HT '18

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 2018 ACM International Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT 2018) in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 9--12.

HT is a top-tier ACM conference in the areas of Hypertext and Social Media. Since 1987, it has successfully brought together leading researchers and developers from the community. It is concerned with all aspects of modern hypertext research, including social media, adaptation, personalization, recommendations, user modeling, linked data and semantic web, dynamic and computed hypertext, and its application in digital humanities, as well as the interplay between those aspects such as linking stories with data or linking people with resources.

HT 2018 continues to create an outstanding technical program consisting of research and demo paper presentations. The single-track conference brings together researchers working in topics including Algorithms and Methods for Social Media Analysis, Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science, Adaptive Hypertext and Recommendations, Semantic Web and Connected Data, Digital Storytelling and News, and Collaboration and Crowdsourcing.

In total, we have received 69 regular paper (10 pages) submissions reviewed by a group of 66 regular and 33 senior program committee members, who led the discussions. In the end, 19 regular papers (acceptance rate of 27%) were accepted with another 10 full papers accepted as short papers. Additionally, 3 of 16 short paper submissions were accepted. This year, for the first time, we also organized a Blue Sky Ideas track with the support of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC). This track received 5 submissions of which 3 were accepted and received partial travel support from CCC.

To help provide a broad perspective on current trends at the intersection of data science and society, the conference will host the following four, diverse keynote speakers: Leslie Sage, the Director of Data Science at DevResults; Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, the author of the NYT bestseller Everybody Lies; Elizabeth Kittrie, a Strategic Advisor for Data and Open Science at the National Library of Medicine (NLM); and Ben Zhao, the Neubauer Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago.

In addition to the scientific presentations and the keynotes, the pre-conference day on July 9 will also feature three focused workshops and a tutorial.