Dear Colleagues,

Please find a call for abstracts for a workshop on Computational Social Science below. I apologise for cross posting.

Best, Taha

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Apologies for cross-posting.

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

Computational Social Science: Social Contagion, Collective Behaviour, and Networks

to be held in Lucca, Italy, 24-25 September 2014

Website: http://cssworkshop.oii.ox.ac.uk/

Important Dates:

Abstract submission deadline 22 June 2014

Conference date 24-25 September 2013

Event Overview

Technology-mediated social collectives are taking an important role in the design of social structures. Yet our understanding of the complex mechanisms governing networks and collective behaviour is still deplorably shallow. Fundamental concepts of on- and off-line networks such as power, authority, leader-follower dynamics, consensus emergence, information sharing, conflict, and collaboration are still not well defined and investigated. These are all crucial to illuminate the advantages and pitfalls of collective decision-making, which can cancel out individual mistakes, but also spiral out of control.

In recent endeavours, data from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Wikipedia, and weblogs have been shown to strongly correlate to, and even predict, elections, opinions, attitudes, movie revenues, and oscillations in the stock market, to cite few examples. Similar data provided insights into the mechanisms driving the formation of groups of interests, topical communities, and the evolution of social networks. They also have been used to study polarization phenomena in politics, diffusion of information, and the dynamics of collective attention. However, a deeper understanding of these phenomena is still very much on demand. In parallel, and even preceding the surge in interest towards social media, the area of agent-based modeling (ABM) has grown in scope, focus and capability to produce testable hypotheses, going beyond the original goal of explaining macroscopic behaviors from simple interaction rules among stylized agents.

The aim of this satellite is to address the question of ICT-mediated social phenomena emerging over multiple scales, ranging from the interactions of individuals to the emergence of self-organized global movements. We would like to gather researchers from different disciplines and methodological backgrounds to form a forum to discuss ideas, research questions, recent results, and future challenges in this emerging area of research and public interest.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

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Interdependent social contagion process -

Peer production and mass collaboration -

Temporally evolving networks and dynamics of social contagion -

Cognitive aspects of belief formation and revision -

Online communication and information diffusion -

Viral propagation in online social network -

Crowd-sourcing; herding behaviour vs. wisdom of crowds -

E-democracy and online government-citizen interaction -

Online socio-political mobilizations -

Public attention and popularity -

Temporal and geographical patterns of information diffusion -

User-information interplay -

Group formation, evolution and group behavior analysis. -

Modeling, tracking and forecasting dynamic groups in social media. -

Community detection and dynamic community structure analysis. -

Social simulation, cultural, opinion, and normative dynamics. -

Empirical calibration and validation of agent-based social models. -

Models of social capital, collective action, social movements. -

Coevolution of network and behavior.

Questions about the conference scope should be directed to the program co-chairs at css2014@indiana.edu

Submission Instructions

Submissions will be made by sending one A4 page abstract in pdf via Easychair https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=css14.

The deadline for abstract submission is 22 June 2014.

The contributions to the event will be evaluated by the programme committee through a peer review process that will account for the scientific quality as well as for the relevance of the contribution to the aims of the satellite.

The authors of accepted abstracts will be notified via e-mail by end of July 2014.

Invited Speakers (to be completed)

János Kertész (Central European University, Budapest, Hungary)

Esteban Moro (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)

Alain Barrat (Centre de Physique Théorique, Marseille, France)

Organising Committee

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Javier Borge-Holthoefer (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Doha, Qatar) -

Jonathan Bright (OII, University of Oxford, UK) -

Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia (CnetS, Indiana University at Bloomington, USA) -

Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon (Annenberg, University of Pennsylvania, USA) -

Emilio Ferrara (CnetS, Indiana University at Bloomington, USA) -

Alessandro Flammini (CnetS, Indiana University at Bloomington, USA) -

Márton Karsai (ENS de Lyon, INRIA, France) -

Alessandro Vespignani (Northeastern University – USA, ISI Foundation, Italy) -

Taha Yasseri (OII, University of Oxford, UK)