The rapid progress of the Internet as new platform for social and collaborative interactions and the widespread usage of social online applications in mobile contexts have led the research areas of social and mobile computing to receive a widespread interest from academic and research institutions as well as from private and public companies.

Social Computing consider relationships between the evolution of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and the pervasiveness of new devices and embedded sensors, which enable a wide access of data and information by people, and an effective use of new services. Social computing deals with the design and application of information and communication technologies in social contexts. In this scenario the emerging technologies are stimulated and stimulate social evolution, considering that they will be used by very heterogeneous people according to their social, cultural and technological features. Social computing addresses many challenges, such as increasing interactive collaboration, understanding social dynamics of people, socially constructing and sharing knowledge, helping people to find relevant information more quickly. That is why in recent years this topic has attracted significant interest from researchers in computing and social sciences, as well as web entrepreneurs, software and online game vendors.

Social networking is one of the most important topic of social computing. Social networking technologies bring friends, co-workers and other social communities together. These technologies are convergent, emerging from a variety of applications, such as search engines and employee evaluation routines, while running on equally diverse platforms, from server clusters to wireless phone networks. Social networking and its connection with the use of mobile devices represents one of the most relevant phenomena of the recent years. Challenging problems of social networking are robustness, vulnerability, privacy, security access, content management in large scale collections, context awareness, multimedia search and retrieval, social graph modelling, etc.

Mobile computing plays an important role in many social and collaborative activities, predominantly in those activities where having the right data at the right time is a mission critical issue. Mobile services and technologies serve groups of people “on the move”, sharing activities and/or interests; in particular, mobile technologies enable geographically distributed users to access information and services anytime and everywhere. Challenging activities that have been conducted in mobile computing include wireless mobile networks, ad-hoc networks, smart user devices, mobile computing platforms, and location-based and context-aware mobile services. By their real nature, mobile technologies can be considered multidisciplinary technologies involving social aspects; indeed, they often involve personal, group and ubiquitous issues, supporting inter-personal connections and involving human technology interaction in different, and dispersed, contexts. Moreover, mobile technologies are the base for collaborative distributed virtual environments, enabling geographically distant users to exchange information, communicate and collaborate.


OBJECTIVES

The aim of the proposed workshop is to gather researchers, from academia and industry, and practitioners to discuss about artificial social systems, and in particular adaptive open socio-technical systems, and mobile computing, to identify challenging problems that appear in these research fields and to show results and experiences realized by researchers. The workshop will be organized in a way to stimulate interaction among the participants. We invite research or position papers from researchers and practitioners of all backgrounds, in particular social computing, mobile computing, networking technologies, human-computer interaction, and collaborative environments.
The best papers of the workshop, opportunely extended, will be selected for a special issue on an international journal.


TOPICS OF INTEREST

Topics of interest to this workshop include, but are not limited to:

• Social computing theories and models,
• Social networking
• Collaborative applications and social software,
• Social behaviour modelling,
• Social network analysis
• Social media technologies
• Novel social interaction paradigms
• Architecture and services for user-generated contents,
• Agent-based modelling,
• Accessibility and Human Machine Interaction,
• Information and services accessibility,
• Mobile social networking
• Mobile computing
• Mobile security and privacy
• Mobile accessibility
• User interfaces and interaction for mobile devices
• Multimodal mobile applications
• Mobile social services
• Future mobile applications
• Collaborative technologies
• Collaborative social networks
• Mobile collaborative applications


IMPORTANT DATES

Abstract Submission Deadline: May 18, 2012
Paper Submission Deadline: May 25, 2012
Acceptance Notification: July 2, 2012
Camera Ready Due: July 16, 2012
Author Registration Due: July 16, 2012
OTM Conferences: September 10 - 14, 2012


SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

All submitted papers will be carefully evaluated based on originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of expression. All submissions must be in English. Submissions should be in PDF format and must not exceed 10 pages in the final camera-ready format. Detailed formatting instructions can be found at:
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html
The final proceedings will be published by Springer Verlag as LNCS. Failure to commit to presentation at the conference automatically excludes a paper from the proceedings.
Failure to comply with the formatting instructions for submitted papers will lead to the outright rejection of the paper without review.
The paper submission site will be announced soon.


ORGANISATION COMMITTEE

Fernando Ferri
Istituto di Ricerche sulla Popolazione e le Politiche Sociali (IRPPS)
National Research Council
Via Palestro 32,
00185 Rome, Italy
Phone: +39 06 492724216
Fax: +39 06 49383724
Email: fernando.ferri@irpps.cnr.it

Patrizia Grifoni
Istituto di Ricerche sulla Popolazione e le Politiche Sociali (IRPPS)
National Research Council
Via Palestro 32,
00185 Rome, Italy
Phone: +39 06 492724215
Fax: +39 06 49383724
Email: patrizia.grifoni@irpps.cnr.it

Arianna D’Ulizia
Istituto di Ricerche sulla Popolazione e le Politiche Sociali (IRPPS)
National Research Council
Via Palestro 32,
00185 Rome, Italy
Phone: +39 06 492724297
Fax: +39 06 49383724
Email: arianna.dulizia@irpps.cnr.it

Maria Chiara Caschera
Istituto di Ricerche sulla Popolazione e le Politiche Sociali (IRPPS)
National Research Council
Via Palestro 32,
00185 Rome, Italy
Phone: +39 06 492724298
Fax: +39 06 49383724
Email: mc.caschera@irpps.cnr.it

Irina Kondratova
Institute for Information Technology e-Business
National Research Council Canada
46 Dineen Drive, Fredericton, New Brunswick, E3B 9W4, Canada
Phone: +1 (506) 444-0489
Fax: +1 (506) 452-3859
Email: Irina.Kondratova@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca


Program Committee Members (to be extended)

Kevin C. Almeroth – University of California, USA
Frederic Andres - University of Aizu, Japan
Richard Chbeir - Bourgogne University , France
Karin Coninx - Hasselt University, Belgium
Juan De Lara - Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Rajkumar Kannan - Bishop Heber College, India
Nikos Komninos - Dept. of Informatics, University of Pireaus, Greece
Stephen Marsh - NRC Institute for Information Technology of Moncton, Canada
Rebecca Montanari - Dipartimento di elettronica, Informatica, Sistemistica, University of Bologna, Italy
Nitendra Rajput, IBM Research, India
Tommo Reti - Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Finland
Nicola Santoro – Carleton University, Canada
Thanassis Tiropanis - School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK
Riccardo Torlone - University of Rome RomaTre, Italy
Adam Wojciechowski - Poznan University of Technology, Poland