Special issue on Human Computation of "it - Information Technology", a leading German Computer Science journal published in English

Guest editors: Francois Bry (*), Clemens Schefels (*), and Christoph Wieser (**)

Contact: hc-it at pms.ifi.lmu.de

(*) Informatics, Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, Germany
(**) IT4IPM GmbH, Munich, Germany

The Web has made possible outsourcing to wide, often worldwide, workers’ pools, what has been called “crowdsourcing” [1]. Online markets have established crowdsourcing as an effective approach to reduce costs by tapping into an expertise outside a business’ core competency. Human Computation goes one step further by relying on "systems that interconnect humans and machines that process information as a system, and [that] serve a purpose" [2] or "systems taking a group of individuals and turning them into a thinking system, a kind of “superorganism”" [3]. Human Computation systems can be described as algorithms with “humans in the loop” as conscious or implicit contributors of data or computations.

Human Computation exploits information and communication technologies, data generated by humans, Data Science methods, and let humans contribute as they like, when they like, and as much as they can, the “laissez-faire collaboration” without predefined roles and processes made by software, the Human Computation systems.

Human Computation is applied in among others educational technologies (for example with peer assessment), sciences (with Citizen Science), and online commerce (for example with collaborative filtering).

Human Computation has been very successful at solving problem for which so far no purely algorithmic solutions are known and at collecting data from humans for all sorts of purposes. Human Computation is related to human factors in computing, data science methods that are used by Human Computation systems for aggregating the data collected from human contributors, to social computing, social media, and social science-related theories and methods such as game theory, social choice theory, and voting algorithms.

The special issue call for submissions of articles on all aspects of Human Computation including but not limited to:
- Principles and methods of Human Computation
- Data Quality in Human Computation
- Human Computation Systems
- Evaluation of Human Computation Systems
- Citizen Science
- Human Computation in educational technologies
- Societal and ethical aspects of Human Computation

Deadlines:

- 15 July 2017: In case you intend to submit an article, please let us know by 15 July 2017 its (provisional) title, authors, and length.
- 31 August 2017: Articles submissions
- 15 October 2017: Notification due
- 15 November 2017: Final versions due
- December 2017: Expected publication date

Short instructions to authors:

- The articles should be in English
- The articles should consist of at most eight printed pages (including figures and tables), a printed page (without figures and tables) consisting of 5,000 characters.
- Subtitles: Up to a depth of three (like 1.2.1).
- The articles should be formatted in LaTeX or Word.
- The citation should be like [1] or [1; 4].
- An article should contain:
-- A title
-- An abstract
-- Keywords
-- A literature list ordered alphabetically by authors' names including only works cited in the article's body
-- Short CV (of up to 400 characters), email and postal addresses, and photographs of all authors

Please, go to http://www.editorialmanager.com/itit/ for more detailed instructions, for LaTeX and Word style files, and for submitting an article.

References:

[1] Jeff Howe: The Rise of Crowdsourcing, Wired, June 2006
[2] Pietro Michelucci: Introduction, Handbook of Human Computation, Pietro Michelucci editor, Springer Verlag, 2013
[3] Mary Catherine Bateson: Foreword, Handbook of Human Computation, Pietro Michelucci editor, Springer Verlag, 2013