VLDB Workshop on Online Social Systems (WOSS 2012)
*** Deadline 11:59PM PDT, July 1st, 2012 ***
*** First keynote speaker confirmed: Sebastiano Vigna, Università degli Studi di Milano. ***

WOSS 2012 is the first international workshop on Online Social Systems to be held in conjunction with VLDB 2012, on August 31st, 2012, in Istanbul, Turkey.

== Call for Papers ==

In the last decade and a half, there has been an explosion of academic
research as well as industrial activity seeking to organize, explore,
analyze, mine, exploit and even monetize data arising from social
phenomena. This space is populated by several companies and startups
which leverage recommender systems, social networks, social media or
combinations thereof, possibly in conjunction with traditional
structured data.

Significant strides have been made by the research community in the
general area of online social systems such as above. While many
research issues arising in online social systems tend to have an
interplay with data management and mining, the majority of the
published literature has appeared mainly outside mainstream top tier
"database" conferences.

This workshop is intended as a forum for researchers interested in the
various aspects of online social systems to discuss and disseminate
results in both foundational and pragmatic aspects of social systems.
We plan to have two exciting keynotes (details to follow). We plan to
keep the workshop format fairly informal, having ample room for
discussions, debate and the eventual identification of new research
challenges. We hope that the workshop will trigger vigorous research
activity within the database community in this exciting area. We
solicit papers in any of the following topics as well as other topics
that may be relevant to online social systems.

Information Diffusion
Competitive Viral Marketing
Social Media Analytics
Information Extraction from Social Systems
Social Search
Privacy and Security Issues in Social Systems
Collaborative Tagging Systems
Data Management & Mining in Social Systems
Query Languages for Social Systems
Data and Query Recommendations
Support for Recommender Systems
Benchmarks for Social and Recommender Systems
Integration of Crowdsourcing in Data Management & Mining
Infrastructure for Social Systems
Mobility and Social Systems

= Key Dates =

Submissions due: 11:59PM PDT, July 1st, 2012.
Reviews due: August 1st, 2012.
Author notification: August 7th, 2012.
Camera-Ready versions due: August 15th, 2012.
Workshop date: August 31, 2012.

= Keynote Speakers =

Speaker 1: Sebastiano Vigna, Università degli Studi di Milano. Title of talk: TBA.
Speaker 2: TBA.

= Submission Guidelines =

Papers should be in 11 point single-spaced, two-column format in ACM
SIG style (Option 1 or Option 2) up to 6 pages, including abstract,
figures and bibliography, and should be submitted online through
EasyChair, no later than 11:59PM, July 1st, 2012, Pacific Daylight
Time.

= Program Committee =

Smiriti Bhagat (Technicolor)
Wei Chen (Microsoft Research Asia)
Graham Cormode (AT&T Labs)
Gautam Das (University of Texas at Arlington)
Amr El Abbadi (PC co-chair, University of California, Santa Barbara)
Hakan Ferhatosmanoglu (Bilkent University)
Amit Goyal (University of British Columbia)
Laks V.S. Lakshmanan (PC co-chair, University of British Columbia)
Ee-Peng Lim (Singapore Management University)
Vahab Mirrokni (Google Research)
Alessandra Sala (Bell Labs)
Lexing Xie (Australian National University)
Cong Yu (Google Research)

= Publicity =

Wei Lu (University of British Columbia): welu AT cs.ubc.ca

= WOSS 2012 workshop URL ==
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~welu/woss2012/