Social Networking Workshop | Comsnets 2015
Thank you for making COMSNETS 2015 a great success. See you at COMSNETS 2016: 5th - 9th Jan 2016, Bangalore !
JANUARY 6 - 10
BANGALORE, INDIA


Vidhana Soudha by Ranganath Krishnamani

Social Networking Workshop

Workshop Date: Tuesday, January 6, 2015 (Click to view schedule)

Social networking is profoundly changing the way people communicate and interact on a daily basis. Online social networks are serving as a vital means for supporting information and resource sharing, aiding discovery of connected individuals, improving communication between globally dispersed individuals, and even measuring scientific impact. A significant fraction of mind-share in the form of applications, diverse access interfaces, and a large economic ecosystem has developed around this field. Going past the simple characterization and enumeration of properties, the networking research community has shown significant interest in attacking various problems associated with social networks. The proposed workshop strives to bring together academic, R&D, and industry researchers from these disciplines to address both the science and engineering challenges associated with the rapidly evolving domain of social networking.

Topic of Interest

The goal of this workshop is to facilitate cross-disciplinary discussion of relevance to social networking, involving novel ideas and applications, and experimental results. This workshop provides an opportunity to compare and contrast the ethological approach to social behaviour in human with web-based evidence of social interaction, perceptual learning, information granulation, the behaviour of humans and affinities between web-based social networks. This workshop welcomes 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 network analysis
  • Social networks and social intelligence
  • Link topology and site hierarchy
  • Virtual and web communities and web site clustering
  • Security, privacy and trust computational analysis of social networks
  • Web-based cooperative work
  • Knowledge community formation and support
  • Intelligent wireless Web
  • Social network analysis and mining of communities of practice
  • Network evolution and growth mechanisms
  • Information diffusion and knowledge transfer in social networks
  • Epidemics and rumours in networks
  • Geographical clusters, networks, and innovation
  • Anomaly detection in social network
  • Computational models and agent-based simulations of networks
  • High Dimensional network analytics
  • Big data techniques for social networks
  • Strategic social networks and game theoretic models

Submission Guidelines


Authors of accepted papers are expected to present their papers at the workshop. Submissions must be original work not under review at any other workshop, conference, or journal.

Papers can be submitted through the submission site EDAS.

Note: All Workshop papers (full papers - both regular and invited) WILL appear in IEEE Xplore.

How to Submit


  1. Log in to EDAS
  2. Go to the list of conferences accepting submissions.
  3. Find "COMSNETS 2015 - Social Networking Workshop" and click on "Submit Paper" link at the right of the column.
  4. You can also come to this page directly by going to https://www.edas.info/newPaper.php?c=18873
  5. You will be taken to a page that asks you for the title of the paper, topics etc.
  6. In the box called "Paper abstract", put in the abstract.
  7. After you press the submit button, you should add all other authors.
  8. That completes the abstract submission/registration.
  9. You can upload the paper after that, which can be done until November 5, 2014.

Important Deadlines


Submission Due Oct 27, 2014 Nov 5, 2014
Notification of Acceptance Nov 28, 2014
Camera-ready Version Due Dec 2, 2014
Workshop Date Jan 6, 2015


Keynote Speaker

Noshir Contractor

Northwestern University, USA

Title:
Leveraging Network Science to address Grand Societal Challenges

Abstract:
The increased access to big data about social phenomena in general, and network data in particular, has been a windfall for social scientists. But these exciting opportunities must be accompanied with careful reflection on how big data can motivate new theories and methods. Using examples of his research in the area of networks, Contractor will argue that Network Science serves as the foundation to unleash the intellectual insights locked in big data. More importantly, he will illustrate how these insights offer social scientists in general, and social network scholars in particular, an unprecedented opportunity to engage more actively in monitoring, anticipating and designing interventions to address grand societal challenges.

Click here to view Biography

Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, the School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, USA. He is the Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University and a board member of the Web Science Trust. He is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in a wide variety of contexts.

His research program has been funded continuously for almost two decades by major grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation with additional funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), Army Research Laboratory, Air Force Research Laboratory, Army Research Institute, NASA, Rockefeller Foundation, Gates Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation.

His book titled Theories of Communication Networks (co-authored with Professor Peter Monge and published by Oxford University Press), received the 2003 Book of the Year award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association. He is a recipient of the National Communication Association Distinguished Scholar Award recognizing a lifetime of scholarly achievement in the study of human communication. He is also the co-founder and Chairman of Syndio, which offers organizations products and services based on network analytics.

Professor Contractor has a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California.


Invited Speakers


Anirban Dasgupta

IIT Gandhinagar, India

Saikat Guha

MSR, Bangalore, India

Anindya Sinha

National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore


Title and Abstract of Talks


  • Anirban Dasgupta: Aggregating information from a crowd

    Click here to view Abstract

    Crowdsourcing is now widely used to replace judgement or evaluation by an expert authority with an aggregate evaluation from a number of non-experts, in applications ranging from rating and categorizing online content to evaluation of student assignments in massively open online courses (MOOCs) via peer grading. A key problem in these settings is how to aggregate these evaluations, thereby giving an accurate estimate of the ground truth, given that the agents are of varying, unknown, expertise.

    In this talk, we consider a model to formalize this question of aggregating information collected from a crowd. We first present a simple model where tasks are binary and each agent has an unknown fixed, reliability that determines the agent's error rate in performing tasks. The problem is to determine the (hidden) truth values of the tasks solely based on the agent evaluations and on the effort they decide to put, should they behave strategically. We will outline how to first incentivize the agents to put in their full effort. We will then present algorithms whose error guarantees depend on the expansion properties of the agent-task graph. We next discuss generalizations of this model by using gaussian distributions to capture tasks with continuous feedback, and present initial results.


