SoBigData - Towards A European Laboratory On Big Data Analytics And Social Mining: Bootstrap Workshop

The big data originating from the digital breadcrumbs of human activities, sensed as a by-product
of the ICT systems that we use everyday, record the multiple dimensions of social life. We need
to set the ground for a science and technology of social mining – the process to transform the big
data into high level social knowledge – which offers us unprecedented opportunities for
understanding and managing the complexity of the global interconnected society we inhabit
today. Three pillars support this vision:

• Social sensing, aimed at better methods for harvesting the big data from the techno-social
  ecosystem.
• Social mining, aimed at discovering patterns and models of human behavior across the
  various social dimensions.
• Trust-based, privacy-aware digital ecosystem, aimed at creating a new deal around the
  questions of privacy and data ownership, empowering everyone with control and
  transparency on own personal data and knowledge.

Social mining has the potential to provide a privacy-respectful social microscope, or socioscope,
needed to observe the hidden mechanisms of socio-economic complexity. Around these scientific
challenges a critical mass of multi-disciplinary scientists is teaming up, based on their pioneering
work on the various facets of social mining, as well as big data and tools and systems and
networks of international and interdisciplinary collaborators – academia, research and industry.
There is a fertile ground for further aggregation of researchers and stakeholders, towards the
creation of a European Laboratory on Big Data Analytics and Social Mining, capable of boosting
research and innovation in the deployment of big data analytics, social mining and privacy/trust
technologies to face global challenges.

We invite you to be part of this one-day workshop, entirely devoted to discuss the opportunity of
big data analytics and social mining from different perspectives, including that of policy makers,
public administration, European commission, industry, official statistics, and research. The
agenda of the workshop includes presentations from leading scientists in big data analytics and
social mining, short presentations of case studies and early experiences, and panel discussions
across the different stakeholders.