Half-Day Workshop on Social Computing and Collective Intelligence

Half-Day Workshop on Social Computing and Collective Intelligence Yasuaki Sakamoto (ysakamot@stevens.edu) School of Technology Management, Stevens Institute of Technology Castle Point on Hudson, Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA T: 201.216.8198 F: 201.216.5385 Wai-Tat Fu (wfu@illinois.edu) Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 201 North Goodwin Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801 USA Keywords: Social computing, collective intelligence, social influence, wisdom of crowds, social networks important in explaining human behavior, especially when humans are situated in a social environment where individuals interact and observe others’ behavior. • How research in cognitive science can be applied to the design of social media tools: Work in cognitive science can provide recommendations for improving the design of social tools. The three main goals of this workshop are to: • bring together researchers working in this area • bridge research in different fields • discuss directions for future research To achieve these goals, we invited speakers with diverse backgrounds. They study the three topics we have listed, and conduct research that will shape the future of social computing and collective intelligence in cognitive science. Brief introductions of the invited speakers are included in the Participants section. We will build a webpage to start discussing current and future research before the workshop. Background Twitter announced in April 2010 that its 105,779,710 registered users posted 55 million tweets a day on average, and its website attracted 180 million unique visitors a month (Twitter, 2010). Web services like Twitter and Facebook are becoming integral to our everyday lives. While cognitive scientists have much to say about how the information flow between humans and systems eventually lead to emergent social behavior, there is still a lack of momentum in gathering researchers to systematically study these social phenomena in cognitive science. Using these and other services, crowds can carry out tasks akin to computers performing processing. Users with diverse backgrounds can work across time and space, their ideas aggregated later. This process is involved in collaborative tagging and filtering, online auctions, prediction markets, and crowdsourcing. Amazon, Yahoo!, eBay, and Digg, for example, let users rate a product, and show the aggregate rating as a collective opinion. Because crowds are cheap and motivated, yet their collective solutions can be as good as experts’ (Surowiecki, 2004), social production has even become a viable alternative to firms and markets (Benkler, 2006). Clearly, technologies are changing how humans think and act, and cognitive science needs to consider this issue (Glushko et al., 2008). The overall aim of this workshop is to foster research collaboration among researchers in multiple areas of cognitive science to systematically study issues related to social computing and collective intelligence. Justification and Relevance Yasuaki Sakamoto and Wai-Tat Fu will organize the workshop. Both have background in cognitive science, and are actively engaged in the study of social computing and collective intelligence. They have experiences in organizing similar workshops and conference tracks. Sakamoto is the Co-PI on a project funded by the Social- Computational Systems program at NSF. He studies how social networks shape cognition, and how they can be designed to augment cognition (e.g., Nickerson & Sakamoto, 2010; Sadlon et al., 2009; Sakamoto, 2010). Fu’s research focuses on developing cognitive models of how people interact with social information systems, and how people can learn from social information shared by the aggregate users. The topics addressed in this workshop are current and cut across disciplines. For example, in the fields of information systems and human-computer interaction, workshops related to social-computational systems have been organized recently. Time is ripe to organize a workshop on this area in cognitive science. Consistent with the theme of this year’s conference, one goal of the workshop is to “expand the space of cognitive science” by introducing work from multiple disciplines. Participants who have expressed their intention to attend Topics and Goals We propose a half-day workshop on social computing and collective intelligence. The workshop will cover the following three topics: • How networks of humans and computers generate and use social information: The Internet is changing the way humans learn and categorize information, make decisions, and solve problems. • How individual cognition is influenced by behavior of others: Social influence is often found to be