CFP: AISB/IACAP World Congress

Social Turn: Social Computing - Social Cognition - Social Intelligence

The field of social computing has two different foci: social and computational. There is the focus on socialness of social software or social web applications. Widespread examples of social software are blogs, wikis, social bookmarking services, instant messaging services, and social networking sites. Social computing often uses various types of crowdsourcing techniques for aggregation of input from numerous users (public at large). Tools such as prediction markets, social tagging, reputation and trust systems as well as recommender systems are based on collaborative filtering and thus a result of crowdsourcing. Another focus of social computing is on computational modeling of social behavior, among others through Multi-agent systems (MAS) and Social Networks (SN). MAS have an anchoring going beyond social sciences even when a sociological terminology is often used. There are several usages of MAS: to design distributed and/or hybrid systems; to develop philosophical theory; to understand concrete social facts, or to answer concrete social issues via modelling and simulation. MAS aim at modelling, among other things, cognitive or reactive agents who interact in dynamic environments where they possibly depend on each other to achieve their goals. The emphasis is nowadays on constructing complex computational systems composed by agents which are regulated by various types of norms, and behave like human social systems. Finally, Social networks (SN) are social structures made of nodes (which are, generally, individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, idea, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, conflict, trade, web links, disease transmission, among many others. Social networks analysis plays a critical role in determining the way specific problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals. Social networks analysis has addressed also the dynamics issue, called dynamic networks analysis. This is an emergent scientific field that brings together traditional social network analysis, link analysis and multi-agent systems.

The symposium addresses, but is not limited to, the following topics:

• Conceptual issues such as Socialness (notions of the social used and/or enforced in social computing and research on social cognition or social intelligence) and Computational Models and mechanisms of social computing (information processing) as well as models and social mechanisms of cognition and intelligence.
• Agency & Action in social computing systems: How can agency be understood and/or modeled in systems consisting of human and non-human agents?
• Social Coordination & Norms: Emergence of norms (e.g. in Wikipedia) and compliance including their computational modeling in socio-technical systems.
• Interaction & Communication in socio-technical systems and their computational models
• Knowledge: the epistemological and ethical consequences of distributed knowledge creation in social computing and its computational models
• Relations between the individual and the social: Forming of individual existence in relation to social computing (e.g. digital identity), including its computational modeling.
• Agreement technologies.
• Electronic Institutions.
• Empirical and/or theoretical studies on a specific social or legal relationship (power, solidarity, legitimity, dependency...).
• Empirical and/or theoretical studies on social relations' regulations.
• Formalization of Normed Systems.
• Logical frameworks for representing, describing and analysing agent's social or legal relationships.
• Relations between the individual and the social: Forming of individual existence in relation to social computing (e.g. digital identity), including its info-computational modeling.
• Responsibility, Accountability & Liability. What is epistemically and ethically responsible behavior with respect to social software and how can it be supported? What are the responsibilities of different human agents (e.g. software users, designers, researchers, etc)?
• Rules and standards.
• Social Networking Sites: philosophical implications of socialness in social networking sites (e.g., privacy, social structures, etc.).
• Info-computational models of social networking sites.
• The role of agents´ attributes in structuring social and legal relationships.
• The role of specific social relationships in structuring groups and organizations.
• Trust in social computing. Differences and similarities between notions of trust e.g. in multi-agent systems, social networking sites, recommender systems, etc. Differences and similarities between trust online and offline. How can trust be supported by a computational system itself?

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline: February 1, 2012.

Notification of acceptance: March 1, 2012.

Camera ready version deadline: March 30, 2012.

Symposium: 2nd – 3rd July, 2012.

PAPER SUBMISSION

Guidelines for paper submission are as follows:

• The paper should be written in English.
• The maximum length of a paper is 6 A4-sized pages in ECAI format (format download: http://www.aisb.org.uk/convention/aisb08/download.html).
• The paper should be in PDF format.
• Please choose one track between SOCIAL TURN and SNAMAS, and submit via the online paper submission system to the corresponding track at: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=socialturnmasaisbiac

POSTERS AND SYSTEM DEMONSTRATIONS

There will be one session for system demonstrations, and one day poster exhibition.

CONTACTS

For further inquiries please contact any of the chairs:

[email protected], [email protected] (SOCIAL COMPUTING - SOCIAL COGNITION - SOCIAL NETWORKS) [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] (MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS)