Social Computing and User Generated Content
Social computing systems are now ubiquitous on the web-- Wikipedia is perhaps the most well-known peer production system, and there are many platforms for crowdsourcing tasks to online users, including Games with a Purpose, Amazon's Mechanical Turk, the TopCoder competitions for software development, and many online Q&A forums such as Yahoo! Answers. Meanwhile, the user-created product reviews on Amazon generate value to other users looking to buy or choose amongst products, while Yelp's value comes from user reviews about listed services; and a significant fraction of the content consumed online consists of user-generated, publicly viewable social media such as blogs or YouTube, as well as comments and discussion threads on these blogs and forums.
Workshop Topics
The workshop aims to bring together participants with diverse perspectives to address the important research questions surrounding social computing and user generated content: Why do users participate- what factors affect participation levels, and what factors affect the quality of participants' contributions? How can participation be improved, both in terms of the number of participants and the quality of user contributions? What design levers can be used to design better social computing systems? Finally, what are novel ways in which social computing can be used to generate value? The answers to these questions will inform the future of social computing; both towards improving the design of existing sites, as well as contributing to the design of new social computing applications. Papers from a rich set of experimental, empirical, and theoretical perspectives are invited. The topics of interest for the workshop include, but are not limited to
- Incentives in peer production systems
- Experimental studies on social computing systems
- Empirical studies on social computing systems
- Models for user behavior
- Crowdsourcing and Wisdom of the Crowds
- Games with a purpose
- Online question-and-answer systems
- Game-theoretic approaches to social computing
- Quality and spam control in user generated content
- Rating and ranking user generated content
- Manipulation resistant ranking schemes
- User behavior and incentives on social media
- Trust and privacy in social computing systems
- Social-psychological approaches to incentives for contribution
- Usability and user experience
Submission Instructions
We solicit both new work and work recently published or soon to be published in another venue. For submissions of the latter kind, authors must clearly state the venue of publication. The workshop will not have an archival proceedings. Reports on work in progress, position papers and panel discussion proposals are also welcome. Research contributions will be selected based on relevance, technical merit, and likelihood to catalyze discussion.
Submissions can be in any format and can be up to 18 pages long (excluding appendices). We recommend the ACM 's single-column format (LaTeX; Word). Please submit all papers through link below by Midnight HST (Hawaii time) on April 12, 2012.
At least one author of each accepted research contribution will be expected to attend and present their work at the workshop.
Important Dates
April 12, 2012, Submissions due Midnight HST (Hawaii time)
April 30, 2012: Notification of accepted research contributions
June 7, 2012: Workshop date
Organizing Committee
Yiling Chen, Harvard University
Arpita Ghosh, Yahoo! Research
More Information
For more information or questions, email the organizing committee: sc-organizers@seas.harvard.edu