ICWSM-18

Workshop program

June 25, 2018

FULL DAY WORKSHOPS (8:30AM - 5:30PM)

W1: Beyond Online Data: Tackling Challenging Social Science Questions
Michael Macy; Daniel M. Romero; Amit Sharma; Chenhao Tan

W8: 1st International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media (Emoji 2018)
Sanjaya Wijernatne; Emre Kiciman; Horacio Saggion; Amit Sheth

HALF DAY WORKSHOPS (Morning, 8:30AM - 12:30PM)

W4: Bridging the Gaps: Social Media, Use and Well-being
Megan French; Xun "Sunny" Liu; Samuel Hardman Taylor; Eden Litt

W5: Data-Driven Personas and Human-Driven Analytics: Automating Customer Insights in the Era of Social Media
Jim Jansen; Joni Salminen; Lene Nielsen; Matti Mäntymäki

W6: Algorithmic Personalization and News: Risks & Opportunities
Juhi Kulshrestha; Cornelius Puschmann; Nicolas Diakopoulos; Aniko Hannak

W9: 1st International Workshop on Chatbot
Ying Ding; Bing Liu; James Shanahan; Jie Tang

(CANCELLED) W10: Computational Social Science of Innovation Diffusion and Evolution (C-SIDE)
Tim Weninger; Nathan Hodas; Svitlana Volkova; Emily Grace

W11: Making Sense of Online Data for Population Research
Lee Fiorio; Emilio Zagheni; Afra Mashhadi; Bogdan State; Dennis Feehan

W15: The 3rd International Workshop on Event Analytics using Social Media Data (EASM)
Yuheng Hu; Yu-Ru Lin

HALF DAY WORKSHOPS (Afternoon, 1:30PM - 5:30PM)

W3: The Third International Workshop on NEws and publiC Opinion (NECO 2018)
Jisun An; Haewoon Kwak; Fabrício Benvenuto

W7: Social Media and Health: A Focus on Methods for Linking Online and Offline Data
Yelena Mejova; Rumi Chunara; Kyraki Kalimeri; Michael Paul

W12: Designed Data for Bridging the Lab and the Field: Tools, Methods, and Challenges in Social Media Experiments
Dominic DiFranzo; Natalie Bazarova; S. Shyam Sundar; Jeff Hancock

W13: 3rd International Workshop on the Social Web for Environmental and Ecological Monitoring (SWEEM)
Darian Frajberg; David J. Crandall

W14: Exploring Ethical Trade-Offs in Social Media Research
Casey Fiesler; Stevie Chancellor; Katie Shilton; Jessica Vitak; Michael Zimmer

EVENING WORKSHOP (8:00PM - approx. 10:00PM)

W16: The ICWSM Science Slam
Fabian Flöck; Cody Buntain, at Dutch Goose Restaurant

Details about each workshop are below.


W1: Beyond Online Data: Tackling Challenging Social Science Questions

The abundance of online data has provided exciting opportunities for computational social science. However, most social processes thrive at the intersections of online and offline worlds. It thus becomes necessary to connect online studies to the offline world, especially for tackling broad social science questions such as information access, education, healthcare, migration, discrimination, and poverty. This ICWSM workshop on "Beyond online data" aims to bring together social scientists and computer scientists to think about new ways to utilize data for addressing challenging social science questions. This includes novel ways of utilizing offline data, combining offline and online data, and creating new data through observation and experiments. Instead of starting with available datasets, the workshop will discuss approaches that start with a substantive question and find possible ways to leverage diverse potential datasets, including both online data and offline data.

Organizers
  • Michael Macy, Cornell University
  • Daniel M. Romero, University of Michigan
  • Amit Sharma, Microsoft Research
  • Chenhao Tan, University of Colorado Boulder

W8: 1st International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media (Emoji 2018)

Pictographs, commonly referred to as "emoji", have become a popular way to enhance electronic communication. With their introduction in the late 1990's, emoji have been widely used to enhance the sentiment, emotion, and sarcasm expressed in social media messages. They often play distinct social and communicative roles compared to other forms of written language while taking over language constructs such as slang terms and emoticons. The ability to automatically process, derive meaning, and interpret text fused with emoji will be essential as society embraces emoji as a standard form of online communication. Yet the pictorial nature of emoji, the fact that (the same) emoji may be used in different contexts to express different meanings, and that emoji are used in different cultures and communities over the world who interpret emoji differently, make it especially difficult to apply traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to analyze them. To meet these challenges, Emoji2018 aims to stimulate research on understanding social, cultural, communicative, and linguistic roles of emoji and developing novel approaches to analyze, interpret and understand emoji and their usage in social media applications. It provides a forum to bring together researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry in the areas of social network analysis and mining, natural language processing, computational linguistics, human-computer interaction, and computational social sciences to discuss high-quality research and emerging applications, to exchange ideas and experience, and to identify new opportunities for collaboration.

