Academic Communities

Right now I am working on Social Network Analysis, which is related to Web and Information Systems (W3), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Data Mining (DM) and Databases (DB).

For the Web and Information Systems area, the World-Wide Web Conference (WWW) is the leading conference community, which focuses on the future evolution of the Web, the standards and the impacts of the Web to the society. The topics of WWW include Browsers and UI, Data Mining, Mobility, Multimedia, Search, Security and Privacy, Semantic Web, Social Networks and Web 2.0 and so on. Social Network is recently been discussed in WWW and has just developed into workshops - Workshop on Social Web and Knowledge Management (SWKM 2008) and Workshop on Social Web Search and Mining (SWSM 2008). From the workshops, I can learn what research about social network is being conducted and then I can get the research trends, which are very helpful for my research work.

In the Artificial Intelligence field, there are several important and influential conferences, such as International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), American Association for AI National Conference (AAAI), International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) and Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS). Generally speaking, the first two conferences discuss different topics of AI while the last two focus on specific topics - machine learning and neural information separately. Since social network is a branch of AI, a lot of influential papers of social network can be found in these conference communities.

Also, social network can either use the data mining and databases methods and can be applied in these two areas. In the data mining area, ACM Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD) and IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) are the top tier conferences. And in the databases field, Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), ACM SIGMOD Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD) and IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) are the leading conference communities. Also, International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) is also important in database communities. During the conferences of DM and DB listed above, a lot of interesting topics and discussions of social network can be found.