In conjunction with International World Wide Web Conference 2011 in Hyderabad, India
Over the last two decades the nature of human-computer interaction has transformed. The conceptualization of the user has changed from being a cog in an organizational machine and a source of errors, to a partner in social interaction and ultimately consumer, and more recently to content creator. The shift in paradigm has been tremendous, particularly on the Web. Within this shift, a strong new focus is the sharing of experiences through social media, with one of the main implications being that traditional user metrics hardly give insights into user behavior or satisfaction. Interest in engagement and how to measure it in this new setting has thus gained significant momentum, in particular given the success of social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Digg, Flickr, Youtube, etc.) and the corresponding implications for advertising and user satisfaction.
Engagement defines the phenomena of being captivated and motivated: engagement can be measured in terms of a single interactive session or of a more long-term relationship with the social platform across multiple interactions. Thus, social media engagement is not just about how a single interaction unfolds, but about how and why people develop a relationship with a platform or service and integrate it into their lives.
In a world full of choice where the fleeting attention of the user becomes a prime resource, it is essential that technology providers, in particular in the context of social media not just design systems but rather engaging experiences. The questions then become: how do we do this, and closely related to that, how do we assess the experience as being the kind we would like to design? To answer these questions we need some way of assessing and measuring user engagement in the social media context. We need a framework in which user engagement can be studied, measured and explained, leading to, for example, recommendations and guidelines for user interface and interaction design, as well as having a direct impact on algorithms and functionalities implemented in social media platforms.
Objectives:
The aim of
this workshop is to encourage discussion and sharing of ideas and research
results on social media engagement. We aim to promote interdisciplinary
research and exchange of ideas in this area, not only between industry and
academia, but also between different fields (e.g., computer science,
mathematics, physics, psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, etc.). In
particular, we would like to discuss approaches to address some of the serious research
challenges we face in devising engagement metrics, in developing methodologies,
and in understanding how different technical approaches can be used to enhance
our understanding of user behavior in social media.
Keynote speaker
Andrei Broder is a Yahoo! Fellow and Vice President for Computational Advertising. He also serves as Chief Scientist for Yahoo's Advertising Product Group. Previously he was an IBM Distinguished Engineer and the CTO of the Institute for Search and Text Analysis in IBM Research. From 1999 until 2002 he was Vice President for Research and Chief Scientist at the AltaVista Company. He was graduated Summa cum Laude from Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology, and obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford University under Don Knuth. His current research interests are centered on computational advertising, web search, context-driven information supply, and randomized algorithms. Broder is co-winner of the Best Paper award at WWW6 (for his work on duplicate elimination of web pages) and at WWW9 (for his work on mapping the web). He has authored more than a hundred papers and was awarded twenty-five patents. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of ACM and of IEEE, and past chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing.
An introduction to Online Targeted Advertising: Principles, Implementation, Controversies
Online user interaction is becoming
increasingly personalized both via explicit means: customizations, options,
add-ons, skins, apps, etc. and via implicit means, that is, deep data mining of
user activities that allows automated personalized content and experiences,
e.g. individualized top news stories, personalized ranking of search results, personal
"radio stations" that capture idiosyncratic tastes from past choices,
individually recommended purchases, and so on. On the other hand, the vast
majority of providers of content and services (e.g. portals, search engines,
social sites) are supported by advertising, which at core, is just a different
type of information. Thus,
not surprisingly, on-line advertising is becoming increasingly personalized as
well, supported by an emerging new scientific sub-discipline, Computational
Advertising.
The central problem of Computational
Advertising is to find the "best match" between a given user in a
given context and a suitable advertisement. The context could be a user
entering a query in a search engine ("sponsored search"), a user
reading a web page ("content match" and "display ads"), a
user communicating via instant-messaging or via e-mail, a user interacting with
a portable device, and many more. The information about the user can vary from
scarily detailed to practically nil. The number of potential advertisements
might be in the billions. Thus, depending on the definition of "best
match" this problem leads to a variety of massive optimization and search
problems, with complicated constraints. The solution to these problems provides
the scientific and technical foundations of the online advertising industry,
which according to E-Marketer, is estimated to achieve $25.8B dollars in
revenue in 2010 in US alone, for the first time exceeding print advertising
revenue at "only" 22.8B dollars.
The focus of this talk is targeted advertising, a form of personalized advertising
whereby advertisers specify the features of their desired audience, either
explicitly, by specifying characteristics such as demographics, location, and
context, or implicitly by providing examples of their ideal audience. A particular form of targeted
advertising is behavioral targeting, where the desired audience is
characterized by its past behavior.
