Proceedings of the 1st ACM Workshop on Social Media World Sensors

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 2015 ACM Workshop on Social Media World Sensors -- Sideways 2015, which is held in conjunction with the 26th ACM conference on Hypertext and Social Media -- HT 2015 in Cyprus, September 1st. This first edition of the workshop aims at bringing together academics and practitioners from different areas to promote the vision of social media as social sensors. Nowadays, social platforms have become the most popular communication system all over the world. In fact, due to the short format of messages and the accessibility of these systems, users tend to shift from traditional communication tools (such as blogs, web sites and mailing lists) to social network for various purposes. Billions of messages are appearing daily in these services such as Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, etc. The authors of these messages share content about their private life, exchanging opinions on a variety of topics and discussing a wide range of information news. Even if these system cannot represent an alternative to the authoritative information media, considering the number of its users and the impressive response time of their contributions, they represent a sort of real-time news sensor that can also predate the best newspapers in informing the web community about the emerging topics and trends. In fact, the most important information media always need a certain amount of time to react to a news event; i.e. professional journalists require time, collaborators and/or technology support to provide a professional report. However a user can easily report, in few characters, what is happening in front of the user's eyes, without any concern about the readers or the writing style. These aspects make social services the most powerful sensor for events detection and automatic news generation. The aim of this workshop was to ask researchers to enter into such view, by studying how social platforms can be used in a real-time scenarios to detect emerging events and enrich them with contextual information. The call for papers attracted submissions from India, Europe, Africa, and the United States.