CALL FOR PAPERS

Computational Social Science and the Wisdom of Crowds

Workshop at NIPS 2010

December 10 or 11, Whistler, Canada

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~wallach/workshops/nips2010css/

-- Submission Deadline: October 8, 2010 --

OVERVIEW

Computational social science is an emerging academic research area at the intersection of computer science, statistics, and the social sciences, in which quantitative methods and computational tools are used to identify and answer social science questions. The field is driven by new sources of data from the Internet, sensor networks, government databases, crowdsourcing systems, and more, as well as by recent advances in computational modeling, machine learning, statistics, and social network analysis.

The related area of social computing deals with the mechanisms through which people interact with computational systems, examining how and why people contribute to crowdsourcing sites, and the Internet more generally. Examples of social computing systems include prediction markets, reputation systems, and collaborative filtering systems, all designed with the intent of capturing the wisdom of crowds.

Machine learning plays in important role in both of these research areas, but to make truly groundbreaking advances, collaboration is

necessary: social scientists and economists are uniquely positioned to identify the most pertinent and vital questions and problems, as well as to provide insight into data generation, while computer scientists contribute significant expertise in developing novel, quantitative methods and tools. To date there have been few in-person venues for researchers in these traditionally disparate areas to interact. This workshop will address this need, with an emphasis on the role of machine learning. The primary goals of the workshop are to provide an opportunity for attendees to meet, interact, share ideas, establish new collaborations, and to inform the wider NIPS community about current research in computational social science and social computing.

TOPICS OF INTEREST:

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We welcome contributions on theoretical models, empirical work, and everything in between, including but not limited to:

* Automatic aggregation of opinions or knowledge

* Prediction markets / information markets

* Incentives in social computation (e.g., games with a purpose)

* Studies of events and trends (e.g., in politics)

* Analysis of and experiments on distributed collaboration and

consensus-building, including crowdsourcing (e.g., Mechanical Turk) and peer-production systems (e.g., Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers)

* Group dynamics and decision-making

* Modeling network interaction content (e.g., text analysis of blog posts, tweets, emails, chats, etc.)

* Social networks

PAPER SUBMISSION:

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Papers may be up to four pages long and must be in the NIPS 2010 format. Accepted papers will be made available on the workshop website. However, the workshop's proceedings can be considered non-archival, meaning contributors are free to publish their results subsequently in archival journals or conferences. Accepted papers will be either presented as a talk or poster. Submission instructions will be available on the workshop website closer to the deadline.

Deadline for submissions: Friday October 8, 2010 Notification of acceptance: Monday November 1, 2010

David Lazer (www.davidlazer.com)

Associate Professor of Political Science and Computer Science Northeastern University & Director, Program on Networked Governance Harvard Kennedy School Harvard University The netgov blog: http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/netgov/

- SocNet