6th IEEE Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Processing for Computational Social Systems (ParSocial 2022)

Welcome to the Sixth IEEE Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Processing for Computational Social Systems (ParSocial 2022). This year the workshop highlights novel algorithms and models that leverage parallel computing with applications in social network and social media analysis. The first set of papers focus on the key individual identification problem in social network analysis. The paper by Vandromme et al entitled “Efficient Parallel PageRank Algorithm for Network Analysis” proposes a more efficient parallel algorithm for PageRank that has been shown to improve the time complexity by a factor of two. In a similar vein, the paper by Sahu et al entitled “Dynamic Batch Parallel Algorithms for Updating PageRank” proposes two parallel algorithms for recomputing PageRank of nodes in a dynamic social network that can scale across various architectures. A related research problem is identifying opinion leaders that can improve information dissemination within communities. The paper entitled “Effect of Community-based Opinion Leaders on Guideline Dissemination in Large-Scale Physician Networks” by Murugappan et al, focuses on the problem of the dissemination of medical guidelines. The authors propose a culturally infused agent based model to analyze the effectiveness of various opinion leader selection strategies and the tradeoffs between the reach and rate of spread of medical guideline information. The next set of papers focus on social media analysis. Systems for large scale ingestion of social media data sets can support a wide range of research problems in computational social systems. A step in this direction is taken by authors Huber et al, who have proposed a parallel system for large scale processing of Reddit data in their paper entitled “A Streaming System for Large-scale Mining of Reddit Data”. On the other hand, authors Abeysinghe et al in their short research paper entitled “Unsupervised User Stance Detection on Tweets Against Web Articles Using Sentence Transformers”, have proposed a parallel computing based technique to identify the stance of users using the information and articles shared in their tweets. Finally, the short research paper by Bogle et al entitled “Distributed Algorithms for the Graph Biconnectivity and Least Common Ancestor Problems” focuses on the problem of connectivity in social networks and tackles the problem of identification of cut vertices and edges in networks by formulating a parallel biconnectivity algorithm for distributed graph structures.