2nd Workshop on Computational Social Science and the Wisdom of Crowds, Sierra Nevada

CALL FOR PAPERS

2nd Workshop on Computational Social Science

and the Wisdom of Crowds

at NIPS 2011

December 16 or 17, Sierra Nevada, Spain

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~wallach/workshops/nips2011css/^[1]

-- Submission Deadline: October 7, 2011 --

OVERVIEW

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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.

The primary goals of this workshop are to provide an opportunity for

attendees from diverse fields 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.

The inaugural Workshop on Computational Social Science and the Wisdom

of Crowds brought together experts from fields as diverse as political

science, psychology, economics, and machine learning, connecting

researchers with common goals but disparate methods and audiences,

and we aim to attract a similar breadth of contributions this year.

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

* Incentives in social computation (e.g., game-theoretic approaches)

* Prediction markets / information markets

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

* Quality control for user generated content

* 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

* Games with a purpose

PAPER SUBMISSION:

-----------------

Papers are limited to four content pages, including figures and tables,

and must follow the NIPS 2011 format; however, an additional fifth page

containing only cited references is permitted. Papers should not be

anonymized (i.e., you should uncomment or add \nipsfinalcopy in

your .tex file prior to submitting). 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 work in archival journals or conferences. Accepted papers

will be either presented as a talk or poster. Paper submissions should

be emailed to nipscssworkshop at gmail dot com with a subject line of

"NIPS CSS 2011: XXX" where "XXX" is the title of the paper submission.

Deadline for submissions: October 7, 2011

Notification of acceptance: November 11, 2011

Final versions due: November 30, 2011

INVITED SPEAKERS:

-------------

Confirmed Invited Speakers:

Panagiotis Ipeirotis, New York University

David Jensen, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Daniel McFarland, Stanford

David Rothschild, Yahoo! Research

ORGANIZATION:

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Workshop Organizers:

Winter Mason, Stevens Institute of Technology

Jenn Wortman Vaughan, UCLA

Hanna Wallach, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Program Committee:

Alexander Strehl (Facebook), Brendan O'Connor (Carnegie Mellon

University), Bruce Desmarais (University of Massachusetts, Amherst),

Chris Callison-Burch (Johns Hopkins University), David Jensen,

(University of Massachusetts, Amherst), David Mimno (Princeton), Deepak

Ganesan (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Edith Law (Carnegie

Mellon University), Edoardo Airoldi (Harvard), Foster Provost (New

York University), Gabriele Paolacci (Ca' Foscari University of

Venice), Haoqi Zhang (Harvard), John Horton (oDesk Corporation), Jure

Leskovec (Stanford), Justin Grimmer (Stanford), Kristen Grauman,

(University of Texas, Austin), Lester Mackey (University of California,

Berkeley), Mark Dredze (Johns Hopkins University), Michael Buhrmester,

(University of Texas, Austin), Rahul Sami (University of Michigan),

Sandy Pentland (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Sean Gerrish,

(Princeton), Thore Graepel (Microsoft Research), and Yiling Chen,

(Harvard).

References

1. ^{^} http://www.cs.umass.edu/~wallach/workshops/nips2011css/ (www.cs.umass.edu)