Third Annual Workshop on Search in Social Media (SSM 2010)

I’m proud to announce that Eugene Agichtein, Marti Hearst, and Ian Soboroff have invited me to help organize the upcoming Workshop on Search in Social Media (SSM 2010). The workshop will take place in conjunction with the ACM  Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2010), a young conference that has quickly become a top-tier forum for work in these areas. The conference and workshop will take place in my home town of New York–Brooklyn, to be precise!

Here’s the key information from the workshop web site:

Overview

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 the 3rd Annual Workshop on Search in Social Media (SSM 2010), 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?

SSM 2010 follows up on the highly successful SSM 2009 and SSM 2008 workshops held at SIGIR 2009 and CIKM 2008 respectively. We are looking forward to an equally exciting workshop at WSDM 2010 in New York!

Format and Topics

We are planning for a full-day workshop consisting of invited speakers, organized in both plenary and panel sessions, and a contributed poster/demo session.

We solicit short (under 2 pages) position papers, posters or demo proposals to be presented as part of a poster session, describing late-breaking and novel research results or demonstrations of prototypes or working systems. All topics at the intersection of information finding and social media are of interest, 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.
• 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. Note that the workshop proceedings will not be archived or considered as formal publication, to encourage the informal atmosphere and to allow the authors to publish expanded versions of the work elsewhere.

The poster/demo proposals should be in standard ACM SIG format, more details to be posted soon.

Submissions are due on December 15th. I hope to see some of you there! Meanwhile, feel free to suggest ideas for invited speakers who have done interesting work at the intersection of social media and search, and I’ll share your suggestions with my co-organizers.