Via fellow ex-physicist Kristina Lerman (one of the few people who's said something mathematically sensible about swarm systems), the call for papers of what promises to be a very interesting symposium, on a topic whose interest needs, for the present audience, no elaboration:
Social Information Processing
March 26-28, 2008
Stanford University, California, USAThe label 'social media' has been attached to a quickly growing number of Web sites, such as blogs, wikis, Flickr, and Del.icio.us, whose content is primarily user-driven. In the process of using social media sites, users are creating content and adding metadata in the form of: (1) tags: content annotations using free-form keywords; (2) ratings: passive or active evaluation of content; and (3) social networks: where users designate others as friends so as to track their activities. The connections between content, users and metadata create layers of rich interlinked data that will revolutionize information processing. New applications will include personalized information discovery; applications that exploit the 'wisdom of crowds,' for example, emergent semantics and collaborative information evaluation; deeper analysis of community structure to identify trends and experts, and many others.
Social media facilitate new ways of interacting with information - what we call social information processing. Social information processing allows users to collaborate implicitly by leveraging the opinions and knowledge generated by others. In addition to collaborative problem solving, social information processing may lead to wholly new kinds of knowledge, that emerge from the distributed activities of many users.
The symposium will bring together researchers from academia and industry, who are interested in the emergent field of social information processing. We are soliciting papers that present recent results, as well as more speculative presentations that discuss research challenges, define new applications, propose methodologies for evaluating and the roadmap for achieving the vision of social computing.
Important dates
- October 5, 2007: Papers due
- November 2, 2007: Notifications of acceptances mailed out
- March 26-28, 2008: Spring Symposium Series, Stanford University
If this sounds intriguing, check out Kristina's page on the symposium for more details, submission instructions, etc.
The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts; Networks; Complexity; Incestuous Amplification
Posted at September 14, 2007 11:30 | permanent link