Organizers
  • Sanjaya Wijeratne, Kno.e.sis Center, Wright State University
  • Emre Kiciman, Microsoft Research
  • Horacio Saggion, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
  • Amit Sheth, Kno.e.sis Center, Wright State University

W3: The Third International Workshop on NEws and publiC Opinion (NECO 2018)

Computational study of journalism has been an emerging discipline in recent years. A lot of inspiring data-driven studies on news production and consumption, news audience, news bias, and tools have been published and discussed. On the other hands, social media has received a lot of attention from researchers who study public opinion. The data collected from social media is a valuable asset to see what people have in their mind about at the very moment. Election prediction based on Twitter is a good example of such efforts. In this workshop, we are trying to make this two disciplines meet. How news media formulate public opinion and how public opinion influences on news media are our questions to ask. For this, of course, the parallel efforts on the understanding of news media and public opinion are required first and then based on the findings, we can look into the interplay between them. As a result, the workshop topics can be categorized into three groups: news, public opinion, and their interplay.

Organizers
  • Jisun An, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU
  • Haewoon Kwak, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU
  • Fabrício Benevenuto, Federal University of Minas Gerais

W4: Bridging the Gaps: Social Media, Use and Well-being

There has been a wealth of recent reviews, meta-analyses, and empirical studies on the relationship between social media and well-being. However, scholars still have a limited understanding of how and why social media influences and relates to well-being. In this half-day workshop, academic and industry researchers will engage in cooperative problem-solving activities around the current state of social media and well-being to identify open questions and brainstorm design solutions. The overall goals of this workshop are to 1) foster discussion in order to bridge gaps and map future directions and 2) share the day's discussion with the field more broadly.

Organizers
  • Megan French, Stanford University
  • Samuel Hardman Taylor, Cornell University
  • Eden Litt, Facebook
  • Sunny Xun Liu, Stanford University

W5: Data-Driven Personas and Human-Driven Analytics: Automating Customer Insights in the Era of Social Media

The workshop deals with the use of online analytics data for automating customer insights. An example of such an approach is automatic persona generation, in which social media data is retrieved via application programming interfaces (APIs), analyzed automatically with computational techniques, and presented to users of customer analytics via an online system. Even though automation of customer analytics includes a myriad of benefits, automation has been questioned as algorithms may pose bias and result in stereotypical or non-meaningful data portrayals. Thus, this workshop also explores the duality of data- and human-driven analytics. While data-driven analytics is focusing on the accuracy and availability of data to support decision making, human-driven analytics is defined as presentation and analysis of insights about users or customers that highlights qualitative attributes over numbers. We welcome all research papers/proposals that deal with the promises and challenges of automation of customer analytics, including the above-mentioned themes of techniques and mentality of automation.

Organizers
  • Bernard J. Jansen, Hamad Bin Khalifa University
  • Joni Salminen, Hamad Bin Khalifa University; University of Turku
  • Lene Nielsen, IT University Copenhagen
  • Matti Mäntymäki, University of Turku

W6: Algorithmic Personalization and News: Risks & Opportunities

Algorithms play a crucial role in how citizens around the world inform themselves about current affairs. According to the 2017 Reuters Digital News Report, an increasing number of users globally rely on personalization algorithms to receive news both directly on news websites, as well as indirectly via their algorithmic social media feeds, search engines, and news aggregators. In tandem with this development, there are growing concerns about the impact of algorithmic personalization on society in areas such as public opinion formation and viewpoint diversity on controversial issues. This workshop aims to broaden the debate on algorithms and news to discuss both risks and opportunities of personalization for news consumption and to develop suitable methods for auditing algorithmic personalization and its impact on users’ news consumption behaviors. It also aims to foster a dialogue between the stakeholders involved by bringing together researchers from computer science, media studies, journalism and communication sciences, as well as industry practitioners from both mainstream media and startups.

Organizers
  • Juhi Kulshrestha, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
  • Cornelius Puschmann, University of Hamburg
  • University of Hamburg, Northwestern University
  • Aniko Hannak, Central European University

W7: Social Media and Health: A Focus on Methods for Linking Online and Offline Data

In this workshop, we discuss the latest developments in the use of social media data and offline data in health research and applications, advancing the use of social media. For example, from tracking seasonal illnesses like the flu to understanding the context of mental conditions such as anorexia and bulimia, passive monitoring allows for nowcasting disease, that is, estimating its prevalence in the moment it happens. Other efforts bring the technology back to the individual, enabling immediate and richer health data gathering, which may be employed to provide instantaneous feedback. While much of the work in the area is happening regarding health, the topic is of broad relevance to researchers and practitioners in sociology, demography, linguistics and economics.

