Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Social Influence Analysis (SocInf 2016)
July 9th, 2016 - New York, USA




   Preface
   Discovering influential users on the current social networks is a key and really complex
   problem for many companies and organizations. This problem requires developing models,
   techniques and algorithms for an appropriate analysis of the current social networks.

   The workshop focuses the attention on presenting and discussing the state-of-the-art, open
   problems, challenges and latest models, techniques and algorithms in the field of social network
   analysis for discovering influential users. In particular, this workshop focuses on presenting and
   discussing the development and use of AI techniques and algorithms for discovering influential
   users on the current social networks.

   The 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 four long papers were
   accepted for presentation at the workshop. These accepted papers span a variety of issues and
   techniques related to social influence analysis. SocInf 2016 also included a special session in
   which the top 3 teams of the Tianchi Contest “Brick-and-Mortar Store Recommendation
   Contest” presented their solutions to the problem.

   Additionally, the workshop included two invited talks: "Big Network Analysis: Algorithms,
   and Applications" by Prof. Jie Tang, from the Department of Computer Science and
   Technology of Tsinghua University, and "Negative Social Influence in Online Discussions" by
   Justin Cheng, from the Computer Science Department of Standford University.

   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 Alibaba Group for
   sponsoring the travel expenses of the invited speakers.

   July 2016

   Marcelo G. Armentano,
   Ariel Monteserin
   Jie Tang
   Virginia Yannibelli

   SocInf 2016 Workshop Chairs