CFP: Workshop on Search in Social Media (SSM 2009) at SIGIR in Boston

Workshop on Search in Social Media (SSM 2009)

23 July 2009 in Boston, MA
Co-located with SIGIR 2009
http://ir.mathcs.emory.edu/SSM2009/

Social applications are the fastest growing segment of the web. They
establish new forums for content creation, allow people to connect to each
other and share information, and permit novel applications at the
intersection of people and

information. However, to date, social media has been primarily popular for
connecting people, not for finding information. While there has been
progress on searching particular kinds of social media, such as blogs,
search in others (e.g., Facebook, Myspace, of flickr) are not as well
understood.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together information retrieval and
social media researchers to consider the following questions: How should we
search in social media? What are the needs of users, and models of those
needs, specific to social media search? What models make the most sense? How
does search interact with existing uses of social media? How can social
media search complement traditional web search? What new search paradigms
for information finding can be facilitated by social media?

The workshop will include invited talks by Abdur Chowdhury (Chief Scientist,
Twitter) and Joseph Konstan (University of Minnesota), as well as
contributed panel presentations, and a demo/poster session.

We solicit submissions on topics at the intersection of information finding
and social media, including, but not limited to:
* Searching blogs, tweets, and other textual social media.
* Searching within social networks, including expert finding.
* Searching Wikipedia discussions and revision histories.
* Searching online discussions, mailing lists, forums, and community
question answering sites.
* The role of human-powered and community question answering.
* Novel models of information finding and new search applications for
social media.
* The role of timeliness, authority, and accuracy in social media
search.
* Interaction between traditional web search and social media search.
* User needs assessments and task analysis for social media search.
* Usability studies of people using social media search tools.
* Interactions between searching and browsing in social media.
* Searching and exploiting folksonomies, tags, and tagged data.
* Spam and adversarial interactions in social media

Ideal papers may include late-breaking and novel research results, position
and vision papers discussing the role of search in social media, and
demonstrations of prototypes or working systems. The workshop notes will
not be formally published but will be distributed at the workshop, and will
be archived at the workshop website and/or Arxiv.

All submissions (research papers, position papers, and demo proposals) are
limited to a maximum of 4 pages. Submissions must be in PDF format and
follow the ACM Conference style guidelines
(http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates). The URL for
submissions is http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ssm2009

Important Dates
* June 16: submissions due
* June 29: notification of acceptance
* July 9: final papers due
* July 23: Workshop (full day)

Organizers
* Eugene Agichtein, Emory University
* Marti Hearst, University of California, Berkeley
* Ian Soboroff, NIST

Program Committee
Eytan Adar, University of Washington
Ed Chi, Xerox PARC
Abdur Chowdhury, Twitter
Natalie Glance, Google
Bernardo Huberman, HP Labs
Matthew Hurst, Microsoft Live Labs
Pranam Kolari, Yahoo! Labs
Craig Macdonald, University of Glasgow
Gilad Mishne, Yahoo! Labs
Doug Oard, University of Maryland
Iadh Ounis, University of Glasgow
Nitya Narasimhan, Motorola Labs
Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam
Markus Strohmaier, TU Graz
Andrew Tomkins, Yahoo!