Social Computing

The system that support gathering, representation, processing, use, and dissemination of information that is distributed across social collectivities such as teams, communities, organizations, and markets. Moreover, the information is not anonymous but is significant precisely because it is linked to people, who are in turn linked to other people.

This Residency surveys the field of social computing, introducing its key concepts, paradigms, and techniques. Specific topics are selected from the following list: social media and social network analytics, sociological underpinnings, crowdsourcing and surveys, human computation, social mobilization, human decision making, voting theory, judgment aggregation, prediction markets, economic mechanisms, incentives, organizational modeling, argumentation, contracts, norms, mobility and social context, sociotechnical systems, and software engineering with and for social computing.

This Residency incorporates ideas from diverse disciplines (including sociology, psychology, law, economics, political science, logic, statistics, philosophy, business) to provide essential background for future computer science careers in industry and research.

The broad topics to be covered in the Residency include:

    Social network analysis -- introduction, applications and challenges
    Structural properties of large networks (social networks, random networks, technological networks, etc.)
    Network centrality; identifying popular users/experts
    Community structure in social networks
    Social media text analysis -- introduction, applications and challenges
    Harmful users/content on social media -- hate speech, fake news, spammers in social networks, etc.
    Bias in social computing systems
    Advertising: the economic engine of social media
    Different types of social platforms -- Anonymous social networks, E-commerce sites
    Social media during pandemics and lockdowns

This Residency is self-contained, and gives the essential background for social computing. The Residency provides an introduction to the rich variety of social computing applications, some already popular and some emerging. It identifies the key concepts underlying such applications highlighting the main paradigms of social computing.

This Residency understands social computing in a broad sense. In this conception, people and organizations are social entities and social computing arises from the interplay between computing on the one hand and social relationships among social entities on the other hand. Specifically, this Residency considers how (1) social relationships and individual preferences can be modeled, represented, and reasoned about through computing technology and (2) how interactions among social entities can be incorporated into computations as a basis for solving problems. This Residency surveys the key paradigms exhibited by applications of social computing. It identifies concepts for modeling and realizing social computing applications.