Background:

Social computing can be broadly defined as computational facilitation of social studies and human social dynamics as well as the design and use of information and communication technologies that consider social context. In recent years, social computing has become one of the central themes across a number of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) fields and attracted significant interest from not only researchers in computing and social sciences, but also software and online game vendors, Web entrepreneurs, political analysts, digital government practitioners, among others.

The Workshop on Social Computing (SOCO 2008) intends to bring together social computing researchers from a wide spectrum of academic disciplines to (a) report and review the current state of the art of social computing research and its applications, (b) identify key technical challenges   facing social computing studies; and (c) provide a forum to bring together researchers and practitioners to identify future research opportunities. Below are some sample research topics.

1. General theory of social computing; general architectures for social computing systems 
2. HCI issues in social computing; social computing and ubiquitous computing
3. Social computing and multi-agent systems, agent-based modeling and simulation
4. Social computing and dynamic network applications, social networking cites, massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), and socially intelligent search strategies
5. Collaborative filtering, community-based information retrieval and recommendation, collaborative bookmarking and tagging
6. Web standards, data mining, and visualization techniques to facilitate online community building and collect and analyze related datasets
7. Applications of social computing in business and education: impact of online groups on marketing, product development, and innovation efforts; social shopping; online ratings of products and services; trust; distance learning technologies
8. Social computing in complex engineering-economic systems such as transportation, power, energy, public health, and market systems
9. Applications of social computing in the public sector: computational organization, digital government applications, large-scale community development and opinion formation, civic rights
10. Case studies; related empirical findings and analysis

Submission Guidelines:

Long (12 pages) and short (6 pages) papers (in English) may be submitted electronically via the workshop website in January 2007.  Required Springer LNCS Microsoft Word/LaTeX templates can be found on the workshop website.

Submissions due	February 28, 2008 *
Notification of acceptance	March 20, 2008 *
Camera-ready copy due	March 28, 2008 *
Workshop Date	June 17, 2008 *

Workshop Co-Chairs:

• Daniel Zeng, University of Arizona
• Fei-Yue Wang, Chinese Academy of Sciences
• Kathleen Carley, Carnegie Mellon University