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SBP and BRiMS 2016  -- Deadline extended, see below 

The Conferences on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling
and Prediction (SBP) and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (BRiMS) will jointly hold their meetings in 2016.
=========================================================

June 28 - July 1, 2016
UCDC Center, Washington DC, USA
Conference Website: http://sbp-brims.org 

 
IMPORTANT DATES
--------------------------
Paper registration deadline: January 22, 2016 February 4, 2016
Paper/full text due:   January 28, 2016 February 4, 2016
Author notification: March 1, 2016
Final Version: March 14, 2016

Late-breaking results papers, Demo
and Industry Track abstracts due: February 1 - May 1, 2016 (rolling)
Author notification:          2 weeks after submission
Tutorial proposals due:    February 1, 2016
Pre-conference Tutorial Sessions:   June 28, 2016
Conference (Single Track):   June 29-July 1, 2016
  

ABOUT SBP-BRIMS
-------------------------
SBP-BRiMS is a multidisciplinary conference with a selective single
paper track and poster session. The conference also invites a small
number of high quality tutorials and nationally recognized keynote
speakers. The conference has grown out of two related meetings: SBP
and BRiMS, which were co-located in previous years.

Social computing harnesses the power of computational methods to study social behavior, such as during team collaboration. Cultural
behavioral modeling refers to representing behavior and culture in the
abstract, and is a convenient and powerful way to conduct virtual
experiments and scenario analysis. Both social computing and cultural
behavioral modeling are techniques designed to achieve a better
understanding of complex behaviors, patterns, and associated outcomes
of interest. Moreover, these approaches are inherently interdisciplinary; subsystems and system components exist at multiple levels of analysis (i.e., “cells to societies”) and across multiple disciplines, from engineering and the computational sciences to the social and health sciences.

The SBP-BRiMS conference invites modeling and simulation papers from
academics, research scientists, technical communities and defense
researchers across traditional disciplines to share ideas, discuss research results, identify capability gaps, highlight promising technologies, and showcase the state-of-the-art in applications in the areas of cultural behavioral modeling, prediction, and social computing.

Please see the SBP-BRiMS16 website for more details. Keynotes and tutorials  delivered in the previous SBP and BRiMS meetings are available through  the websites http://sbp-conference.org/ and http://cc.ist.psu.edu/BRIMS2015/ .


CALL FOR PAPERS
------------------------
Submissions are solicited on research issues, theories, and applications. 
Topics of interests include the following.
 
Modeling
- Intelligent agents and avatars/adversarial modeling
- Cognitive robotics and human-robot interaction
- Models of reasoning and decision making
- Model validation & comparison
- Socio-cultural M&S: team/group/crowd/behavior
- Physical models of human movement
- Performance assessment & skill monitoring/tracking
- Performance prediction/enhancement/optimization
- Intelligent tutoring systems
- Knowledge acquisition/engineering
- Human behavior issues in model federations

Basic Research on Sociocultural & Behavioral Processes 
- Group interaction and collaboration
- Group formation and evolution
- Group representation and profiling
- Collective action and governance
- Cultural patterns & representation
- Social conventions and social contexts
- Influence process and recognition
- Public opinion representation
- Information diffusion
- Psycho-cultural situation awareness

Methodological Issues 
- Mathematical foundations
- Verification and validation
- Sensitivity analysis
- Matching technique or method to research questions
- Metrics and evaluation
- Methodological innovation
- Model federation and integration
- Evolutionary computing
- Optimization

Information, Systems, & Network Science
- Social medial and social network analysis
- Data mining on social media platforms
- Diffusion and other dynamic processes over networks
- Inference of network topologies and changes over time
- Analysis of link formations and link types
- Detection of communities and other types of structures in networks
- Analysis of high-dimensional networks

Military and Intelligence Applications
- Evaluation, modeling and simulation
- Group formation and evolution in the political context
- Technology and flash crowds
- Networks and political influence
- Group representation and profiling
- Reasoning about terrorist group behaviors and policies towards them

Health Applications 
- Social network analysis to understand health behavior
- Modeling of health policy and decision making
- Modeling of behavioral aspects of infectious disease spread
- Intervention design and modeling for behavioral health

Other Applications 
- Economic applications of behavioral and social prediction
- Viral marketing
- Reasoning about development aid through social modeling
- Reasoning about global educational efforts through cognitive simulation

 
FORMAT AND SUBMISSION
------------------------------------
The conference solicits three categories of papers:
- Regular papers (max. 10 pages)
   All topics and authors (academic, government, industry) welcome
   Published in a Springer volume and online.  Plenary or poster presentation.

- Late-breaking results (max. 6 pages)
   All topics and authors welcome.
   Published online. Typically a poster or plenary presentation. 