We will discuss how targeted advertising fits the optimization framework
above, present some of the mechanisms by which targeted and behavioral
advertising are implemented, and briefly survey the controversies surrounding
behavioral advertising as a potential infringement on user privacy. We will conclude with some speculations
about the future of personalized advertising and interesting areas of research.
Topics of the workshop:
Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to the following:
· Qualitative and quantitative social engagement models and metrics;
· Methodologies for design and evaluation of engagement;
· Psychological, sociological, and cultural factors in measuring engagement;
· User needs and tasks in social media applications;
· Engagement within and across platforms, e.g. desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones;
· Discovery of engagement patterns based on large-scale social media data analysis and mining;
· Case studies highlighting social media factors that can impact engagement;
· Analysis and mechanisms of incentives for engagement;
· Domain-specific engagement metrics (e.g., gaming, search, advertising, marketing, branding, etc.);
· Data sets and benchmarks suitable for measuring social media engagement;
· Social media and engagement in the developing world.
Format of the workshop:
We aim to have a highly interactive workshop where all attendees contribute; we want them to think “outside the box” rather than just listen to conference-style presentations. We propose a one-day program, with an introductory summary of current challenges, an explanation of the goals of the day, a series of presentations, a poster booster session, one keynote, and break-out sessions. The goal of the workshop is to produce a joint statement on future and timely directions of research in social media engagement. A drafting statement will be produced by the end of the workshop. This joint statement will be submitted to a suitable journal in white paper form as an archival record of the deliberations of the workshop.
Program:
|
9.30-10.00 |
Welcome, introduction, agenda |
|
10.00-10.30 |
Coffee break |
|
10.30-12.30 |
Brief presentations (thematically grouped by challenging questions) ·
R.
Jain, V. Singh and M. Gao, Social
life networks (15 minutes) ·
V.
Pathak, S. Smaldone and L. Iftode, Social
farm: making social networks work for profit
(15 minutes) ·
M.
Patel, S. Chaudhary and M. Bhise, Agro-produce
Marketing Using Social Networks (10 minutes) ·
H.
Purohit, Y. Ruan, A. Joshi, S. Parthasarathy
and A. Sheth,
Understanding
User-Community Engagement by Multi-faceted Features: A Case Study on Twitter
(15 minutes) ·
Y.
Liu, V. Lehdonvirta, T. Alexandrova,
M. Liu and T. Nakajima, Engaging
Social Medias: Case Mobile Crowdsourcing
(15 minutes) ·
L.
Morado, D. Anastasiou, C.
Exton and I. O’ Keeffe, Web
2.0 and Localization (10 minutes) |
|
12.30-13.30 |
Lunch break |
|
13.30-14.30 |
Keynote talk Andrei Broder An introduction to Online Targeted
Advertising: Principles, Implementation, Controversies |
|
14.30-15.00 |
Formation
of thematic discussion groups Groups
are formed around the following topics. Group 1: Metrics Group 2: Development During this session, members of the groups come up with key questions relating to the group’s topic. |
|
15.00-15.30 |
Coffee break |
|
15.30-16.15 |
Break-out sessions Each
of the groups discusses the questions raised in the previous session and
comes with the answers. The
answers should include a prospective research agenda (e.g., what disciplines should
participate? data sets? experiments? techniques?) |
|
16.15-17.00 |
Reassembly - presentations of the break-out session
outcomes Each
group presents the answers for feedback |
|
17.00-18.00 |
Final
words, drafting statement Topics are summarized
by the moderators. |
|
Important dates:
|
|
Submission:
We invite full and short original paper submissions. Papers must be up 8 (full paper) or 4 (short paper) pages and be formatted according to the ACM template. Submissions must be made electronically in PDF through EasyChair website.
Papers would
be presented by means of short talks or interactive posters during the
workshop. At least one of the authors of an accepted paper is required to
attend the workshop.
Organization:
Chairs:
Alejandro
Jaimes
(Yahoo! Research, Spain)
Mounia Lalmas (Yahoo! Research, Spain)
Yana Volkovich (Barcelona Media Innovation
Centre, Spain)
Program
Committee:
Simon Attfield (Middlesex University, UK)
Maribeth Back (FXPal, USA)
Abdur Chowdhury (Twitter, USA)
Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo! Research, USA)
Alan Dix (Lancaster University, UK)
Debora Donato (Yahoo! Research, USA)
Elisa Giaccardi (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)
Daniel Goldstein
(Yahoo! Research, USA)
Gene Golovchinsky (FX Palo Alto Laboratory,
USA)
Gregory Grefenstette (Exalead, France)
Petter Holme (Umea University, Sweden)
Frank Nack (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
Kerry Rodden (YouTube, USA)
Ian Soboroff (NIST, USA)
Elaine Toms
(Dalhousie University, Canada)