Proceedings of the Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

US Government and Social Media Panel

Macon Phillips (Panelist) Don Burke (Panelist) Macon Phillips is the Director of New Media for Don Burke is affiliated with the CIA Direc- the Obama . Phillips also served as torate of Science and Technology, Intellipedia Director of New Media for the Presidential Project. Transition Team, developing Change.gov and overseeing the transition's overall online com- munications. Prior to that, he served as the Haym Hirsh (Panelist) Deputy Director of New Media for Obama for America, managing the day to day operations Haym Hirsh is the director of the Division of of the campaign's online program. Before the Information and Intelligent Systems in the campaign, Macon led Blue State Digital’s strate- Computer Science Directorate at the National gy practice, working with clients like the Science Foundation. He is also a professor of Democratic National Committee and Senator computer science at Rutgers University, special- . izing in machine learning and data mining. Data Challenge Workshop

ICWSM has a tradition of offering data to re- ed the data from their ICWSM 2009 Data Chal- searchers and inviting submissions that exploit lenge papers. Dan Knights (JDPA) provided a the dataset. This has served to encourage re- Lucene index of the dataset. These contribu- peatable research on common social media da- tions are linked from the ICWSM data webpage. ta. Starting last year, we refined this tradition By the time you read this, we expect to host with two activities — a dataset collection initia- at least two new datasets: a collection of rich tive, and an annual data challenge workshop. sentiment and mention annotations of With help from Spinn3r.com, ICWSM created posts, and a Wikipedia dataset containing a full a free, liberally-licensed dataset that can be text revision history. We plan to gather and re- downloaded from the ICWSM website. The lease new datasets throughout the year to en- ICWSM 2009 Spinn3r Blog Dataset is a set of 44 courage social media research on shared, open million blog posts made between August 1 and data. October 1, 2008. The data is formatted in XML The data challenge workshop is a half-day and is further arranged into tiers approximating event on the last day of ICWSM intended to to some degree search engine ranking. The to- highlight data-driven social media research. The tal size of the dataset is 142 GB. This dataset workshop format encourages late-breaking re- spans a number of big news events (the 2008 sults, student papers, and free discussion. This Summer Olympics, both US presidential nomi- year’s workshop again features a session of nating conventions, the beginnings of the finan- technical talks and a broader discussion of is- cial crisis) as well as everything else you might sues surrounding data in the social media com- expect to find posted to . munity. We encourage researchers to download, use, The ICWSM data chairs would like to thank and publish about this dataset at ICWSM and Spinn3r.com and especially Kevin Burton for beyond. This year, we also asked for contribu- helping us build the 2009 dataset, and Tim tions of indexes, annotations, and tools for the Finin at the University of Maryland, Baltimore Spinn3r dataset, as well as contributions of oth- County for hosting the data for download. er data. Meeyoung Cha, Juan Antonio Navarro Perez, and Hamed Haddadi (MPI-SWS), and An- – Ian Soboroff and Akshay Java, drew Gordon and Reid Swanson (USC) provid- Data Challenge Cochairs

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