News Story

Against the odds at SocialCom 2012

Harith Alani, Tuesday 4 Sep 2012

The ASE/IEEE International Social Computing conference managed a 23% acceptance rate this year, maintaining a high profile and quality program and presentations.

KMi submitted three papers to this conference, under the auspice of FP7 ROBUST and EPSRC ViolenceDet projects, and achieved a 100% acceptance rate! Matthew Rowe and Harith Alani, in the paper titled "What makes communities tick? Community health analysis using role compositions", showed how user behaviour models and analysis can be used to measure health of business online communities. Claudia Wagner from Graz University, who did an internship in KMi, presented the paper titled "Ignorance isn’t Bliss: An Empirical Analysis of Attention Pattens in Online Communities", co-authored with Matthew Rowe and Harith Alani from KMi, and Markus Strohmaier from Graz University. The paper investigated the idiosyncrasies that individual community forums exhibit in their attention patterns and how the factors that impact activity differ.

The third paper from KMi was titled "Online Sentiment and Topic Dynamics Tracking over the Streaming Data", coauthored by Yulan He, Chenghua Lin, and Amparo Elizabeth Cano. The paper proposed a dynamic joint sentiment-topic model (dJST) that allows the detection and tracking of views of current and recurrent interests and shifts in topic and sentiment. The proposed model dynamically updates itself to capture the most recent language use of sentiments and topics in social media.

The relative high presence of KMi members and work in SocialCom demonstrates the excellence and reputation of our group in the fast growing inter-disciplinary field of Social Computing.