#RDSM2015

1st International Workshop on

Rumors and Deception in Social Media: Detection, Tracking, and Visualization

May 19, 2015 in Florence, Italy
Collocated with WWW’2015

Workshop programme now available

Workshop statement and aims

From a business and government point of view there is an increasing need to interpret and act upon information from large-volume media, such as Twitter, Facebook, and web news. However, knowledge gathered from online sources and social media comes with a major caveat – it cannot always be trusted. Rumors tend to spread rapidly through social networks, especially in circumstances where their veracity is hard to establish. For instance, during an earthquake in Chile rumors spread through Twitter that a volcano has become active and there was a tsunami warning in Valparaiso. Another example are astroturf campaigns – a malicious use of Twitter and other social media during election campaigns to spread disinformation about opposing candidates. Researchers have found that people read untrusted sources for various reasons, the main ones being their interestingness, entertainment value, a friend’s online recommendation, or a search engine result.

A 2012 report of Pew Internet Research on the future of big data (Anderson and Rainie, 2012) argues that even though by 2020 big data is likely to have a transformational effect on our knowledge and understanding of the world, there is also danger from inaccurate or false information (called “distribution of harms”).

This workshop will focus on rumors and deception in social media, including but not limited to automatic detection, tracking, and visualization of deceptive content, as it spreads across media, languages, and social networks; and modelling trustworthiness of information sources.

The aim of this multi-disciplinary workshop is to bring together researchers from web science, social network analysis, social computing, information visualisation, natural language processing, and other scientific disciplines.

Important Dates:

Submission Deadline: Jan 31, 2015 (23:59 Hawaii Standard Time)
Notification of Acceptance: Feb 22, 2015
Camera-Ready Versions Due: Mar 8, 2015
Workshop date: May 19, 2015

We welcome contributions from many research fields including but not limited to web mining, social network analysis, semantic web, information visualization, social computing, natural language processing.

The workshop will focus on diverse research topics around deception in social media, including:

Detection of rumors, misinformation, disinformation, and other deceptive content
Propagation of rumors and deceptive content across social networks
Identifying false claims in user-generated content
Argumentation and rebuttal of false claims in social media
Qualitative studies of rumors and deception in social media
Annotation schemas and evaluation of rumor and misinformation detection methods
Making use of human-verification sites (e.g. FactCheck) in automatic methods
Using inference to distinguish between rumors and facts
Using Linked Open Data as a factual knowledge source
Spatio-temporal grounding of rumors and deceptive content
Modelling user/information source trustworthiness
Visualization of rumor propagation and spheres of influence
Applications of rumor and deception detection methods to real-world problems (e.g. healthcare, digital journalism, emergency response, environmental communication)

The workshop also seeks position papers, evaluation datasets and frameworks, and case studies on industrial applications.

Submission Procedure

We solicit full research papers (5-6 pages), and short papers (1-4 pages) both in the ACM conference paper style. Font size should not be smaller than 9pt and papers should not exceed the page limits above, including the abstract, references, and appendices.

Paper submission is through EasyChair:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rdsm2015

Proceedings

Contributions will be included in the Companion volume of the ACM WWW2015 conference, which will be published by ACM and included in the ACM Digital Library.

However, to make that happen at least one author of the accepted paper has to register. At the time of submission of the final camera-ready copy, authors will have to indicate the already registered person for that publication.

Any paper published by the ACM, IEEE, etc. which can be properly cited constitutes research which must be considered in judging the novelty of a WWW submission, whether the published paper was in a conference, journal, or workshop. Therefore, any paper previously published as part of a WWW workshop must be referenced and suitably extended with new content to qualify as a new submission to the Research Track at the WWW conference.

Workshop Organizers

Kalina Bontcheva (University of Sheffield, UK)
Maria Liakata (University of Warwick, UK)
Arno Scharl (MODUL University, Austria)
Rob Procter (University of Warwick, UK)

Programme Committee

Wolfgang Aigner (Vienna University of Technology, Austria)
Omar Alonso (Microsoft, USA)
Martin Atzmueller (University of Kassel, Germany)
Tim Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia)
Axel Bruns (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)
Pete Burnap (Cardiff University, UK)
Trevor Cohn (University of Melbourne, Australia)
Thierry Declerck (University of Saarland and DFKI, Germany)
Leon Derczynski (University of Sheffield, UK)
Nicholas Diakopoulos (University of Maryland, US)
Georgi Georgiev (Ontotext, Bulgaria)
George Gkotsis (Open University, UK)
Aditi Gupta (Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, India)
Bo Han (IBM Research, Australia)
Bernie Hogan (Oxford Internet Institute, UK)
Geert-Jan Houben (TU Delft, The Netherlands)
William Housley (Cardiff University, UK)
Marina Jirotka (Oxford University, UK)
David Laniado (Yahoo! Research, Spain)
Matteo Magnani (Uppsala Universitet, Sweden)
Nicolas Nicolov (Amazon, USA)
Petya Osenova (Ontotext, Bulgaria)
Leysia Palen (University of Colorado Boulder, USA)
Denis Parra (Catholic University of Chile, Chile)
Massimo Poesio (University of Essex, UK)
Allan Ritter (Ohio State University, US)
Damiano Spina (UNED, Spain)
Anna Koliakou (King’s College, UK)
Arun Sundararajan (NYU, USA)
Sara Rosenthal (Columbia, USA)
Peter Tolmie (University of Warwick, UK)
Christoph Trattner (Know Center, Austria)
Andreas Vlachos (University College London, UK)
Arkaitz Zubiaga (University of Warwick, UK)