WORKSHOP: Social-Computational Systems (SoCS) Doctoral Symposium

Systems in which people and computers work together in a socially intelligent manner represent a new form of computing that brings together the challenges of traditional computing (e.g., algorithms, information representation, information acquisition, data quality) with those of human interaction (e.g., cognition, social interaction, culture, learning) and indeed a whole host of new challenges related to the combination of humans and computers (e.g., computer reasoning about human knowledge and abilities, socially-intelligent human-computer interaction, social computing).

This award supports a Doctoral Symposium (DS), June 9, 2011 for graduate students who are developing SoCS related research topics. Doctoral students pursing SoCS research face numerous challenges, including defining research that spans computing and human elements, but also identifying meaningful evaluation for their research (often in the absence of close precedents) and positioning their research to fulfill the requirements of disciplinary dissertation committees. The doctoral symposium will help students hone their dissertation projects so that they can make better contributions to the solution of these intellectual challenges, and also help them build a social network of fellow doctoral students and more senior researchers to support their careers.

There are both short and long-term benefits from this work. In the short term, the DS will provide significant feedback to the students selected to participate in the DS. In the long-term, we expect that students who participate in the DS will help establish critical research trajectories for SoCS and SoCS related topics. Students who participate in the DS will be well positioned to provide feedback to their peers who may also be interested in SoCS topics.