Organizers
  • Yelena Mejova, Qatar Computing Research Institute
  • Rumi Chunara, New York University
  • Kyriaki Kalimeri, Institute of Scientific Interchange
  • Michael Paul, University of Colorado, Boulder

W9: 1st International Workshop on Chatbot

With the AI technologies penetrating every part of our daily life, the way of processing and delivering information has been fundamentally changed. Chatbot will become the new interface between human and information, human and services, and human and society in the AI era. Dialoging is one of the most common and intuitive ways for human to communication. Previously web interface of searching or browsing is the main interface between human and information, but this will be soon replaced by chatbot. We envision that chatbot will become the front-end interface of almost all digital everything. To develop better chatbot technology, it requires inter-disciplinary attentions. For the backend technologies of chatbot, it needs the domain expertise on information summary/cognitive summary, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, natural language processing, text mining, and machine learning. For the frontend technologies of chatbot, it desires user interactive communication, user behavior, user cognitive thinking, user engagement, user interface design, and voice or video communication. Beyond that, it entails the complicated social part of users and society, which includes peer communication, conformity, social and society pressure, trends, personality, social bonding, and more. Here we call for contributions from teams in academia and industry working on chatbot to share their insights, network, and brainstorm the future roadmap of chatbot.

Organizers
  • Ying Ding, Indiana University
  • James Shanahan, Native X
  • Bin Liu, University of Illinois at Chicago
  • Jie Tang, Tsinghua University

W11: Making Sense of Online Data for Population Research

All data come with some type of bias, and an essential responsibility of scientists in any field is to understand the nature of the bias manifested in the data from which they draw inference and test hypotheses. In this respect, data generated from human interaction with digital technology are no different from data traditionally used in social science research, but they do pose new and interesting problems. The goal of this workshop is to provide a space for researchers with background in social sciences, quantitative methods and computational approaches, from academia and industry, to come together and discuss how to appropriately interpret online data and share creative ways for grappling with issues related to bias. The workshop will be organized along three main themes: (1) understanding underlying populations and demographic processes, (2) understanding data generating behaviors, and (3) leveraging scale to ask new questions.

Organizers
  • Lee Fiorio, University of Washington
  • Emilio Zagheni, University of Washington and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
  • Afra Mashhadi, University of Washington
  • Bogdan State, Facebook and Stanford University
  • Dennis Feehan, University of California, Berkeley

W12: Designed Data for Bridging the Lab and the Field: Tools, Methods, and Challenges in Social Media Experiments

This workshop will explore the methodological middle ground between the field and the lab. Research using repurposed observational data from online platforms has transformed the study of online behavior and have high external validity, but present challenges for establishing causality and replication. On the other hand, experimental studies offer high internal validity, discovery of causal relationships, and ease of replication, but the rigid control over the settings and interactions of an experiment can limit generalizability. New methods work toward bridging these two research contexts, bringing the lab to the field to recruit more diverse participants in a natural setting, or by simulating natural settings and interactions of the field in the lab. This workshop will showcase more naturalistic experimental paradigms, innovative tools and methods, and challenges in conducting research to optimize both internal and ecological validity.

Organizers
  • Dominic DiFranzo, Cornell University
  • Natalie Bazarova, Cornell University
  • Shyam Sundar, Penn State University
  • Jeff Hancock, Stanford University

W13: The 3rd International Workshop on the Social Web for Environmental and Ecological Monitoring (SWEEM 2018)

The exponential growth of the popularity of social media has provided not only novel techniques for public communication and engagement, but has also generated unprecedented volumes of publicly-available, user-generated social media content. These trends open new opportunities for ecological and environmental applications, both in terms of alternative data sources and novel approaches for interacting with the public. The goal of the workshop is to bring together a combination of academic and industrial participants to discuss ideas, challenges, and solutions at the intersection of Social Media and Environmental/Ecological Science.

Organizers
  • David J. Crandall, Indiana University Bloomington
  • Darian Frajberg, Politecnico di Milano

W15: The 3rd International Workshop on Event Analytics using Social Media Data (EASM)

Social media channels enjoy many advantages over traditional media channels, such as ubiquity, mobility, immediacy, and seamless communication in reporting, covering and sharing real-world events, e.g., the Boston bombings, the NBA finals, and the U.S Presidential elections. Given these advantages, social media posts such as tweets can typically reflect events as they happen, in real-time. Despite these benefits, social media channels also tend to be noisy, chaotic, and overwhelming. As a result, the vast amount of noisy social media data poses tremendous challenges for conducting in-depth analysis, which is critical to applications for event playback, journalistic investigation, storytelling, etc. We propose this workshop to provide a platform to understand the critical challenges in event analytics, determine the values they bring in various domains and to enable cross-fertilization of ideas between the different scientific (machine learning, data mining, social computing, NLP, etc) and functional (academia and business) groups.

Organizers
  • Yuheng Hu, University of Illinois at Chicago
  • Yu-Ru Lin, University of Pittsburgh

W16: The ICWSM Science Slam

A Science Slam is an epic scientific event where scientists compete with short talks on their research. It's just like a poetry slam, but with science instead of poems. Slammers are completely free to do whatever they want on stage, everything is allowed including slides, games, the more creative, the better! The only two rules are: The topic of the slam has to be related to social media and the presentation should not take more than 8 minutes.

Organizers
  • Fabian Flöck
  • Cody Buntain