Vol. 2 No. 1 (2008): Second International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
ISSN 2334-0770 (Online)
ISSN 2162-3449 (Print)
ISBN 978-1-57735-355-3
260 pp., references, index, illus.
The Second International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM-08) was held March 30-April 2, 2008 in Seattle, Washington, USA. The conference general cochairs were Eytan Adar (University of Washington, USA) and Matthew Hurst (Microsoft Live Labs, USA). The conference program cochairs were Tim Finin (University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA) Natalie Glance (Google Inc., USA), Nicolas Nicolov (Umbria Inc., USA), and Belle Tseng (NEC, USA). The conference was sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
The rapid creation and consumption of social media content continues to drive the evolution of the internet and the web. Social media content now accounts for the majority of content published daily online, eclipsing professional web content. ICWSM is the premier conference for researchers and industrialists to gather, share research findings and explore this exciting space.
The founders of the conference view social media, the social web and social networks as being the next major transformation of the web – in fact the realization of the original vision for the web in many ways. The impact of these changes affects not only society’s interactions mediated online, but society in general and therefore represents a fundamentally important area of research.
The space produces large quantities of data and relationships which benefit AI research in two major ways: (1) There is huge value in automating the analysis of social content. This requires the development of technologies which are capable of understanding human language, interactions and relationships in a manner which challenges existing capabilities. Automating the understanding of this data, of significant industrial value, requires advancing the state of the art in a number of key areas. (2) In creating technologies to understand the social web, we will gain insight into the personal and social mechanisms involved: reflecting one of the principle goals of the AI research agenda.
The ICWSM conference is now one of a number of prestigious events supported by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
