandra, IIT Patna, India

  • Niyati Chhaya, Adobe Research, India

  • Monojit Choudhury, Microsoft Research India

  • Sourav Dandapat , IIT Patna, India

  • Lipika Dey, TCS Innovation Labs, Kolkata

  • Sourav Dutta, Bell Labs, Ireland

  • Niloy Ganguly, IIT Kharagpur, India

  • Saptarshi Ghosh, IIT Kharagpur, India

  • Kripabandhu Ghosh, IIT Kanpur, India

  • Pawan Goyal, IIT Kharagpur, India

  • Paramita Mirza, MPI for Informatics, Germany

  • Bivas Mitra, IIT Kharagpur, India

  • Animesh Mukherjee, IIT Kharagpur, India

  • Maya Ramanath, IIT Delhi, India

  • Sudipta Saha, IIT Bhubaneswar, India

  • Mithileysh Sathiyanarayanan, University of London, UK

  • Ritwik Sinha, Adobe Research, India

  • Jannik Stroetgen, MPI for Informatics, Germany

  • Balaji Vasan Srinivasan, Adobe Research, India

  • Andrew Yates, MPI for Informatics, Germany


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