General Information
- Workshop date: December 17, 2011
- Location: Sierra Nevada, Spain (held at NIPS 2011)
- Submission deadline: October 7, 2011
- Organizers: Winter Mason, Hanna Wallach, and Jennifer Wortman Vaughan
- Student assistant: Peter Krafft
The call for papers (plain text) is available here.
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 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 are able to contribute significant expertise in developing novel, quantitative methods and tools. The primary goals of this workshop are to provide an opportunity for attendees from diverse fields 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. The inaugural workshop on Computational Social Science and the Wisdom of Crowds (held in 2010) brought together experts from fields as diverse as political science, psychology, economics, and machine learning, connecting researchers with common goals but disparate methods and audiences, and we aim to attract a similar breadth of contributions this year.
Topics of Interest
We welcome contributions on both theoretical models and empirical work, as well as everything in between, including but not limited to the following areas of research:
- 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 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., Yahoo! Answers)
- Group dynamics and decision-making
- Modeling network interaction content (e.g., analysis of blog posts, tweets, emails, chats, etc.)
- Social networks
- Games with a purpose
Paper Submission
Papers are limited to four content pages, including figures and tables, and must follow the NIPS 2011 format; however, an additional fifth page containing only cited references is permitted. Papers should not be anonymized (i.e., you should uncomment or add \nipsfinalcopy in your .tex file prior to submitting). 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 work in archival journals or conferences. Accepted papers will be either presented as a talk or poster. Paper submissions should be emailed to nipscssworkshop at gmail dot com with a subject line of "NIPS CSS 2011: XXX" where "XXX" is the title of the paper submission.
Important Dates
- Submission deadline: October 7, 2011
- Notification of acceptance: November 11, 2011
- Final versions of accepted papers due: November 30, 2011
- Workshop date: December 17, 2011
Schedule
- 7:30–7:40 Opening Remarks
- 7:40–8:25 Invited Talk: "Machine Learning and Computational Social Science: Intersections and Collisions" by David Jensen, University of Massachusetts Amherst (Computer Science) [slides]
- 8:25–8:45 Contributed Talk: "A Text-based HMM Model of Foreign Affair Sentiment" by Sean Gerrish and David Blei [paper | slides]
- 8:45–9:25 First Poster Session and Coffee Break
- 9:25–10:10 Invited Talk: "The Rise of Molecules and Machines: Three Decades of Intellectual Change in Academia" by Daniel McFarland, Stanford University (Education)
- 10:10–10:30 Contributed Talk: "A Wisdom of the Crowd Approach to Forecasting" by Brandon M. Turner and Mark Steyvers [paper | slides]
- 10:30–4:00 Ski Break
- 4:00–4:45 Invited Talk: "Understanding the players from how they play (Halo)" by Winter Mason, Stevens Institute of Technology (Technology Management) [slides]
- 4:45–5:05 Contributed Talk: "Learning Performance of Prediction Markets with Kelly Bettors" by Alina Beygelzimer, John Langford, and David M. Pennock [paper | slides]
- 5:05–5:25 Contributed Talk: "Approximating the Wisdom of the Crowd" by Seyda Ertekin, Haym Hirsh, and Cynthia Rudin [paper | slides]
- 5:25–6:05 Second Poster Session and Coffee Break
- 6:05–6:50 Invited Talk: "Forecasting: Expectations, Intentions, and Confidence" by David Rothschild, Yahoo! Research [slides]
- 6:50–7:35 Invited Talk: "Quality Assurance and Connections with Machine Learning" by Panagiotis Ipeirotis, New York University (Information, Operations, and Management Sciences) [slides]
- 7:35–7:45 Closing Remarks and Wrap-up
First poster session:
- "A Failure to Communicate: The Role of Networks in Inter- and Intra-Group Cooperation" by Jennifer M. Larson
- "A Hard Science is Good to Find: Textual Similarity as a Measure of Scientific Paradigm Development, A Preliminary Investigation" by Susan Biancani
