What an unforgettable week in Munich! The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM-19) was held this year at the the Bavarian capital. This edition (the fourth in a row) I attended the conference to present, together with Vicenç Gómez and Andreas Kaltenbrunner, a tutorial on generative models of discussion threads. The tutorial extended the first version we prepared for the international conference series on Advances in SOcial Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2018). In particular, I added the generative model which includes reciprocity as new behavioral feature that better capture the deep structures of discussion threads (i.e., the model I presented in ICWSM-17). This was only a great opportunity to disseminate our work in this field, supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the María de Maeztu Units of Excellence Programme (MDM-2015-0502), but also to finally find a motivation to get started with R.
In addition to this, I presented a poster with some results from our working paper about comparing online petition signing in two sister platforms. This was done in a new track for papers accepted for revise and resubmit. The objetive is to receive feedback from the community and, if the revision is accepted in the next round, it would be published in the proceedings of the ICWSM 2020 conference (and presented there). I believe this idea will greatly improve the overall quality of ICWSM publications. Finally, besides sharing time with old and new colleagues and discovering very interesting research on online communities and discussions, I had the immense joy of being one of the recipients of the best reviewer award.
Pablo Aragón 