Special Session: Social Computing Systems and Algorithms 2014

Aim: In 2005, mankind created 150 exabytes of data, while in 2010 it surpassed 1,200 exabytes. The task of organizing this information sets one of the most significant technical challenges of the 21st century; the task of making meaning of this information is a social and cultural one.
Social Computing focuses on methods for harvesting the collective intelligence of groups of people in order to realize greater value from the interaction between users and information. In other words digital systems are designed to support useful functionality by making socially produced information available to users. This information may be provided directly, as when systems show the number of users who have rated a review as helpful or not. Or the information may be provided after being filtered and aggregated, as is done when systems recommend a product based on what else people with similar purchase history have purchased. Alternatively, the information may be provided indirectly, as is the case with Google's page rank algorithms which orders search results based on the number of pages that (recursively) point to them. In all of these cases, information that is produced by a group of people is used to provide or enhance the functioning of a system.

This special session aims at gathering researchers from around the globe, who focus on several different aspects of Social Computing: from “Wisdom-of-the-Crowds Methods” to “Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games’ Analytics”.