CASoN 2012: November 21-23, Sao Carlos, Brazil -> http://www.mirlabs.net/cason12 
Evolution of Social Networks - ESN 2012

Special session title: ESN 2012, Evolution of Social Networks
Rationale of the need and objective of the session:
In recent years, research in area of social network analysis grows rapidly, mainly thanks to the prevalence of the large-scale social network systems. These social network systems can be characterized by complex network structures and extensive content.  Social network analysis can be applied to static or dynamic types of problems. The current research is mainly focused on analysis of topological properties and dynamic properties corresponding to evolution of networks and communities. Contextual information can help in analyzing these properties.
Social network data comes mainly from many on-line services. The huge quantity of data can be consisting of millions of vertices and edges. Given the scale, complexity and dynamics, the traditional methods of social network analysis cannot be easily used. It becomes crucial for researchers to understand the dynamics of these networks. It is important to predict the next evolution and analyze trends in the network. Other current directions of research are detection of communities and analysis of community evolution in large social networks, content (topic) evolution, information diffusion in social networks, etc.
Specific topics of interest
To address the aforementioned aspects of evolution of social networks, the preferred topics for this special session are (but not limited to):

• Community detection and evolution
• Role detection and evolution in social networks
• Content evolution and Information diffusion in social networks
• Trend prediction in social networks
• Anomaly detection in social network evolution
• Mining dynamics and evolution patterns of social networks
• Mining of user behavior patterns in social networks
• Analysis of co-authorship and citation networks and evolution of research topics
• Evolution in collaborative environments, wikis, e-learning systems, …
• Case studies and applications from the area of social network dynamics and evolution
• Social network data pre-processing
• Evaluation techniques and benchmarks

Session Chairs

• Vaclav Snášel, Department of Computer Science, VSB - Technical University of Ostrava, vaclav.snasel@vsb.cz
• Miloš Kudělka, Department of Computer Science, VSB - Technical University of Ostrava, milos.kudelka@vsb.cz  

Short bio of the organizers
Vaclav Snášel is Professor of Computer Science. He works as researcher and university teacher. He is Dean Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Vaclav Snášel's research and development experience includes over 30 years in the Industry and Academia. He works in a multi-disciplinary environment involving artificial intelligence, social network, conceptual lattice, information retrieval, semantic web, knowledge management, data compression, machine intelligence, neural network, web intelligence, nature and Bio-inspired computing, data mining, and applied to various real world problems. He has given more than 15 plenary lectures and conference tutorials in these areas. He has authored/co-authored several refereed journal/conference papers, books and book chapters. He has published more than 400 papers (191 papers are recorded at Web of Science, 256 papers are recorded at Scopus) and 1317 citations in Google Scholar Citations.
Vaclav Snášel has served as a PC member to many international conferences, and she has been  general chair and organizer of the INCoS 2009 -- IEEE, Barcelona, Spain, General Chair, NWeSP 2009 -- IEEE, Prague, Czech Republic, General Chair, AWIC 2009 -- Springer, Prague, Czech Republic, General Chair, NDT 2009 -- IEEE, Ostrava, Czech Republic, General Chair, CASoN 2009 -- IEEE, Fontainebleau, France, International
Miloš Kudělka works as a researcher and a university teacher at VSB -Technical University of Ostrava. He is an assistant professor at CS Dept. of Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He received Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics in 2009. Milos Kudelka's research and development experience includes over 20 years at the academia and industry. He works in multi-disciplinary environment involving software engineering, data mining, and social network analysis. He is also interested in teaching methods in computer science education. He has authored/co-authored several refereed journal/conference papers and book chapters. He has published more than 60 papers; more than 20 are recorded at Web of Science and Scopus. Milos Kudelka has served as a PC member to many international conferences He is a member of IEEE (USA) and ACM (USA).
Contacts:
Miloš Kudělka, milos.kudelka@vsb.cz
Eliška Ochodková, eliska.ochodkova@vsb.cz

Program committee (tentative)
Vaclav Snasel, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic
Milos Kudelka, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic
Pavel Kromer, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic
Jan Platos, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic
Pavel Moravec, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic
Petr Gajdos, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic
Jan Martinovic, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic
Eliska Ochodkova, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic
Dusan Husek, Institute of Computer Science, Academy of Science, Czech Republic
Petr Musilek, University of Alberta, Canada
Suhail S. Owais, AL-Balaqa University, Jordan
Eyas El-Quwashme, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Jordan
Hideyasu Sasaki, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Juan D. Velasquez, University of Chile, Santiago, Chile
Michal Wozniak, Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland
Milos Besta, Google, New York
Nashwa Mamdouh El-Bendary, Arab Academy for Science, Technology, and Maritime Transport, Egypt
Dr. Muhanned Al Farras, College of Computer Engineering & Sciences, Gulf University, Bahrain
Aboul Ella Hassanien, Cairo University, Egypt