Connectionists: CFP: NIPS Workshop on Networks in the Social and Information Sciences

[Aaron Clauset]

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          CALL FOR PAPERS

          NIPS workshop on

    Networks in the Social and Information Sciences

    12 December 2015, Montreal, Canada

    http://tinyurl.com/NetworksNIPS2015

    Submission Deadline : Monday, 2 November 2015

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Description
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This workshop aims to bring together a diverse and cross-disciplinary set of researchers to discuss recent advances and future directions for developing new network methods in statistics and machine learning. In particular, we are interested in

 • network methods that learn the patterns of interaction, flow of information, or propagation of effects in social and information systems,
 • empirical studies, particularly attempts to bridge observational methods and causal inference, and studies that combine learning, networks, and computational social science,
 • research that unifies the study of both structure and content in rich network datasets.

While this research field is broad and diverse, there are emerging signs of convergence. For example, in the study of information diffusion, social media and social network researchers are beginning to use rigorous tools to distinguish effects driven by social influence, homophily, or external processes -- subjects historically of intense interest amongst statisticians and social scientists.

Similarly, there is a growing statistics literature developing learning approaches to study topics popularized earlier within the physics community, including clustering in graphs, network evolution, and random-graph models.

Finally, learning methods are increasingly used in highly complex application domains, such as large-scale knowledge graph construction and use, and massive social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. These applications are stimulating new scientific and practical questions that often cut across disciplinary boundaries.


Invited speakers (confirmed)
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Deepak Awargal (LinkedIn)
Emily Fox (Washington U)
Jon Kleinberg (Cornell U) 
Hanna Wallach (Microsoft Research)


Format and Submissions
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This is a 1-day workshop. The program will feature 4 invited talks, poster spotlights and a poster session, and a panel discussion.

We welcome the following types of papers:
 • Research papers that introduce new models or apply established models to novel domains,
 • Research papers that explore theoretical and computational issues, or
 • Position papers that discuss shortcomings and desiderata of current approaches, or propose new directions for future research.

Submissions will be lightly peer-reviewed. We encourage authors to emphasize the role of learning and its relevance to the application domains at hand. In addition, we hope to identify current successes in the area, and will therefore consider papers that apply previously proposed models to novel domains and data sets.

Submissions should be 4­-­8 pages long, non-anonymized, and otherwise adhere to NIPS format.

*** Submission Deadline : Monday, November 2, 2015 ***
Decision Notification : Thursday, November 5, 2015

Submissions will be accepted via :
  https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nipsnetworks2015


ISBA Travel Awards
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The workshop is endorsed by the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA). The organizers have been invited to nominate graduate students or junior researchers (up to five years after graduation) who will be presenting at the workshop for ISBA Travel Awards. Two such awards will be granted (across all NIPS workshops endorsed by the ISBA), offering up to 700 USD in support. To be considered for an ISBA Travel Award, submissions must be submitted early, by ** October 12, 2015. **


Organizers
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Edo Airoldi, Harvard University
David Choi, Carnegie Mellon University
Aaron Clauset, University of Colorado, Boulder
Panos Toulis, Harvard University
Johan Ugander, Microsoft Research