Enterprises are increasingly basing decisions on advanced analytics, and using analytics to interact more effectively with their customers (e.g, to determine suitable promotions to offer them). Social network data is ever more prevalent and important, and mobile devices are key both for information gathering (e.g., location) and communication (e.g., offering a promotion to a customer who is nearby). Business innovations arise frequently, and lead to the need for rapid development of customized analytics and analytics-based applications. These are often hosted on clouds, leading to the quartet known as SMAC: social, mobile, analytics, cloud. The time-compressed lifecycle inherent in this context poses significant software engineering challenges. Customizing and assembling components in novel ways dominates development from scratch, and requires suitable development-time and run-time support, such as analytics, social and mobile platforms or ecosystems. Business users who are not developers should be able to accomplish customization and simple assembly, and end users should have a pleasant, consistent and personalized user experience.

Goal
The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for discussion and exploration of software engineering challenges in the SMAC context. We want to promote interactions and synergy among researchers and developers who deal with the challenges of developing and deploying effective analyses of social and mobile data, towards shared understanding of the implications of SMAC for software engineering. To facilitate interaction and discussion, the workshop will consist of two working sessions. In each we will have brief presentations by authors of a subset of accepted papers, followed by a panel discussion, and then a group discussion to further explore important questions. To fuel this discussion, all presenters will be asked to come prepared to describe two problems they have encountered or anticipate in engineering SMAC software.
Focus

The focus of this workshop will be the software engineering aspects of analytics, and of the confluence of analytics, social and mobile. Topics and trends of interest include, but are not limited to:

Software engineering of analytics algorithms (distributed, real-time, incremental, …)

Supporting platforms for analytics-based solutions (ecosystems, cloud, …)

Reuse and composition of analytics components

Environments for development, testing and validation

Data acquisition and integration from multiple sources, including social and mobile

Building and leveraging models of people from relevant temporal, spatial and other data

Real-time personalization for mobile users

Privacy and security issues in the SMAC context

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: August 26

Author Notification: September 17

Final version: October 3

Submission Information

Prospective participants are invited to submit 2-5 page position papers on any topic relevant to the workshop focus.
Papers must be submitted through Easy Chair by the submission deadline.
Submissions will be judged based on novelty, insightfulness, quality, relevance to the workshop, and potential to spark discussion.
Accepted submissions will be posted on the workshop website.
Contact

Elham Khabiri ekhabiri@us.ibm.com