Computational Social Science: Social Data Mining and Emergent News

July 21 - July 28, 2012, Lipari Island, Italy


The news consumption style has changed dramatically with the proliferation of modern always-connected computing devices, such as smart phones, tablets, portable computers, and smart TVs. Compared to the old, somewhat romantic, view of the morning paper sitting on the breakfast table, readers today want to cherry-pick their news many times a day on various devices. Digital footprints are left behind any such access on very detailed digital logs. Such data logs provide a rich repository for socially relevant analysis and optimization algorithms. The Computational Social Science discipline lies at the intersection of social science and computational science, providing a scientific framework for understanding this phenomenon. The 2012 Lipari School on Computational Social Science will address this topic through seminar sessions by world-class researchers in the field. The Social Data Mining theme of this 2012 edition will focus on the current regime of online news and text/data mining techniques to advance our understanding of the new media and emergent news.

List of speakers

  • David Beaver
    Social Language Processing [abstract].
    Department of Linguistics, at the University of Texas at Austin, USA

  • Bonnie Blake
    Director, Graphic Communications Management & Technology M.A. Program at New York University

  • Raghu Ramakrishnan
    The Future of Media: Content Optimization, Social Networks, Interactivity---And Who Will Pay? [abstract]
    Chief Scientist for Search and Cloud Platforms at Yahoo!

Invited Speaker

  • Elizabeth Osder
    Emerging Trends in Digital News: History, Context and Innovation at the Intersection of Content and Technology [abstract].
    The Osder Group, USA

Tutorials

  • Calogero Zarba
    Recommendation algorithms for online news [abstract]
    Neodata Intelligence s.r.l., Italy

  • Alessandro Pluchino
    Netlogo: An agent based simulation programmable environment [abstract]
    University of Catania, Italy

  • Diego Reforgiato
    Opinion mining and sentiment analysis [abstract]
    SentiMetrix Inc., USA and University of Catania, Italy

School director

  • Prof. Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, George Mason University, USA

Scientific Committee

  • Prof. Alfredo Ferro, University of Catania, Italy
  • Prof. Giovanni Giuffrida,University of Catania, Italy
  • Prof. Carlo Pennisi, University of Catania, Italy
  • Prof. Alberto Trobia, University of Palermo, Italy
  • Prof. Rosalba Giugno, University of Catania, Italy
  • Prof. Alfredo Pulvirenti, University of Catania, Italy