Dear all,

Due to a large number of requests for late submissions, the EvoStar submission websites will stay open until *Friday, November 15*! Authors who have already submitted, can update their work until this time.

Best regards,

Giovanni

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*Overview*

If you have an interest in *social networks and bio-inspired soft computing*, join us at a special session http://www.evostar.org/2020/evoapps/biosocnet/ dedicated to social networks at EvoStar 2020 http://www.evostar.org/2020/, the main European event on bio‑inspired computation.

Social networks are simple models used to describe complex phenomena that emerge in various fields such as social sciences, digital communication platforms, economics, business, international relations, environmental sciences, and medicine. For example, social networks are used to model social interactions on web platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, the spreading of contagious illnesses, news and information, the mutual influence between voters during an electoral campaign, the adoption of new goods on the market, the correlation between purchases on e-commerce platforms, or the interaction between agents, bots and humans.

In this special session we seek contributions where original soft computing techniques, for instance new bio-inspired or physics-inspired metaheuristics, are applied to solve specific social network problems or to define new social network models. Real-world experimental studies, as well as presentations of new datasets, or algorithmic studies on novel techniques tested on publicly available datasets and scalability studies are especially welcome. We also encourage contributions from the Operational Research and Complex Networks/Statistical Physics perspectives based on bio- inspired or physics-inspired principles.

*Topics and applications of interest* include, but are not limited to:

- Influence maximization - Vaccination optimization - Virus diffusion control - Sentinel optimal placement for event detection - Community detection - Network clustering - Models of influence spread - Models of network dynamics

*Chairs*:

Giovanni Iacca, University of Trento, Italy Doina Bucur, University of Twente, The Netherlands

*Important Dates*:

Submission deadline: 15 November 2019

*Publication*:

Accepted papers will appear in the proceedings of EvoApplications, published in a volume of the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Submission details can be found at: http://www.evostar.org/2020/?page_id=80 .