You Never Walk Alone: Recommending Academic Events Based on Social Network Analysis

International conferences, symposiums, workshops etc. provide researchers a forum to present research work and results. But they also bring them together building social ties in academic communities. Young researchers often encounter the problem finding the right academic events or the right communities, for instance, when they are starting their PhD research. The numerous existing conference management systems and digital libraries have not supported the newbies in this way, yet. We combine Social Network Analysis (SNA) and recommender systems to help young researchers getting involved in academic events and communities easier. Based on a comprehensive academic event model, SNA is applied to analyze the development of academic events as well as communities, and certain recommendation algorithms are put into practice. As a proof of concept, the prototype AERCS has been realized. It analyzes and mashes up a great amount of data from the DBLP and EventSeer. The system evaluation result shows great interest from researchers and the academic event recommendation does help.