Showing posts with label stcsn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stcsn. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

IEEE Computer "Social Computing" Column: Call for Papers

I’m looking for forward-looking and thought-provokening articles for the Social Computing column within the IEEE Computer magazine. As you know, IEEE Computer is the flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society (CS) which is distributed to all members (CS is the biggest society within IEEE).

The topics are related to the Special Technical Community on Social Networking (STCSN) and please submit column articles directly to me! The guidelines see below and no specific template is required (just plain text in an editable Word file is fine).

An overview of previous columns can be found here. If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to contact me.


Guidelines for Computer Column Contributions

We encourage column editors to include contributions solicited from their colleagues to provide the six installments for their bimonthly Computer columns.

The target length for each column is 2.0-2.5 magazine pages, or about 1,500-1,900 words. Each figure or table is counted as 300 words, and obviously we prefer to include appropriate graphic elements when they are available. Max. 2,200 (if no art).

Editors are asked to remind contributors that columns do not include a bibliography or an acknowledgments section. References or URLs can be inserted inline in the text if needed.

Submitted columns should include the article title, author(s) name(s) and affiliation(s) and a brief bio that also provides email contact information:

//First name/last name// is a //academic title, institution, or business title, company//. Contact him at //email address.//

Image guidelines

To ensure the quality needed for print publication, we need an editable vector art file-for example, Illustrator or Visio files-for each line drawing. For each photo, we need a 4-color electronic image at 300 dpi resolution, preferably in a .tif, .png, or .jpeg format. We cannot use derivative images or images embedded in a document.

In our article layouts, the figures are usually at least 4 inches (24picas) wide. If you prefer to send screenshots, they should be approximately 12 inches wide. Our production artist can reduce these low-resolution images to 4 inches in Photoshop and process them to achieve the required resolution. If your original images are smaller than 12 inches, using a large monitor set at its highest resolution will help achieve a better screenshot. No compression is necessary.


Tuesday, March 18, 2014

The Social Multimedia Experience

As of 2014, I'm taking over the IEEE Computer Social Computing column from John Riedl, who, sadly, passed away last year. The Social Computing column aims to explore the latest developments within the field from the point of view of both researchers and practitioners.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
  • social networking services, applications, and tools;
  • social search;
  • social multimedia and social communications;
  • mobile social networks;
  • social network analysis and visualization;
  • standardization trends and federated social Web initiatives;
  • social computing business models; and
  • societal aspects such as privacy and data protection.
This column is part of the IEEE Computer Society’s Special Technical Community on Social Networking (STCSN) which aims to be the online portal for researchers and practitioners in social computing, social networking, and related fields, fostering communication and interaction among members of this rapidly growing global community. Further information about the STCSN and its goals and members are available at www.computer.org/stcsn. Come and join now!

The March 2014 issue is about

The Social Multimedia Experience

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt participates in New FP7 Project on Social Networks

Social media applications have become a modern reality affecting a growing part of the population, as well as companies and public organisations. For example, twitter messages played an important role in the recent developments in Arab countries, while Flickr and YouTube are rich image and video collections based exclusively on user contributions and around 30 billion content items (links, photo albums, status updates) are posted on Facebook every month. It becomes clear that, much of what happens in the real-world is documented in real time by the millions of social network users that upload content, interact with each other, and give feedback (rate, comment) on already published online content. It is equally important that social networks and applications can be used for a plethora of diverse applications, beyond sharing, networking, news and entertainment. For example, they have been used for emergency planning and response, in travel and tourism, in e-government, and in product monitoring.

SocialSensor is a 3-year FP7 European Integrated Project, which aims at exploiting information in social networks and developing applications that enhance user experience. In the project framework, new techniques for analysis, aggregation and real-time search of user-generated content will be developed, in order to extract useful information and make it available for use in different applications. Innovative solutions from the fields of information extraction and retrieval, social network analysis, user modelling, semantic web services, and media adaptation, delivery and presentation, will compose a software platform that crawls and analyses multimedia User Generated Content from the social web, combines it with professional content, and makes it searchable for professional users, but also recommends, delivers and presents it to media consumers depending on their context and their personal profile. To achieve this, crucial issues have to be tackled, such as the sheer data volume, its heterogeneity and low quality.


The platform will be showcased and evaluated in two use cases: (a) news, involving professional news editors, journalists and casual readers, benefiting from the improved capabilities of SocialSensor for discovering new interesting social content and integrating it in the news creation and delivery lifecycle, and (b) infotainment, providing new multimedia search tools and unique media consumption experiences to attendants of large events (e.g. festivals). Providing real-time social indexing capabilities for both of these use cases is expected to have a transformational impact on both sectors.

In the project, whose total budget is €9.64 million, Alpen-Adria-Universität (AAU) Klagenfurt, Multimedia Communications Group participates, with research activities on media streaming and sharing within social networks. The consortium comprises 11 participants in total, coming from different universities and research organizations (CERTH-Informatics and Telematics Institute (co-ordinator), University of Koblenz-Landau, City University London, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), as well as from the IT industry and news domains (IBM Israel, Yahoo! Spain, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, Deutsche Welle, Athens Technology Center, JCP-Consult).

