Please distribute to anyone who may be interested. Thank you! ============================================================= The 2nd When the City Meets the Citizens Workshop: Big Data and the Study of the Urban Habitat Boston, July 11th 2013 (WCMCW) In conjunction with the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_project.php?id=4394 ============================================================= Social media analysis can play a key role in providing insights into people's activities, opinions and day-to-day lives. When they are geolocated, these user-generated information streams become a unique opportunity to understand the rhythms and tenors of a city and its citizens. By applying computational, social science, and humanities methods to social media data such as photos, tweets and check-ins, researchers are now beginning to conceive of new methodological and theoretical frameworks not only to extract local insights but, more importantly, to better understand cities and their residents. Following the success of last year's first WCMCW held in Dublin, this workshop aims to understand the various ways social media data can be used to produce knowledge about cities that supports citizen engagement. The WCMC workshop will involve discussions on topics such as (but not limited to): * Improving understandings of the city through mining social media * Use of social media to engage citizens (for example, through game mechanics) * Visualizations and interfaces to enable exploration of city data * Mobilizing communities through social media * Pervasive applications for user interaction and data collection * Disaster recovery and coordination using social media * Enabling citizen and NGO initiatives through social media * Methodology for quality evaluation and validation of user generated content * Privacy and ethical concerns in citizen engagement Objectives Our aim is to facilitate a session that encourages computer scientists, industry professionals, academic researchers, architects, urban planners, government officials, hackers, artists, and other interested participants to work together to explore timely questions relating to social media, big data, citizen engagement and the creation of smarter cities. We will encourage interdisciplinary collaboration so that participants can work together to create a common understanding of how social media data might address contemporary urban issues. Participants will have the opportunity to showcase projects; discuss theoretical, methodological, ethical, and political questions in regard to the study of urban life through the prism of social media data; and participate in a brainstorming “data hacking” session where participants will collaboratively tackle a specific social media dataset. SUBMISSIONS All contributions must be submitted as PDF files. The workshop accepts novel research or work-in-progress papers (no longer than 4 pages) or position papers (no longer than 2 pages). All papers must be submitted by the deadlines provided below and formatted in AAAI two-column, camera-ready style (see the author instructions page). All submitted papers will be reviewed and judged on originality, technical correctness, relevance, and quality of presentation by the Program Committee. All accepted submissions must be presented during the workshop. Please submit papers to EasyChair WCMCW2013 (http://www.easychair.org conferences/?conf=wcmcw2013). IMPORTANT DATES Paper submission deadline: March 18, 2013 Paper acceptance notifications: March 26, 2013 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Elizabeth M. Daly, IBM Research, Ireland / Co-Chair Raz Schwartz, Rutgers University, USA / Co-Chair David Millen, IBM Research, USA Ingrid Erickson, Rutgers University, USA Brian Keegan, Northeastern University, USA Germaine Halegoua, University of Kansas, USA -- Germaine R. Halegoua Assistant Professor Dept. of Film and Media Studies University of Kansas 225 Oldfather Studios 1621 W. Ninth St. Lawrence, KS 66044 grhalegoua@ku.edu