Ross Dawson at the San Francisco KM Cluster

MeshForum 2005 speaker, Ross Dawson, is speaking at the SF-area KM Cluster at the end of the month. 

Ross is the kick-off speaker at your Fall 2005 Bay Area/Silicon Valley Cluster on September 27, 2005 in downtown San Francisco. Ross is joined by John Hagel, Greg Oxton and others. This is a unique, low-cost opportunity to meet key international (Ross is from Sydney, AUS) and California knowledge economy thought leaders.

Upodate: removed link to talk - no longer active.

Workshop on Link Discovery, Aug 21 2005 in Chicago

Per a recent post to SOCNET, the following workshop of interest to MeshForum will be held later this summer in Chicago.

The Workshop on Link Discovery: Issues, Approaches and Applications (LinkKDD-2005), to be held August 21, 2005 - Chicago, IL, USA in conjunction with ACM SIGKDD-2005,

has extended its paper submission deadline to June 20th.

For more info, please see http://www.isi.edu/LinkKDD-05/Content/cfp.htm

TOPICS OF INTEREST
-----------------------------------
Particular topics of interest for the workshop include but are not
limited to:

* Theoretical advances to link discovery and group detection
* Practical applications of link discovery to real world databases
* Link-analysis and graph mining
* Social network analysis and community finding
* Graph theory, scale-free networks and small world phenomenon
* Web-mining and text-mining applied to link discovery
* Link discovery for data streams and scalability of developed
approaches
* Record linkage, alias detection and object consolidation
* Visualization of link structures
* Performance evaluation measures
* Innovative applications in areas such as medical informatics,
insurance, laws enforcements and web communities
* Link discovery and other theoretical fields such as natural
language processing, agent theory, complex systems, trust models and
dynamic pricing models
* Survey and analysis of deployed link discovery integrated systems,
commercial products, educational and commercial packages

Please consider submitting a paper to this workshop.

Network science summer school

Interesting. Network Science Summer School, in Trieste

Greetings from lovely Trieste, Italy. I am here for slightly more than a week,
to participate (that is, give a bunch of lectures) at the School and Workshop on
Structure and Function of Complex Networks, at the Abdus Salam International
Centre for Theoretical Physics.

Net Centric Operations conference

Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog: Speaking at Ronald Reagan Building Next Wednesday

Next week Thomas P. M. Barnett will be the keynote speaker at a conference focused on a topic which we heard about at MeshForum 2005. At MeshForum 2005, John Garstka of the Office of Force Transformation shared a bit with us about net-centric operations, next week Dr. Barnett will be speaking to a conference focused on the topic.

CFP: The 'Small Worlds' of Rural Europe: social networks, social capital and enterprise

The European Society for Rural Sociology is holding a conference that seeks to look at how social networks can help rural Europe. This call for papers officially closes next week, but have a look at the whole picture. The conference is the XXI Congress, A common European countryside?, "Change and continuity, diversity and cohesion in the enlarged Europe," 22-27 August, 2005 Keszthely Hungary.

Final CPF - ESRS (European Society for Rural Sociology) Working Group 2:

The 'Small Worlds' of Rural Europe: social networks, social capital and enterprise

Recent studies have reflected on the importance of both social networks and social capital in the small and medium land based enterprises that form the core of the social economy of rural Europe. With increasing policy emphasis placed on the multifunctionality of agriculture and the development of the food chain, the role of networks and the social capabilities represented by social capital have taken on a fresh importance. This panel seeks to explore the interconnections between social networks, social capital and rural development, with an explicit focus on the enterprise and its principals.

To that end we invite papers that explore:

• The modalities of social networks in rural areas, with particular references to networking between enterprises in the food chain.


• Explorations of the utility of the concept social capital in rural communities and the contribution it can make to analysis the process of rural development.
  
• Considerations of the different forms of networks or community building dynamics in both 'new' and 'old' European countryside.


• Empirical studies of the networks of rural enterprises,particularly adaptive responses by enterprises in the face of either new technologies or policy initiatives.


• Papers that seek to extend the existing methodology of networks through the modelling of social networks, ethnographic exploration or other innovations.

Our aim is to instigate a dialogue between the existing scholarship on role the enterprise in rural communities and extend it through new methodologies that reflect the impact of the economic forces of globalisation and the opportunities presented by policy initiatives. We would welcome contributions from postgraduate students as well as more established colleagues.

Please send, by 15 April 2005, your abstract for a paper (not longer than 300 words) to the working group convenors.

WOMMA Summit 2005

The Word of Mount Marketing Association is having their WOMMA Summit 2005 on March 29-30 in Chicago, IL.  They bill it as "The first-ever conference on the art and science of word of mouth marketing."

World Congress of the International Sociological Association

The XVI World Congress of the International Sociological Association will take place in Durban, South Africa, 23-29 July 2006. There will be a session devoted to social network analysis. [snip] If you are interested in giving a presentation, please send a proposal to the session chair before October 1, 2005. For the social network session, that would be Christian Steglich. I'd be happy to assemble a high-quality social networks session.
[via Christian Steglich on the SOCNET mailing list]

Sunbelt 2005

It's a little late to sign up for the 25th International Sunbelt Social Network conference, but there are certainly plenty of synergies with MeshForum. We will keep an eye on their experts too.

