Extended deadline: 4 March 2013, Workshop on theory and practice of social machines at WWW2013

***APOLOGIES FOR CROSS POSTINGS***

***EXTENDED DEADLINE : 4 March 2013***

Call for Participation : SOCM2013
Workshop on The Theory and Practice of Social Machines at WWW2013

http://sociam.org/www2013

Sixty-four years after the Turing machine was proposed as a model for 
classical computation, we now witness new kinds of “machines” governed 
not purely by computational processes, but by collective social 
processes resulting from the amalgam of individual action and 
coordination, mediated and enabled by the shared communication substrate 
of the Web.

This workshop proposes to derive the characterisation of social systems 
on the Web as “social machines”, computational entities
governed by both computational and social processes.   The purpose of
such a model is to enable the effective identification and interrogation 
of the components, processes, properties and limits of such systems, in 
particular that enable them to solve complex social and computational 
problems in a decentralized fashion, at large scale.
  The objective of this workshop is to bring together experts of various 
kinds of online social systems, including crowd-powered systems, social 
networks, and online communities, to jointly refine the model and apply 
it to the study and design of new kinds of social systems.

The theme of this workshop derives from concepts introduced by Tim 
Berners-Lee in Weaving the Web, where the Web was described as engine to 
“create abstract social machines - new forms of social processes that 
would be given to the world at large”, and serves as the focus of and a 
new joint Research Programme Grant funded by the EPSRC.

Goals ::

The objectives of this workshop are to leverage the expertise brought by 
workshop participants towards understanding the use and application of 
social machines as a model.  Examples of research questions and areas 
that we wish to understand include:

Describing social machines - What are the constructs
(dimensions/characteristics) that describe and differentiate current 
social machines when viewed as a collective?
Socio-cognitive-computational primitives of social machines- Can the 
operation, function and output of social machines be described or 
identified in terms of a finite set of  “social primitives” comprised of 
both computational and social functions?
Evolution and adaptation - what forces govern the birth, evolution and 
demise of social machines?  How do users adapt and appropriate platforms 
and substrates to better support social computation?
Management structures - How do the management structures of different 
social machines affect their function and meet their purposes?  Are 
bottom-up (grass-roots) driven social machines characteristically 
different from top-down (mechanical turk style) Machines and substrates 
- Do “general” social networking sites (such as Facebook, reddit, 
Twitter) evolve into social machines when faced with a crisis or a purpose?

Although we do not wish to restrict discussion to these particular 
topics, we hope that these can serve as a basis that can be extended 
with additional topics of interest as assessed by submissions received.

Format ::

The workshop will span a full day, commencing with a keynote 
introduction and closing with focused discussion session. During the 
workshop, we will have brief presentation of short papers submitted to 
the workshop, and an invited panel comprising speakers who selected by 
conference organizers who have done relevant studies and work on social 
machines..

Participating ::

Workshop participants must submit a paper or be a co-author of a 
submitted paper in order to attend.

We encourage authors to write 1) a position paper stating a view 
pertaining to the identification or characterisation of an extant system 
as a social machine, or requirements for future social machines, or, 2) 
a summary of a previously-performed study of an extant social machine. 
We ask that papers be limited to 5 pages in length using the ACM SIG 
template (as per the WWW2013 research track) 
http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates.

At least one author of each paper is expected to register for the 
workshop and attend to present the paper.

Key Dates and Locations ::

Extended Submission Deadline: 4 March 2013 (extended 25 Feb) 
Notification Date: 13 March 2013 Workshop Date: 13 May 2013
Location: WWW2013 Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Organising Committee ::

Prof. Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton) - Prof. Nigel Shadbolt 
is Head of the Web and Internet Science Group in the School of 
Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.
He is a Director of the Web Science Trust, and the Web Foundation, and 
executive director of the new Open Data Institute in London. He is 
Principal Investigator on the SOCIAM project.

Dr. Jeffrey Bigham (University of Rochester) - Dr. Jeffrey Bigham  is 
Assistant Professor of the Computer Science department at Rochester 
University. Jeff received the NSF faculty Career Award in 2012, and was 
named one of MIT Technology Review’s TR35 (“Top 35 researchers under
35”) in 2009 for his accessibility research.

Prof. Dave De Roure (Oxford University) - Prof. Dave De Roure (Oxford
University) FBCS MIMA CITP is Professor of Research at University of 
Oxford.  He serves as Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre (OeRC) 
and National Strategic Director for e-Social Science.  Prof. De Roure is 
closely involved with the UK’s e-Science programme and is best known for 
the myExperiment, the Semantic Grid initiative, and the UK's Open 
Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII-UK).

For contact and more information, please see http://sociam.org/www2013 .

-- 
Dr. Elena Simperl
Senior Lecturer
Web and Internet Science Group
Electronics & Computer Science
University of Southampton
e: E.Simperl@soton.ac.uk

Received on Tuesday, 26 February 2013 12:52:06 UTC