For more information please contact: Dr. Christian Timmerer, AAU/TEWI/ITEC/MMC, christian.timmerer@itec.aau.at or the co-ordinators Dr. Ioannis Kompatsiaris, CERTH-ITI, ikom@iti.gr

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Computing Now 3rd Anniversary: A Social Networking Perspective

Please find below a social networking perspective I've put together for Computing Nows' 3rd year anniversary using Storify. Let me know your thoughts and ideas in the comments....

Friday, February 11, 2011

Impact factor: Conferences vs. Journals

This week, my boss (Hermann Hellwagner) entered my office with the following paper:

Jilin Chen and Joseph A. Konstan. 2009. Conference paper selectivity and impact. Commun. ACM 53, 6 (June 2009), 79-83. DOI=10.1145/1743546.1743569 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1743546.1743569

Reading the abstract ...
Studying the metadata of the ACM Digital Library (http://www.acm.org/dl), we found that papers in low-acceptance-rate conferences have higher impact than those in high-acceptance-rate conferences within ACM, where impact is measured by the number of citations received. We also found that highly selective conferences—those that accept 30% or less of submissions—are cited at a rate comparable to or greater than ACM Transactions and journals.
... I got confirmation that submitting papers to high-quality conferences is still a good thing and - next to that - I was wondering whether someone has done something similar for the IEEE Computer Society (doing a quick/simple search in CSDL, I couldn't find it).

Many (young) researchers are confronted with the requirement (coming from their institution, Ph.D. supervisor, etc.) submitting papers to journals rather than conferences. This is often justified with the higher impact factor of journals (compared to conferences). Another reason - I think - is that submitting papers to journals is much cheaper than conferences due to travel expenses. However, I believe attending a high-quality conference and presenting a paper there, discussing with other researchers on-site/face-to-face and socializing with them (having dinner etc) is much more worth, specifically when someone enters a new domain (btw. successful journal publications will then follow automatically, no worries).

While I certainly agree with the conclusions from the article mentioned above, I think one important aspect is missing. If
papers in highly selective conferences—acceptance rates of 30% or less—should continue to be treated as first-class research contributions with impact comparable to, or better than, journal papers
then what's the reason of having journal publications (or journals at all ...)? Both conference proceedings and journals are accessible through digital libraries offering search facilities better than the office desk with a huge stack of paper. Thus, having it printed somewhere can no longer be the reason. Ah yes, there was this other issue with the travel expenses which is acknowledged but probably it's worth thinking about new ways of remote participation (e.g., I'm attending ACM MMSys'11 end of February which enables that) or other means of interaction, e.g., through social networks. The latter is something that is currently being explored within the IEEE Computer Society, specifically within Computing Now but also the newly established Special Technical Communities (STCs) as mentioned by Sorel Reisman in his IEEE Computer president's message from January 2011.
By the end of 2011, we'll have launched pilot Special Technical Communities in social networking, cloud computing, gaming, education, software engineering, and green computing.
If you're interested in joining the first one - social networking - please contact me via http://www.computer.org/stcsn.

Friday, January 7, 2011

Social Media Computing

Millions of people are using social networks and also the research community is working of scientific issues related to social networks. In this blog post I'd like to collect some articles that has been brought to my attention recently and are related to social media computing.

To begin with, the August'10 issue of IEEE Computer was dedicated to social networks containing one article entitled "Social Multimedia Computing" with the aim to bridge social science and multimedia technology:
  • Abstract: The explosive growth of social multimedia content on the Internet is revolutionizing content distribution and social interaction. It has even led to a new research area, called social multimedia computing.
  • Citation: Yonghong Tian, Jaideep Srivastava, Tiejun Huang, Noshir Contractor, "Social Multimedia Computing," Computer, vol. 43, no. 8, pp. 27-36, June 2010, doi:10.1109/MC.2010.188
Recently, I came along the blog post of Mathias Lux "Social Media, Tagging and Images Semantics" which leads to an article of Neela Sawant, Jia Li and James Z. Wang entitled Automatic image semantic interpretation using social action and tagging data that gives a survey over more than 200 papers in this area:
  • Abstract: The plethora of social actions and annotations (tags, comments, ratings) from online media sharing Websites and collaborative games have induced a paradigm shift in the research on image semantic interpretation. Social inputs with their added context represent a strong substitute for expert annotations. Novel algorithms have been designed to fuse visual features with noisy social labels and behavioral signals. In this survey, we review nearly 200 representative papers to identify the current trends, challenges as well as opportunities presented by social inputs for research on image semantics. Our study builds on an interdisciplinary confluence of insights from image processing, data mining, human computer interaction, and sociology to describe the folksonomic features of users, annotations and images. Applications are categorized into four types: concept semantics, person identification, location semantics and event semantics. The survey concludes with a summary of principle research directions for the present and the future.
Finally, the same blog post contains a nice figure (see below) originating from a blog post of Frederic Cavazza on the "Social Media Landscape" already some time ago.
Social Media Landscape

It provides - among others - an "infinity of tools and services" and an advice which I'd like to quote here: "Jump into the water!"

The same advice I'd like to give to you regarding the "Special Technical Community on Social Networking" that is currently being created within the IEEE Computer Society: Jump into the water and join this very exciting and new activity: