Workshop on Social and Information Networks

We solicit submissions for the Workshop on Social and Information Networks, to be held in conjunction with the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'15) on Monday, June 15, 2015 in Portland, Oregon, USA. The workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss the latest developments in the study of complex networks at the intersection of the computational and social sciences.

Social and economic networks have recently attracted great interest within computer science, operations research, and economics, among other fields. How do these networks mediate important processes, such as the spread of information or the functioning of markets? This research program emerges from and complements a vast literature in sociology. Much of the recent excitement is due to the availability of social data. Massive digital records of human interactions offer a unique system-wide perspective on collective human behavior as well as opportunities for new experimental and empirical methods.

This workshop seeks to feature some of the most exciting recent research across the spectrum of this interdisciplinary area. On the computational end, we invite work on applications of machine learning, algorithms, and complex network theory to social and economic networks. On the social science end, we welcome new theoretical perspectives, empirical studies, and experiments that expand the economic understanding of network phenomena. As an organizing theme, we emphasize the flow of information in networks, but the workshop is not limited to this.

Papers from a variety of empirical, experimental, and theoretical perspectives are invited.

Some example topics of interest include:

• learning in networks (both Bayesian and behavioral models)
• gossip algorithms
• influence maximization
• bargaining in networks
• networked markets
• games on networks
• allocation problems on networks
• network centrality and other network statistics
• generative models of social and economic networks
• strategic network formation
• statistical identification of network formation models
• network inference, reconstruction, and prediction
• navigating social networks
• contagion models
• recommendations in social networks
• random graph models
• community detection
• causal modeling

We solicit research contributions that report new (unpublished) research results or ongoing research. The workshop's proceedings can be considered non-archival, meaning contributors are free to publish their results later in archival journals or conferences. Research contributions should follow the same format of the EC submissions and can be up to 6 pages long (excluding appendices). Panel discussion proposals are also welcome. All contributions should be submitted electronically through the link provided through networks.seas.harvard.edu no later than April 30, 2015 (11:59:59 PM Hawaii Time).

Organizers:

• Matt Elliott
• Ben Golub
• Yaron Singer