The mission of SIG SM is to provide a platform for researchers and professionals interested in social media to connect with one another, discuss research in the field, and share their own work.

Dr. Vivek Singh is a distinguished researcher and Associate Professor at Rutgers University, known for his expertise in social media analysis and human-centered AI. With over 100 publications in prestigious venues such as Science, JASIST, and ACM CHI, his work has been supported by funding from NSF and Google, accumulating over 3,600 citations with an h-index of 32 and an i-10 index of 65. Dr. Singh's pioneering research focuses on enhancing social media safety, including cyberbullying detection, privacy management, and misinformation detection. He has received multiple awards from ASIS&T and iSchools, and his work has been featured by major outlets like The New York Times, BBC, and The Wall Street Journal.

Becoming Superconnected:  Investigating the Process and Experience of Digital Social Interaction

October 26, 2024 | 8:00 am – 12:00 pm | Calgary, Canada

In this talk, Dr. Mary Chayko examines what it means to be interpersonally “superconnected” in a modern digital society. She will provide an overview of her two decades of qualitative research, comprising over 200 in-depth, open-ended, multi-phase interviews (both electronic and face-to-face) that investigate how digital social connectedness is created, maintained, and experienced. She will discuss how social media, anonymity, and portability impact social interaction, and how digital interaction prompts and illuminates face-to-face interaction. Throughout, Dr. Chayko will provide excerpts from her research and most recent book Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno-Social Life (SAGE Publications, 3rd edition, 2021)

Souvick Ghosh is the current chair of SIG-SM and an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Science at San Jose State University. His research involves extensive use of techniques and approaches in Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Deep Neural Networks, and Human-Computer Interaction.

Chuanming Yu, Yinxue Ma, Lu An and Gang Li from School of Information and Safety Engineering, Zhingnan University of Economics and Law; and School of Information Management, Wuhan University respectively won the 2023 SIG SM award with their paper: "BCMF: A bidirectional cross-modal fusion model for fake news detection

LINGZI HONG is the chair-elect of SIG-SM for 2025 and an Assistant Professor at Department of Information Science at University of North Texas. Her research interests include data science and engineering, urban computing, crisis informatics and data ethics.

[Left: Lingzi-Chair-elect, middle: Souvick-Current chair and right: Catherine: Immediate past chair at the 2023 Annual conference, London]

Miaomiao Chen, Lu An, Gang Li, and Chuanming Yu from Wuhan University and Zhongnan University of Economics and Law respectively were the runners up of the 2023 SIG-SM Research Competition with their paper: Severity assessment and the early warning mechanism of public events based on the comparison of microblogging characteristics

Charles Bugre is the webmaster of SIG-SM since 2022 and a PhD candidate at University of Washington Information School. His research interests focus on functional illiteracy and misinformation, adult digital literacy and innovative services in public libraries.

Han Zheng, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Edmund Wei Jian Lee, Chei Sian Lee, and Yin-Leng Theng from Nanyang Technological University won the honorable mention for the 2023 SIG-SM research competition with their paper: Understanding the effects of message cues on COVID-19 information sharing on Twitter

Adam Joinson is a Professor of Information Systems at the University of Bath. He conducts inter-disciplinary research on the interaction between human behavior and technology, with specific foci on issues of how the design of systems influences behavior ranging from privacy and self-disclosure, cyber-security, social relations and patterns of influence. As the guest speaker at the 2023 SIG SM workshop at London he talked on: Theorizing Social Media: Past, Present, and Future(s)

In the picture is Adam from left with some SIG-SM students who won the SIG-SM funding to attend the workshop. Adam donated his honorarium to increase the number of students seeking funding to attend the workshop

Catherine Dumas is the immediate SIG-SM Chair from University at Albany, State University of New York. Her research is motivated by data generated by platforms potentially used for online collective action or digital activism, in particular, electronic petitioning. Currently, she is studying user behavior and interactions on next-gen social VR platforms and making sense of group interaction in VR in the context of next generation e-Participation initiatives.