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
Research papers should report unpublished research results or ongoing research. The workshop will not have an archival proceedings: this means that submissions may be simultaneously under review at a different venue, and the same material may be published later in a journal or archival conference proceedings. Position papers and panel discussion proposals are also welcome. Research contributions will be selected based on relevance, technical merit, and likelihood of catalyzing discussion.
Submissions can be in any format and can be up to 10 pages long (excluding appendices). We recommend the double column ACM proceedings format, see http://www.sigecom.org/ec11/papers.html.
All contributions should be submitted electronically to the organizing committee at sc-organizers@seas.harvard.edu no later than 5pm EDT April 15, 2011.
At least one author of each accepted research contribution will be expected to attend and present their work at the workshop.
Important Dates
April 15, 2011: Submissions due 5pm EDT
May 2, 2011: Notification of accepted research contributions
June 5, 2011: 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