1st call for papers: 2nd international workshop on social machines @WWW2014

Call for papers

SOCM 2014: Second international workshop on the theory and practice of 
social machines

@ WWW 2014, Seoul, Korea
April 7, 2014

Supported by the SOCIAM project
http://sociam.org/socm2014/


Continuing from last year's Theory and Practice of Social Machines 
workshop at WWW2013, the second edition of the SOCM workshop will look 
deeply at social machines that have, or may yet soon have, a profound 
impact on the lives of individuals, businesses, governments, and the 
society as a whole in significant ways. Our goal is to study both extant 
and yet unrealized social machines, to identify factors that govern the 
growth or impede these systems to develop, and to identify unmet 
potential needs (both human and technical) for the kinds of 
loosely-coordinated distributed social systems the Web enables. The 
workshop will discuss methods to analyze and explore social machines, as 
essential mechanisms for deriving the guidelines and best practices that 
will inform the design the next generation of these systems.

=== Objectives ===

The objective of the workshop is to bring together experts of various 
kinds of social machines, including crowd-powered systems, social 
networks, and online communities, to discuss the scope of this new 
scientific and engineering apparatus and to present specific tools that 
they have designed and applied to analyze social machines and their impact.

The goal is to discuss the latest theoretical frameworks and empirical 
insights around Social Machines, an emerging interdisciplinary field of 
research investigating Web-enabled systems governed by combinations of 
computational and social processes. As introduced in last year's 
workshop, we use the term "Social Machines" to refer to socio-technical 
systems which leverage the Web as a medium for communication, 
socialization, decentralized coordination, and peer production. This 
theme derives from concepts introduced by Tim Berners-Lee in his 
influential Weaving the Web book, in which he describes the Web as an 
engine to "create abstract social machines - new forms of social 
processes that would be given to the world at large".

Unlike conventional Turing machines, their social counterparts are 
comprised of loose collectives of people connected by computational 
communication substrates at their core. By being accessible to any 
individual with a Web browser, such social machines have demonstrated 
the ability to allow groups of individuals to accomplish major goals 
using methods of distributed coordination and crowdsourcing at 
unprecedented scales. However, studying and designing such systems also 
requires a new and fundamentally different set of instruments, which, 
though inspired by the mind set of Computer Science and Engineering, 
naturally embraces theories, findings, and scientific methodology from a 
variety of other disciplines in order to understand how human and 
machine intelligence could be best brought together to help individuals, 
businesses, governments and the society as a whole in significant ways. 
This includes languages and models to describe their function and 
operation; methods that can be applied to study and predict their 
behavior; as well as qualitative and quantitative studies of the ways in 
which these systems have evolved and grown to support community 
appropriation and the development of the social practice.

=== Topics ===

The workshop proposes a multidisciplinary discussion focused on the 
following three themes:

1. Studies: analytical and empirical studies of social machines that 
have changed the world, including:
- Quantitative and qualitative aspects of online peer production and 
information exchange systems (multimedia sharing sites, auction sites, 
discussion forums, crowdsourced science, gamified customer relationship 
management, Wikipedia etc)
- Incentives and motivation, and discussions of their broad implications.

2. Design: papers describing insights on the design of effective (extant 
and future) social machines, including:
- Human-computer interfaces
- Architectures and design patterns
- Socio-cognitive computational primitives
- Computational and social infrastructure

3. Methodology: papers describing approaches and methods studying social 
machines, including:
- Languages and models
- Taxonomies that define the constructs (dimensions/characteristics) 
that describe and differentiate current social machines when viewed as a 
collective
- Web observatory installations
- Complex ecosystems of systems and platforms bringing together social 
and algorithmic components
- Evaluation and quality assessment techniques.

=== Submissions ===

Workshop participants must submit a short paper, which can be either a 
regular research paper, or a position paper, pertaining to the three 
themes of the workshop, listed above.

Papers should be at most 5 pages in ACM SIG template format (as per the 
WWW2014 research track, see 
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.

Please submit your paper to SOCM2014 on EasyChair at 
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=socm2014

=== Important dates ===

January 7, 2014    Paper submission deadline
February 4, 2014 Acceptance notifications sent
February 12, 2014 Camera ready version deadline
April 7, 2014 Workshop day

=== Organizers ===

Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton, UK)
James Hendler (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA)
Noshir Contractor (Northwestern University, USA)
Elena Simperl (University of Southampton, UK)

-- 
Dr. Elena Simperl
Senior Lecturer
Web and Internet Science Group
Electronics & Computer Science
University of Southampton
email: E.Simperl@soton.ac.uk
twitter: https://twitter.com/esimperl
telefone: +44 2380 59 7692
mobile: +44 7900 666705

Received on Tuesday, 19 November 2013 09:41:11 UTC