- Demos and Industry Track (2-page abstract, or max. 6 pages)
   Published online.  Typically a poster or demo presentation.

The papers must be in English and MUST be
formatted according to the Springer-Verlag LNCS/LNAI
guidelines. Sample LaTeX and MS Word templates are available at
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0.

A selection of authors will be invited to contribute journal versions
of their papers to one of two planned special issues of the Springer journal “Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory” and another high-profile journal.

The submission website will be available at: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sbpbrims2016

For any questions and inquiries concerning submissions, please email the program chairs.


PRE-CONFERENCE TUTORIAL SESSIONS
----------------------------------------------------

Several half-day sessions will be offered on the day before the full conference. Sessions  will be designed to meet the needs of one of two distinct groups. One group will consist  of attendees who have backgrounds in the computational sciences: computer science, 
engineering, and other mathematically oriented disciplines. Other tutorial sessions will  be designed for behavioral and social scientists and others   (e.g. those with medical backgrounds or training in public health) who may have limited  formal education in  the computational sciences. Attendees will gain an understanding of terminology, theories, and general computational techniques, especially with respect to modeling approaches.

# Tutorial proposal submission
Tutorial proposals should be submitted in plain text or PDF, by February 1, 2016, by email to the tutorial chair, Yu-Ru Lin ([log in to unmask]). The email should have "SBP-BRIMS 2016 tutorial submission" in the subject header. The proposal should  include the following elements:
- Title of the tutorial
- Description of the tutorial topic and expected audience 
  (including the expected backgrounds of the attendees)
- Short bio and contact information of the organizers

More details regarding the pre-conference tutorial 
sessions, including instructors, course content, and registration information will be  posted to the conference website (http://sbp-brims.org/) as soon as this information becomes available. 

Note that the plans for the tutorial sessions are in progress and are subject to change.


POSTER & NETWORKING SESSION
---------------------------------------------
We expect to invite the majority of all authors of paper submissions
to present a poster at a catered poster and network session.


DEMO SESSION
---------------------
We invite technical demonstrations from academia, industry and government. 
Please submit a 2-page abstract.  We will provide a desk and power.


CHALLENGE PROBLEM
--------------------------------

The conference expects to announce a data modeling challenge as
in previous years.


FUNDING PANEL & CROSS-FERTILIZATION ROUNDTABLES
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Previous SBP conferences have included a Cross-fertilization
Roundtable session or a Funding Panel. The purpose of the
cross-fertilization roundtables is to help participants become better
acquainted with people outside of their discipline and with whom they
might consider partnering on future SBP-related research collaborations. The Funding Panel provides an opportunity for conference participants to interact with program managers from various federal funding agencies. Participants for the previous funding panels have included representatives from federal agencies, such as the NSF, NIH, DoD, ONR, AFOSR, USDA, etc.  The details for 2016 will be confirmed at a later date.

 
BEST PAPER AWARDS
-----------------------------
SBP-BRiMS16 will feature a Best Paper Award and a
Best Student Paper Award.  All papers are qualified for the Best Paper
Award. Papers with student first authors will be considered for the
Best Student Paper Award.


HOTEL AND LOGISTICS
------------------------------
Information on accommodation and logistics will be provided at the 
conference website as it becomes available at
http://sbp-brims.org/
 

TRAVEL SCHOLARSHIPS
-------------------------------
Previous SBP and BRiMS conferences provided competitive travel support to participants.  It is anticipated that a limited number of travel scholarships will be available on a  competitive basis. Additional information will be provided at the  SBP-BRIMS Conference website as it becomes available at http://sbp-brims.org/
 

CONFERENCE ORGANIZATION
========================

CONFERENCE CHAIRS
-----------------------------
Kathleen M. Carley, Carnegie Mellon University
Nitin Agarwal, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

PROGRAM CHAIRS
-------------------------
Dongwon Lee, National Science Foundation,  [log in to unmask]
Nathaniel Osgood, University of Saskatchewan, [log in to unmask]
David Reitter, The Pennsylvania State University, [log in to unmask]
Kevin Xu, University of Toledo, [log in to unmask]

AREA CHAIRS
------------------
David Broniatowski, George Washington University
Sibel Adali, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Christian Lebiere, Carnegie Mellon University
Wen Dong, State University of New York, Buffalo
(further area chairs to be confirmed.)

TUTORIAL CHAIR
----------------------
Yu-Ru Lin, University of Pittsburgh

PUBLICITY CHAIRS
------------------------
Donald Adjeroh, West Virginia University 
Nitin Agarwal, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

BRIMS SOCIETY CHAIR
------------------------------
Christopher Dancy II, Bucknell University