Connectionists: 2nd CFP: WSDM 2014 Workshop in "Diffusion Networks and Cascade Analytics" (New York City, Feb 28, 2014)

[Manuel Gomez Rodriguez]

Last Call for Papers (Extended deadline: Dec 6):

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WSDM 2014 Workshop in "Networks -- Processes and Causality
http://people.tuebingen.mpg.de/diffusion-networks-wsdm14

New York City (NY, USA), Feb 28, 2014
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Diffusion of various types of behavior, information, rumors, ideas and
infectious diseases are all instances of stochastic processes that
occur over the edges of an underlying network. A contagion appears at
some node of a network and then spreads like an epidemic from node to
node over the edges of the network, creating a cascade. For example,
in case of information propagation, the contagion represents a piece
of information and infection events correspond to times when nodes
mention or copy the information from one of their neighbors in the
network. Developing computational methods to analyze different cascade
patterns, understand the mechanism underlying diffusion, and
eventually predict the cascading outbreaks, is of paramount importance
since it would allow not only to stop disease spread, avoid rumor and
misinformation spread, or mitigate traffic congestion but also design
optimal marketing strategies, maximize sales of a product, or detect
viral ideas and content in an early stage.

Diffusion and cascades have been studied for many years in sociology,
and different theoretical models have been developed. However,
experimental validation has been always carried out in relatively
small datasets. In recent years, with the availability of large-scale
network and cascade data, research on cascading and diffusion
phenomena has aroused considerable interests from various fields in
computer science. One of the main goals has been to discover different
propagation patterns from historical cascade data. In this context,
understanding the mechanisms underlying diffusion in both micro- and
macro-scale levels and further develop predictive model of diffusion
are fundamental problems of crucial importance.

The main goal of this workshop is therefore to bring together
researchers from academia and industry as well as practitioners to
share and discuss their different perspectives, ideas and latest
research problems on diffusion networks and cascade analytics.

Topics of interest for the workshop include (but are not limited to)
the following:

Cascade pattern mining and analysis
Cascading behavior analysis and prediction
Cascading outbreak detection and prediction
Information diffusion in social networks
Homophily, social contagion and causality
Network inference from cascades
Rumor, misinformation, and anti-spam detection
Mobility patterns mining and analysis
Disease dynamics and vaccination strategies in social networks
Games in networks
Link prediction in networks

Papers must be formatted according to ACM guidelines
(http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates) and style
files to fit within 4 pages, including references, diagrams, and
appendices if any. A submitted paper must be self- contained and in
English. PDF files must have all non-standard fonts embedded.

Papers should be submitted by email to cuip at tsinghua.edu.cn, with the
title of "DifNet Submission: + $the name of the first author$".

Submission Deadline: December 6 (Extended)
Acceptance Notifications: December 21

Organizers:
Peng Cui
Fei Wang
Hanghang Tong