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CALL FOR PAPERS

Computational Social Science and the Wisdom of Crowds
Workshop at NIPS 2010
December 10 or 11, Whistler, Canada

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~wallach/workshops/nips2010css/

-- Submission Deadline: October 8, 2010 --

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OVERVIEW
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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 area of social computing deals with the mechanisms through
which people interact with computational systems, examining how and
why people contribute to crowdsourcing sites, and the Internet more
generally. 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 research
areas, but to make truly groundbreaking advances, collaboration is
necessary: social scientists and economists are uniquely positioned to
identify the most pertinent and vital questions and problems, as well
as to provide insight into data generation, while computer scientists
contribute significant expertise in developing novel, quantitative
methods and tools. To date there have been few in-person venues for
researchers in these traditionally disparate areas to interact. This
workshop will address this need, with an emphasis on the role of
machine learning. The primary goals of the workshop are to provide an
opportunity for attendees to meet, interact, share ideas, establish
new collaborations, and to inform the wider NIPS community about
current research in computational social science and social computing.


TOPICS OF INTEREST:
-------------------

We welcome contributions on theoretical models, empirical work, and
everything in between, including but not limited to:

* Automatic aggregation of opinions or knowledge

* Prediction markets / information markets

* Incentives in social computation (e.g., games with a purpose)

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

* 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


PAPER SUBMISSION:
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Papers may be up to four pages long and must be in the NIPS 2010
format. Accepted papers will be made available on the workshop
website. However, the workshop's proceedings can be considered
non-archival, meaning contributors are free to publish their results
subsequently in archival journals or conferences. Accepted papers will
be either presented as a talk or poster. Submission instructions will
be available on the workshop website closer to the deadline.

Deadline for submissions: Friday October 8, 2010
Notification of acceptance: Monday November 1, 2010


INVITED SPEAKERS: (tentative list)
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Yiling Chen, Harvard University
Justin Grimmer, Stanford (Political Science)
John Horton, Harvard University (Public Policy)
Winter Mason, Yahoo! Research
Paul Resnick, University of Michigan (School of Information)


ORGANIZATION:
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Workshop Organizers:

Jenn Wortman Vaughan, UCLA
Hanna Wallach, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Program Committee:

Lars Backstrom (Cornell University), Jonathan Chang (Facebook), Sanmay
Das (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), Ofer Dekel (Microsoft
Research), Laura Dietz (Max Planck Institute for Computer Science),
Arpita Ghosh (Yahoo! Research), John Horton (Harvard University),
Shaili Jain (Yale University), Lian Jian (Annenberg School of
Communications, University of Southern California), David Lazer
(Political Science and Computer Science, Northeastern University &
Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University), Winter Mason
(Yahoo! Research), Andrew McCallum (University of Massachusetts,
Amherst), Mary McGlohon (Google), Daniel Ramage (Stanford University),
Noah Smith (Carnegie Mellon University), Victoria Stodden (Yale Law
School), and Sid Suri (Yahoo! Research).