ICWSM-17

Workshop program

Full Day Workshops

W1: Social Media and Demographic Research
Emilio Zagheni; Ingmar Weber; Tom Le Grand

W2: Observational Studies through Social Media
Emre Kiciman; Munmun De Choudhury; Elad Yom-Tov

~~W3: Queering Social Media Research~~ (Cancelled)

W4: Digital Misinformation
Filippo Menczer; Alessandro Flammini; Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia; Gregory Maus; Alexio Mantzarlis

Half Day Workshops

W5: Events Analytics Using Social Media Data
Yuheng Hu; Yu-Ru Lin

W6: Studying User Perceptions and Experiences with Algorithms
Nick Proferes; Alissa Centivany; Caitlin Lustig; Jed Brubaker

W7: News and Public Opinion
Jisun An; Haweoon Kwak; Fabrício Benevenuto

W8: Perceptual Biases and Social Media
Nir Grinberg; Kenneth Joseph; Brooke Foucault Welles

W9: The ICWSM Science Slam
David Garcia; Ingmar Weber; Aniko Hannak; Robert West

Details about each workshop are below.

W1: Social Media and Demographic Research

Demography has been a data-driven discipline since its birth. Data collection and the development of formal methods have sustained most of the major advances in our understanding of population processes. The global spread of Social Media has generated new opportunities for demographic research, as individuals leave an increasing quantity of traces online that can be aggregated and mined for population research. At the same time, the use of Social Media and Internet are affecting people's daily activities as well as life planning, with implications for demographic behavior.

The goal of this workshop is to favor communication and exchange between the communities of demographers and data scientists. The workshop would revolve around the main theme of applications and implications of social media and online data for demographic research. We invite contributions from colleagues interested in Computational Demography. We encourage submissions from researchers who wish to present their work, as well as the attendance of scholars interested in broadening their exposure to the topic.

Organizers

Emilio Zagheni, University of Washington, Seattle
Ingmar Weber, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU
Thomas LeGrand, Montreal University, Canada

W2: Observational Studies through Social Media

People’s usage of mobile devices, Internet services, and applications creates a rich repository of data across many domains. As explorations and applications by the ICWSM community become more focused on understanding mechanisms and addressing societal and individual-level problems through policy- and individual-level interventions, the importance of careful studies and causal reasoning methods is becoming more critical. The ICWSM workshop on Observational Studies in Social Media and other human-generated content (OSSM, pronounced “awesome”), brings together social scientists, computer scientists, and others who are investigating observational studies of these interactions and data across many areas, including public health, medicine, sociology, education and others. The goal of the workshop is to foster discussion and brainstorming in this area.

Organizers

Elad Yom-Tov, Microsoft Research
Munmun De Choudhury, Georgia Tech
Emre Kiciman, Microsoft Research
Tim Althoff, Stanford University

W4: Digital Misinformation

The deluge of online and offline misinformation is overloading the exchange of ideas upon which democracies depend. Many have argued that echo chambers are increasingly constricting the ability of alternative perspectives to provide a check on one’s viewpoints. Suffering fragmentation and declining public trust, the Fourth Estate struggles to carry out its traditional editorial role distinguishing facts from fiction. Without those safeguards, fake news, conspiracy theories, and deceptive social bots proliferate, facilitating the manipulation of public opinion. Countering misinformation while protecting freedom of speech will require collaboration between stakeholders across industry, journalism, and academia. To foster such collaboration, the Workshop on Digital Misinformation is intended to bring together key stakeholders to discuss practical countermeasures, including: (1) Identify the cognitive, social, political, financial, and technological factors contributing to the generation and propagation of misinformation; (2) Explore institutional standards such as a classification of different types of misinformation; (3) Devise technical tools to facilitate fact checking; (4) Delineate the distinction between countering misinformation and infringing upon the freedoms of speech, thought, and association; and (5) Develop a shared statement of principles.

Organizers

Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Indiana University
Alessandro Flammini, Indiana University
Alexios Mantzarlis, Poynter International Fact-Checking Network
Gregory Maus, Indiana University
Filippo Menczer, Indiana University

W5: Events Analytics Using Social Media Data

The purpose of the Event Analytics using Social Media Data (EASM) workshop is to bring together researchers that are working in a variety of areas that are all related to the larger problem of analyzing and understanding events using social media responses, to discuss: 1) what are the recently developed machine learning and data mining techniques that can be leveraged to address challenges in analyzing events using social media data, and 2) from challenges in analyzing events, what are the practical research directions in the machine learning and data mining community.

Organizers

Yuheng Hu, University of Illinios at Chicago
Yu-Ru Lin, University of Pittsburgh

W6: Studying User Perceptions and Experiences with Algorithms

From Facebook's News Feed algorithm that shapes the posts and updates we see, to Spotify's recommendation service that introduces us to new music that we might love, to dating site algorithms that attempt to match us with potential romantic partners, algorithms play an increasingly important role in shaping many aspects of our daily lives. We seek to bring together a community of researchers interested in taking a human-centered perspective on studying the experience of algorithms.

To this end, we will be holding a half-day workshop on Monday, May 15th, 2017 in Montreal, Canada. The objective of this workshop is to articulate the grand challenges of studying the user-algorithm relationship and to bring together participants interested in developing projects to address these grand challenges. This workshop is action oriented, and we welcome participants from a variety of disciplinary perspectives who are interested in starting new projects on studying user perceptions and experiences with algorithms or who are in the early stages of an ongoing project.

Organizers

Nicholas Proferes, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland, USA
Alissa Centivany, Information & Media Studies, Western University, Canada
Caitlin Lustig, Department of Informatics, University of California Irvine, USA
Jed Brubaker, Department of Information Science, University of Colorado Boulder, USA

W7: News and Public Opinion

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
Fabricio Benevenuto, Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG)

W8: Perceptual Biases and Social Media

Recent demonstrations of racial and gender bias in the United States have drawn public attention to stereotyping and discrimination in American society and its institutions. However, stereotyping and prejudice are only two examples of how our perceptual biases impact behavior. Confirmation bias, bias in media coverage of events and preferential attachment are all examples of perceptual biases that shape social processes like the creation of echo chambers and discriminatory behaviors. The emergence of social media as a prominent medium for human communication has the potential to provide a new lens for studying the relationship between perceptual biases and social processes, and the role social media plays in affecting this relationship.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together those interested in studying how social media systems and perceptual biases co-evolve, and to write a position paper that outlines what existing research has shown and where new research could improve our understanding. We purposely leave the definition of perceptual bias broad, as the way a person (or institution) constructs its reality. We do so in order to address a variety of possible biases, from those that impact hiring practices of social media companies to those that play a role in social interaction.

Organizers

Nir Grinberg, Network Science Institute, Northeastern University
Kenneth Joseph, Network Science Institute, Northeastern University
Brooke Foucault Welles, Network Science Institute, Northeastern University

W9: 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