Call for Tutorials

The ICWSM-11 Committee invites proposals for Tutorials Day at the Fifth International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM-11). The Tutorials Day will be held on July 17, 2011 in Barcelona, Spain. Anyone interested in presenting a tutorial at ICWSM-11 should submit a proposal to the 2011 Tutorials Chair (via EasyChair). ICWSM-11 is being co-located with IJCAI-11, and there will be a special tutorial rate for IJCAI registrants.

What Is the Tutorials Day?

The Tutorials Day provides an opportunity for junior and senior researchers to spend a day before ICWSM freely exploring exciting advances in disciplines outside their normal focus. We believe this type of forum is essential for the cross-fertilization, cohesiveness, and vitality of the social media field. We all have a lot to learn from each other; the Tutorials Day promotes the continuing education of each member in our community.

Topics

ICWSM is interested in proposals for advanced tutorials at the leading edge of social media in all its incarnations, including but not limited to: NLP, Social Psychology, Data Mining, Sociology and Visualization. We are particularly interested in tutorials that offer two types of knowledge. The first type provides in-depth background tools to help educate researchers and students for the purpose of conducting social media research; examples of this type of tutorial from ICWSM-10 include “Introduction to Social Media Network Analysis'” and “Large-Scale Social Media Analytics with Hadoop”. A second type of tutorial provides a broad overview for a social media area that potentially crosses boundaries with an interesting application area; examples of this type of tutorial from ICWSM-10 include “The Social Semantic Web: How Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web Can Strengthen Each Other” and “The Social Psychology of Social Media through the Lens of Text Analysis”.

Our goal is to present a diverse program that includes tutorials on core areas of social media research for new or non-technical audiences, and tutorials from allied non-computing disciplines that can inform research within social media. Previous years’ tutorial programs provide an indication of the scope and variety of possible topics. The list is not exclusive; indeed, we are expressly interested in topics that we would not have imagined to mention. Finally, note that we very much welcome proposals for educational approaches that go beyond the traditional format of four-hour tutorials, exploiting the flexibility that the open format program offers.

Submission Requirements

We need two kinds of information in the proposals: information that will be used for selecting proposals and information that will appear in the tutorial description brochure. The proposal should provide sufficient information to evaluate the quality of the technical content being taught, the quality of the educational material being used, and the speakers’ skill at presenting this material.

Each proposal should include at least the following:

• Goal of the tutorial: Who is the target audience? What will the audience walk away with? What makes the topic innovative?
• History: List of previous venues and approximate audience sizes, if the same or a similar tutorial has been given elsewhere; otherwise an estimate of the audience size.
• Content: Detailed outline and list of additional materials, augmented with samples, such as past tutorial slides and survey articles, whenever possible. Be as complete as possible.
• Tutorial description: 1-2 paragraphs summarizing the tutorial outline (suitable for promotion on the ICWSM-11 website), and the intended duration of the session (the default is four hours).
• Prerequisite knowledge: What knowledge is assumed of the target audience?

Please also submit the following information about the team of presenters: name, mailing address, phone number, email address; background in the tutorial area, including a list of relevant publications and/or presentations; any available examples of work in the area (ideally, a published tutorial-level article or presentation materials on the subject); evidence of teaching experience (courses taught or references); and evidence of scholarship in computer science or social science.

Submission Deadline

Proposals must be received by February 18, 2011. Decisions about the Tutorials Day program will be made by March 4, 2011. Submissions must be in PDF format and can be made via the EasyChair conference system at:

Kind regards,
Tutorial Chair
John Breslin, NUI Galway