ASONAM 2014 message from steering chair

Three years past since the ASONAM conference was held in Asia for the first time. ASONAM is organized in Beijing this year as part of the trend to rotate the location between North America, Europe and Asia. Many developments and great achievements have been witnessed during the past three years. The size of the conference has grown more than double its size in Taiwan three years ago. In addition to the workshops which have been organized with ASONAM since it started in 2009 in Athens, Greece, the conference has expanded to include tutorials, demos, industrial track and a panel. Also two symposiums very related to the scope of ASONAM are now constantly organized in conjunction with ASONAM and rapidly growing. The symposium on the Foundations of Open Source Intelligence and Security Informatics (FOSINT-SI) is serving mostly researchers and practitioners interested in terror and criminal data analysis. On the other hand, the symposium on Network Enabled Health Informatics, Biomedicine and Bioinformatics (HI-BI-BI) covers the network applications in the health domain from the wet-lab to the clinic. Further, ASONAM is returning to Asia as a financially sponsored venue jointly by the two leading computing organizations, namely IEEE Computer Society and ACM. More important is maintaining the high quality of the papers presented in three parallel sessions for three full days. The acceptance rate has been always kept below 20% and this year it is almost 18%. Indeed, the number of quality submissions is rapidly increasing every year demonstrating the visibility of the conference and making it harder to select the papers to accommodate in the program. Also, the quality of workshops co-located with ASONAM has been considerably improved this year. I know that some researchers hesitate to submit to ASONAM due to this lower acceptance rate. I strongly encourage researchers to continue to submit their high quality papers to ASONAM for several reasons. ASONAM is characterized by consistent and sustainable success. It is the flagship and premier venue where distinguished researcher and practitioners get together to discuss latest developments as well as the vision for future developments and research directions in the area of social networks analysis and mining. Presenting a paper at ASONAM is a privilege because we try our best to keep the review and decision processes based merely on the quality of the submissions and only best papers are selected for inclusion in the program. Presenting at ASONAM will allow researchers to meet, discuss their research, and receive feedback from internationally recognized researchers in the field. Every year, authors of all the papers presented at ASONAM are invited to submit expanded versions of their manuscripts to the prestigious SNAM journal or the LNSN series which are characterized by their high visibility and fast processing of the submissions.