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CALL FOR PAPERS

Machine Learning Journal Special Issue on
Computational Social Science and Social Computing

-- Submission Deadline EXTENDED: August 17, 2012 --

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OVERVIEW:

Computational social science is an emerging academic research area at
the intersection of computer science, statistics, and the social
sciences, in which quantitative methods and computational tools are
used to identify and answer social science questions. The field is
driven by new sources of data from the Internet, sensor networks,
government databases, crowdsourcing systems, and more, as well as by
recent advances in computational modeling, machine learning,
statistics, and social network analysis.

The related research area of social computing deals with the
mechanisms through which people interact with computational systems,
examining how and why people contribute user-generated
content. Examples of social computing systems include prediction
markets, reputation systems, and collaborative filtering systems, all
designed with the intent of capturing the wisdom of crowds.

Machine learning plays in important role in both of these areas. For
this special issue, we invite high quality submissions on work at the
intersection of machine learning and any aspect(s) of social computing
or computational social science, including but not limited to:

* Automatic aggregation of opinions or knowledge

* Incentives in social computation (e.g., game-theoretic approaches)

* Prediction markets / information markets

* Studies of events and trends (e.g., in politics)

* Quality control and reputation mechanisms for user generated content

* Analysis of and experiments on distributed collaboration and
consensus-building, including crowdsourcing (e.g., Mechanical Turk)
and peer-production systems (e.g., Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers)

* Group dynamics and decision-making

* Modeling network-interaction content (e.g., text analysis of blog
posts, tweets, emails, chats, etc.)

* Social networks

* Games with a purpose


PAPER SUBMISSION AND TENTATIVE SCHEDULE:

Authors are encouraged to submit high-quality, original work that has
not appeared in other journals, nor is under consideration by other
journals. Submissions and reviewing will be handled electronically
using the standard procedures for Machine Learning Journal.

Deadline for submissions: August 1, 2012
Notification to authors: January 15, 2013
Revisions due: April 15, 2013


GUEST EDITORS:

Winter Mason, Stevens Institute of Technology
Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, UCLA
Hanna Wallach, University of Massachusetts Amherst