  • Anindya Sinha: The Monkey and the Elephant: Socio-cultural and Cognitive Networks in Wild Mammalian Populations

    Click here to view Abstract

    Individuals in social animal groups engage in diverse behavioural interactions with one another, and display complex social structures and affiliation patterns. Network theory offers a natural approach to tackle such complexity and study the underlying structure and dynamics of animal societies. By representing individuals as nodes in a network and social relationships as the edges connecting them, a network model takes into account all social interactions that connect all individuals. Subsequent theoretical analysis using the measures and tools of network theory not only allows us to quantify the roles played by individuals in the society but also offers qualitatively novel insights. We can thus pose questions and obtain insights that are often outside the scope of traditional statistical approaches in the study of animal behaviour. Such analyses have been widely applied to a wide range of complex systems in biology, from the cellular to the ecological levels, and extending these methodologies to the study of animal social behaviour is a highly promising direction of research. In this talk, we illustrate the utility and scope of network modelling through two case studies: affiliative networks in bonnet macaque Macaca radiata societies and association patterns of all-male groups of the Asian elephant Elephas maximus.


  • Saikat Guha: Towards Catching Click-Spam on Facebook Ads

    Click here to view Abstract

    Users are increasingly influenced by liked posts and ads on Facebook. This has led to a market for black-hat promotion techniques via fake (e.g., Sybil) and compromised accounts, and collusion networks. We present a study of click-spam on Facebook, investigate sources of click-spam traffic, and design techniques to identify such clicks with high confidence. Our technique works with no apriori labeling while maintaining low false-positive rates. Using ground-truth data from Facebook ads, we find our technique identifies click-spam better than existing approaches.



Workshop Schedule

Time Sessions
9:00 - 9:10 Introductory remarks (by the organizers)
Keynote Talk:
9:10 - 10:10 Leveraging Network Science to address Grand Societal Challenges (Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University, USA)
Regular Papers :
10:00 - 10:20 Degree Based Seed Optimization to Maximize Information Dissemination in Social Networks (Kundan Kandhway and Joy Kuri, Indian Institute of Science, India)
10:20 - 10:40 Measuring diversity of network models using distorted information diffusion process (Pradumn Pandey, Bibhas Adhikari; Ruchir Gupta, IIT Jodhpur, India)
10:40 - 11:00 Tea Break
Invited Talk I:
11:00-11:40 The Monkey and the Elephant: Socio-cultural and Cognitive Networks in Wild Mammalian Populations (Anindya Sinha, NIAS, Bangalore)
Invited Talk II:
11:40-12:20 Towards Catching Click-Spam on Facebook Ads (Saikat Guha, MSR, Bangalore, India)
Regular Papers:
12:20-12:40 Extracting Situational Awareness from Microblogs during Disaster Events (Anirban Sen (IIEST, Shibpur, India), Koustav Rudra (IIT, Kharagpur, India), Saptarshi Ghosh (IIEST, Shibpur, India & Max Planck Institute for Software Systems))
12:40-13:00 Temporal Analysis of Author Ranking Using Citation-Collaboration Network(Partha Sarathi Paul, Vickey Kumar, Prasenjit Choudhury, Subrata Nandi, (National Institute of Technology, Durgapur, India))
13:00-14:00Lunch Break
Invited Talk III:
14:00-14:40 Aggregating information from a crowd((Anirban Dasgupta, IIT Gandhinagar, India))
Regular Papers:
14:40-15:00 Investigating Active Learning Techniques for Document Level Sentiment Classification of Tweets (Ayush Kumar, Chaitanya Kansal, Asif Ekbal, (IIT Patna, India))
15:00-15:20 Strategic network formation involving social relations: enmity and friendship (Bibhas Adhikari (IIT Jodhpur, India); Debabrata Pal (Ambedkar University, India); Mainak Mazumdar (IIT Jodhpur, India))
15:20-15:40 Community-based Immunization Strategies for Epidemic Control (Naveen Gupta and Anurag Singh (PDPM IIITDM Jabalpur, India); Hocine Cherifi (University of Burgundy, LE2I UMR CNRS 6306, Dijon, France, France))
15:40-16:00 Contagion, Coordination and Communities: Diffusion of innovations on social networks with modular organization (Kuyyamudi Chandrashekar, Sitabhra Sinha (The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, India))
16:00 - 16:30 Tea Break
16:30-16:50 Shahbag Movement: The Tweeted Perspective (Vaskar Raychoudhury, Divya Saxena, Mayank Chaudhary, Shivam Mangla (IIT Roorkee, India))
16:50-17:10 Design and Evaluation of Euler Diagram and Treemap for Social Network Visualisation (Mithileysh Sathiyanarayanan, Nikolay Burlutskiy (University of Brighton, United Kingdom)
17:10 - 17:30 Concluding Remarks

Workshop Co-Chairs


Niloy Ganguly

IIT Kharagpur, India

[email protected]

Sitabhra Sinha

IMSc Chennai, India

[email protected]


Technical Program Committee

Name Affiliation
Bimol Viswanath MPI - SWS
Joydeep Chandra IIT Patna
Pawan Goyal IIT Kharagpur
Pradipta Maji ISI Kolkata
Ramasuri Narayanam IBM IRL
Ravindran Balaraman IIT Madras
Rishiraj Saharoy Adobe Research India
Sandip Chakraborty IIIT Guwahati
Somprakash Bandopadhyay IIM Kolkata
Srikanta Bedatur IBM IRL
Sudipta Sarangi Lousiana State University and National Science Foundation
Ujjwal Moulik Jadavpur University