Interdisciplinary workshop for researchers working on information and decisions in social networks.

During the last decade, it has become clear that network interactions have a much larger role in 
our lives than had previously been appreciated: 
social networks have a defining impact on not only consumer choice but are also central in social 
and political decisions ranging from the political discourse in the blogosphere to the organization
and coordination of protests in the Arab spring.  Similarly financial networks seem at the heart 
of the 2008 crash. Network effects are now seen as major elements in other domains with human 
decisions including healthcare, public health, smart power grids, urban transportation, and more. 
As a consequence, both businesses and government are increasingly looking to build new types of 
networks to improve management abilities.

This workshop is intended to bring together researchers from different communities working on 
information propagation and decision making in social networks to investigate both rigorous models 
that highlight capabilities and limitations of such networks as well as empirical and simulations 
studies of how people exchange information, influence each other, make decisions and develop 
social interactions.

The workshop is organized by the virtual center Connection Science and Engineering, a 
multidisciplinary and interdepartmental MIT center that focuses on developing an integrated 
framework for the study of the connected world we live in. The center is hosted jointly by 
Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), Media Lab, and Computer Science and 
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Registration is now open. Please visit the workshop website http://wids.lids.mit.edu/ to complete 
your registration. We have limited seating available and registration will be processed on a 
first-come first-serve basis.

Submission Instructions:

All contributions, theoretical, empirical, and experimental, on social networks are welcome. 
There will be no published proceeding. The material submitted to the workshop may also be submitted
elsewhere. Authors are invited to submit an abstract of one to three pages by the deadline of 
September 15, 2012. Submissions should include the title, author(s),affiliation(s) and e-mail 
address(es) on the first page. Pages of the abstract should not be numbered. Electronic submission 
of manuscripts in PDF format is required.

Please send your manuscript directly to widssubmission@gmail.com by September 15, 2012.

Important Dates

June 2012: Registration begins?

September 15, 2012: Submission deadline?

October 10, 2012: Program available?

November 8-9, 2012: Workshop



Organizers

     Vincent Blondel, UCLouvain (Belgium) and LIDS, MIT
     Costis Daskalakis, CSAIL, MIT
     David Gamarnik, Sloan School, MIT
     Asu Ozdaglar, LIDS, MIT
     Alex 'Sandy' Pentland, Media Lab, MIT
     Devavrat Shah, LIDS, MIT
    John Tsitsiklis, LIDS, MIT

Scientific committee

Daron Acemoglu
Itai Ashlagi
Laszlo Barabasi
Kostas Bimpikis
Larry Blume
Damon Centola
Munther Dahleh
Vivek Farias
Ben Golub
Marta Gonzalez
Sanjeev Goyal
Julien Hendrickx
Cesar Hidalgo
Ali Jadbabaie
Patrick Jaillet
Sep Kamvar
Gary King
David Lazer
Jure Leskovec
Andrew W. Lo
Mihai Manea
Andrew McAfee
Christos Papadimitriou
Pablo Parrilo
R. Ravi
Whitman Richards
Alessandro Vespignani
Martin Wainwright
John Williams