Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Social Influence Analysis (SocInf 2015)
July 27th, 2015 - Buenos Aires, Argentina




   Preface
   In the last 10 years, the dissemination and use of social networks have grown significantly
   worldwide. The current social networks have millions of users and are able to record hundreds
   of data from each of its users. Besides, the current social networks expose different aspects of
   the social behavior of its users. In this respect, many users of the social networks are known as
   influencers. The influencers are users that usually publish their opinions about different topics,
   products and services on the social networks, and then affect intentionally or unintentionally
   the opinions, emotions, or behaviors of other users on the social networks.

   Because of the high impact of influencers on the opinions and behaviors of other users, many
   applications exploit the social influence. These applications include viral marketing,
   recommender systems, analysis of information diffusion in Facebook and Twitter, expert
   finding, link prediction and ranking of feeds, among others. However, the discovering of
   influencers on social networks is a really complex problem that requires developing models,
   techniques and algorithms for an appropriate analysis of the current social networks.

   This workshop aims to bring together experts from academia and industry to discuss the state-
   of-the-art, open problems, challenges and innovative approaches, particularly AI approaches, in
   the field of social network analysis for discovering influential users.

   The workshop attracted a number of high-quality contributions of which seven long papers
   were accepted for presentation at the workshop. These accepted papers span a variety of issues
   and techniques related to social influence analysis. Specifically, the papers deal with such
   topics as social influence maximization, social influence analysis, metrics to measuring
   influencers, identification of influencers roles and collective learning through social networks.

   The workshop also includes two invited talks: "Computational Social Influence" by Prof. Wei
   Chen, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, and "Security and Privacy in Social
   Analytics" by Dr. Zhen Wen, Staff Architect at Alibaba Group

   We would like to thank all the authors for their submissions, and our Program Committee and
   additional reviewers for their precious work. We would also like to thank the Artificial
   Intelligence Journal and Alibaba Group for sponsoring the travel expenses of the invited
   speakers.

   July 2015

   Marcelo G. Armentano,
   Ariel Monteserin
   Jie Tang
   Virginia Yannibelli

   SocInf 2015 Workshop Chairs