First Workshop on Social News on the Web (SNOW 2013)
Co-located with WWW '13, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
May 13th 2013
http://snow2013.isti.cnr.it


Call for Papers:

Online news has generated an epochal change in the way we consume news and it has disrupted the journalism industry. In many ways the journalism industry is still trying to recover and reinvent itself in this new Web-centered context.

In addition, social-media platforms have taken the process one step further. Most people come across news serendipitously while performing other online activities, mainly on social networks. Social-media platforms have expanded the ways in which we share and comment on news to such an extent that nowadays people rely solely on these tools to keep themselves up-to-date. As an example, feed syndication and RSS have been mostly supplanted by real-time micro-blogs, such as Twitter and Tumblr.

Social-media platforms have blurred the distinction between professionally curated news and user generated content. News mix in the feeds of friends and becomes partly user-generated content via comments and shares. Moreover, the Web as a collaboration tool has lowered the barrier to publishing. It enables users to collectively share, edit and publish news via blogs and wikis.

This new ecosystem evolving around news composition and news dissemination in social media offers many fascinating opportunities but it also poses new research challenges. Some of the interesting questions to ask are the following: How to search and filter high-quality content in the available news collections, potentially in a personalized manner? How to leverage the existing web-usage data and social-media content in order to build better user profiles and deliver relevant and personalized news recommendations? How to summarize, explore, and visualize news content while possibly fusing information spreading in social networks? How to build platforms that allow amateur journalists and everyday users participate in the process of news creating and reporting?

The relevant topics of interest for SNOW include but are not limited to:

summarization, exploration, and visualization of news content
information retrieval in news collections
personalized news recommendation
tracking of news evolution
modeling of news readers
modeling of news propagation on social networks
studying the interplay between news and web-usage data (web search, clicks, etc.)
studying the interplay between news and social-media data
mining news comments
citizen journalism and wiki-news
platforms and services for computational journalism
news and mobile computing


Paper Submission:

We invite position and research papers on the workshop themes. The selection of papers is primarily based on their potential to generate discussion and influence future research directions.

Finally, in the spirit of the workshop, the acceptance of papers will be conditioned to the submission of a blog entry (that will be eventually posted on the workshop website) describing the research carried out by using a non-technical style. The purpose is to reach out to people outside the computer-science community and to make them aware of the latest results on (modern, i.e., computer-based) journalism.

Position and research papers should not exceed 4 and 8 pages, respectively, double column, including figures, tables and references in the standard ACM conference format (http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates). Papers have to present original research contributions not concurrently submitted elsewhere, and must be submitted electronically in printable PDF format (other formats will be rejected). We will give preference to position papers, although we plan to accept research papers that might be controversial or have a high potential for generating discussion.

Paper submission is single blind and will be handled via EasyChair (https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=snow2013). We will tentatively invite the best submissions to extend their papers in order to be published on a special issue of a journal.

For any question about the call for papers please contact snow2013@isti.cnr.it


Important Dates:

01 Mar 2013: Submission deadline
13 Mar 2013: Acceptance notification
03 Apr 2013: Camera ready due
13 May 2013: Workshop day


Program Chairs:

Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Yahoo! Research, Spain
Aristides Gionis, Aalto University, Finland
Fabrizio Silvestri, ISTI-CNR, Italy