First International Workshop on Social Connections in the Urban Space

2011 (SocialUrb-2011)

MIT, USA, October 9-11, 2011

http://di.ncl.ac.uk/socialurb2011/

Important Dates

Paper Submission: 1 July 2011

Author Notification: 12 August 2011

Final Manuscript: 22 August 2011

Workshop Date: 9-11 October 2011

Background and Motivation

Significant amounts of data are collected in the urban space we move and live in. Most of this data is gathered by governmental and defence agencies. Satellites are used to capture movement and transport while 'dataveillance' captures people's use of credit card, mobile phone, and loyalty card information. CCTVs are also ubiquitous. More recently, applications to gather data using people's mobile phones as a sensor in the urban space have appeared and contribute to this pool of urban data.

This unprecedented bottom-up approach achieves collaborative collection of large quantities of data.

'Participatory Urbanism' sees a shift in mobile device usage - from communication tool to networked mobile personal measurement instrument. Through this, individual citizens can become more proactive in their involvement with their city, neighborhood, and urban self-reflexivity.

Given this growing pool of data of the urban space, there is a question on how the data can be used fruitfully and sensibly to better understand sociality and to inform future planning of our urban environment.

Objectives

This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss and explore research challenges and opportunities in social computing in urban spaces. We are seeking multi-disciplinary contributions that reveal interesting aspects about urban social life and exploit the sensory data as well as digital traces (e.g. mobile phone data, online social network data, transportation traces) to create novel urban social applications that benefit citizens, urban planners, and policy makers.

The SocialUrb-2011 Workshop fosters discussions covering topics such as (but not limited to):

* Analysis of social networks in urban spaces

* Social computing applications for urban planning and design

* Social sensing methodology

* Computational social study of urban spaces

* Mining of data collected from urban social networks

* Urban social geography

* Multi-source urban social information integration

* Real-time urban social information processing

* Case studies and applications of mixed urban social sensing and mining

* Middleware for mobile urban social computing

* City-related knowledge infrastructure and computational models

* Urban social application demos and visualizations

* Security, privacy, reputation, and trust issues in urban social computing

* Impact of social computing technologies in the urban space e.g. economical, psychological.

Submission

Submission must be in IEEE conference paper style with no more than 6 pages in PDF file (http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html).

Submit your paper(s) at the SocialUrb-2011 submission site --

https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=socialurb2011

All contributions must not have been previously published or be under consideration for publication elsewhere. All submitted papers will be reviewed and judged on originality, technical correctness, relevance, and quality of presentation by the Technical Program Committee.

Should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors must attend the workshop to present the work in order for the paper to be published by IEEE and included in the IEEE Digital Library.

Organizing Committee

Santi Phithakkitnukoon, Newcastle University, MIT Cecilia Mascolo, University of Cambridge Tuck Wah Leong, Newcastle University Teerayut Horanont, University of Tokyo

Technical Program Committee

Carlos Bento, Universidade de Coimbra

Daniele Quercia, University of Cambridge David Kirk, University of Nottingham Deborah Estrin, University of California, Los Angeles Dino Pedreschi, Universita di Pisa Dominik Dahlem, MIT Elizabeth Daly, IBM Research Fosca Giannotti, CNR-Pisa Francisco Pereira, MIT Janne Lindqvist, Carnegie Mellon University Licia Capra, University College London Marco Conti, CNR-Pisa Masaki Ito, Tottori University Mike Batty, University College London Mirco Musolesi, University of St. Andrews Mori Kurokawa , KDDI labs Niwat Thepvilojanapong, Mie University Nuria Oliver, Telefonica Research Patrick Olivier, Newcastle University Peter Wright, Newcastle University Ram Dantu, University of North Texas Renaud Lambiotte, Imperial College London Rob Claxton, British Telecom Sandro Rambaldi, University of Bologna Shin-ya Sato, NTT Network Innovation Labs Stephan Sigg, National Institute of Informatics, Japan Tokuro Yonezawa, Keio University Yaniv Altshuler, MIT Yoshihide Sekimoto, University of Tokyo Zbigniew Smoreda, Orange Labs