- "A Non Parametric Theme Event Topic Model for Characterizing Microblogs" by Himabindu Lakkaraju and Hyung-Il Ahn
- "Active Learning from Multiple Knowledge Sources" by Yan Yan, Glenn Fung, Romer Rosales, and Jennifer Dy
- "Annotation Models for Crowdsourced Ordinal Data" by Vikas C. Raykar and Shipeng Yu
- "Bandit Market Makers" by Nicolas Della Penna and Mark D. Reid
- "Behavioral Game Theory on Online Social Networks: Colonel Blotto is on Facebook" by Pushmeet Kohli, Yoram Bachrach, Thore Graepel, Gavin Smyth, Michael Armstrong, David Stillwell, Ralf Herbrich, and Michael Kearns
- "Detecting Grand Tours of Europe with Geo-Tags" by Conrad Lee, Derek Greene, and Padraig Cunningham
- "Do You Feel What I Feel? Social Aspects of Emotions in Twitter Conversations" by Suin Kim, JinYeong Bak, Yohan Jo, and and Alice Oh
- "Human-Debugging of Machines" by Devi Parikh and C. Lawrence Zitnick
- "Learning Performance of Prediction Markets with Kelly Bettors" by Alina Beygelzimer, John Langford, and David M. Pennock
- "Quality Control of Crowd Labeling through Expert Evaluation" by Faiza Khan Khattak and Ansaf Salleb-Aouissi
Second poster session:
- "A Text-based HMM of Foreign Affair Sentiment" by Sean Gerrish and David Blei
- "A Wisdom of the Crowd Approach to Forecasting" by Brandon M. Turner and Mark Steyvers
- "An Axiomatic Approach to Tie-Strength Measures" by Mangesh Gupte and Tina Eliassi-Rad
- "Approximating the Wisdom of the Crowd" by Seyda Ertekin, Haym Hirsh, and Cynthia Rudin
- "AUTOMAN: Integrating Human and Silicon Computation" by Daniel W. Barowy, Emery D. Berger, and Andrew McGregor
- "Computational Text Analysis for Social Science: Model Assumptions and Complexity" by Brendan O’Connor, David Bamman, and Noah A. Smith
- "Experimental Tribe: A General Platform for Web-gaming and Social Computation" by Claudio Cicali, Francesca Tria, Vito D. P. Servedio, Pietro Gravino, Vittorio Loreto, Massimo Warglien, and Gabriele Paolacci
- "Extracting Latent Economic Signal from Online Activity Streams" by Joseph Reisinger
- "Forecasting Conflicts using N-gram Models" by Alireza Bakhtiari and Camille Besse & Luc Lamontagne
- "How to Assure the Quality of Human Computation Tasks When Majority Voting Fails?" by Yu-An Sun, Christopher R. Dance, Shourya Roy, and Greg Little
- "Modeling Community Question-Answering Archives" by Zainab Zolaktaf, Fatemeh Riahi, Mahdi Shafiei, and Evangelos Milios
- "Supporting the Curation of Twitter User Lists" by Derek Greene, Fergal Reid, Padraig Cunningham, and Gavin Sheridan
- "Unified Modeling of User Activities on Social Networking Sites" by Himabindu Lakkaraju and Angshu Rai
Invited Speakers
- Panagiotis Ipeirotis, New York University (Information, Operations, and Management Sciences)
- David Jensen, University of Massachusetts Amherst (Computer Science)
- Winter Mason, Stevens Institute of Technology (Technology Management)
- Daniel McFarland, Stanford University (Education)
- David Rothschild, Yahoo! Research
Related Workshops
The website for last year's workshop is here.
Program Committee
- Alexander Strehl, Facebook
- Brendan O'Connor, Carnegie Mellon University
- Bruce Desmarais, University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Chris Callison-Burch, Johns Hopkins University
- David Jensen, University of Massachusetts Amherst
- David Mimno, Princeton University
- Deepak Ganesan, University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Edith Law, Carnegie Mellon University
- Edoardo Airoldi, Harvard University
- Foster Provost, New York University
- Gabriele Paolacci, Ca' Foscari University of Venice
- Haoqi Zhang, Harvard University
- John Horton, oDesk Corporation
- Jure Leskovec, Stanford University
- Justin Grimmer, Stanford University
- Kristen Grauman, University of Texas at Austin
- Lester Mackey, University of California, Berkeley
- Mark Dredze, Johns Hopkins University
- Michael Buhrmester, University of Texas at Austin
- Rahul Sami, University of Michigan
- Sandy Pentland, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Sean Gerrish, Princeton University
- Thore Graepel, Microsoft Research
- Yiling Chen, Harvard University
Sponsor
Thanks to our sponsor:
- Microsoft Research