The International Sunbelt Social Network Conference is the official conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA). Located in scenic Redondo Beach, CA, Sunbelt XXV will provide an interdisciplinary venue for social scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists, ethnologists, and others to present current work in the area of social networks. Workshops and conference sessions will allow individuals interested in theory, methods, or applications of social network analysis to share ideas and explore common interests.

COSIN: Complex Networks

Through Portals and KM, we discover

There is a Conference on Complex Networks: Evolution and Statistical Properties" - COSIN2005 Salou (Tarragona), Spain, March 14-18, 2005. Certainly, Tarragona is a good place to discuss complexity and a nice time ot be there. COSIN is a consortium, sponsored by the European Union, that has been involved the last three years in complex networks. The funding ends at 2005 and this is the final meeting. It is open to anyone interested in the different aspects of the complex network field.The call for papers ends Feb. 15. Contact the COSIN organizing committee at the COSIN site if you are interested.

Online Social Networks 2005

Online Social Networking 2005

I will be participating in the Online Social Networks 2005 conference. I hope that many people interested in MeshForum will join me at it virtually, and then meet up in person at MeshForum May 1-3 here in Chicago.

On Feb 17th, I, along with many other participants (and non-participants alike) will be at a dinner in NYC. Email me privately or leave your contact info here in a comment to get the evite to the event in Soho on the 17th.

Dyamic programming talk: Jan 18

Northwestern's Industrial Engineering Seminar Series presents Warren B. Powell on Approximate Dynamic Programming for High-Dimensional Resource Allocation Problems

Warren B. Powell
Director, CASTLE Laboratory
Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering
Princeton University

Dynamic programming has long been relegated to small problems due to the well-known "curse of dimensionality." We show that there are actually three curses of dimensionality, but that these can be overcome by using a different form of the optimality equations along with carefully chosen functional approximations. In particular, the use of separable, piecewise linear approximations of the value function is particularly well suited for discrete resource allocation problems, allowing us to solve dynamic programs where the dimensionality of the state variable is in the tens of thousands. We illustrate these methods in the context of several large-scale freight transportation applications, and discuss research issues that have arisen in these applications. One challenge has been the management of resources with complex attributes, which produces dynamic programs where the dimensionality of the state vector can measure in the millions. We show how hierarchical learning strategies can be used to produce effective approximations, helping to solve the "explore vs. exploit" dilemma that is well-known in approximate dynamic programming. As a byproduct, the value functions provide accurate gradient information, avoiding the need to perform statistically unreliable "what if" simulations to determine the effect of changes in fleet size and mix.

When and Where
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Tech M228 4:00pm
Northwestern University
2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208

Exploiting Social Networking in Organizations: Gurteen Knowledge Conference

A Gurteen Knowledge Conference: Exploiting Social Networking in Organizations 29 September 2004 at the Novotel London West, Hammersmith, London, UK.

The 5th Gurteen Knowledge Conference looks at Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Network Analysis and Social Network Tools. It not only provides an introduction to these concepts but takes a look at them from a practical viewpoint and how social networking can be applied and exploited within organizations.

The keynote speaker is Verna Allee. Verna is recognized worldwide for her work in value networks, knowledge management, intangibles, communities of practice, and new business models. She is a practitioner, thought leader, author, and frequent keynote speaker.

ISART 2005

If this isn't about networks, I don't know what is. INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON ADVANCED RADIO TECHNOLOGIES 2005 Call for Papers

The ISART technical program committee is soliciting papers for the 7th annual International Symposium on Advanced Radio Technologies (ISART) to be held in Boulder, Colorado March 1-3, 2005. These papers will discuss new technologies, research and development, innovative ideas, enabling technologies, standards, protocols, business practices and policies, and government regulation for the purpose of forecasting the future development and application of radio frequency technologies into the next decade.

Connecting Communities conference

Interesting link to the social side of our networks interests: UPA 2004: Connecting Communities

Gurteen Knowledge Conference on Social Networking

A one-day conference presented by Gurteen Knowledge and Bizmedia

The 5th Gurteen Knowledge Conference looks at Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Network Analysis and Social Network Tools. It not only provides an introduction to these concepts but takes a look at them from a practical viewpoint and how social networking can be applied and exploited within organizations.

CSCW 2004 in Chicago

How do you support networks of people? How do people work together to get things done? This conference won't answer all these questions, but it will go some way. Computer Supported Cooperative Work: CSCW 2004 in Chicago, 6-10 November 2004.

CSCW is a leading forum for presenting and discussing research and development achievements in the design, introduction and use of technologies that affect groups, organizations, communities, and societies.

Social Tools for Enterprises, 12 July 2004

KMCluster is holding a Social Tools for Enterprises symposium in London on 12 July 2004.