Research in social computing and behavioral modeling is designed to achieve a better understanding of social interactions, complex behaviors, contextual patterns, and associated outcomes of interest. The state-of-the-art in this field is increasingly dependent on interdisciplinary efforts due to the cross disciplinary nature of expertise required to address challenges arising from health, culture, and society. The Social Computing, Behavioral- Cultural Modeling, and Prediction* (SBP) conference is a platform for bringing together researchers from a wide variety of disciplines in this rapidly developing area of research to interact, discuss and disseminate on research issues that are central to its progress and to encourage new collaborations that are essential to its steady development and healthy evolution. Based on the success of its previous editions in the last three years (SBP08, SBP09, and SBP10), we (the steering committee with the guidance of the advisory committee) plan to continue organizing the SBP conference yearly and make it a premier event in the confluence of health, cultural, and social research. Funding this project will provide general support for the conference annually from 2011 to 2014 as well as provide travel awards to graduate students and junior researchers who otherwise might not be able to participate SBP. *Formerly known as Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling, and Prediction
The 2010 SBP conference (aka SBP10) was held on the NIH campus and was a tremendous success with over 400 registrants. SBP10 included several features not present in previous SBP meetings. Four tutorials were offered to allow attendees to learn about areas outside of their own discipline (see appendix for descriptions or visit http://sbp.asu.edu/sbp2010/tutorials.html). SBP10 also featured a cross-fertilization workshop to facilitate interaction between attendees with background and training in disparate disciplines;specifically the intention was to catalyze interaction between mathematically based disciplines (engineering, computer science, physics, mathematics) and those with backgrounds in behavioral or social science as well as those with content area expertise in health and medicine. A third feature was federal funding panels in which funders from NSF, ONR, and various components of NIH presented information programmatic interest and funding opportunities. SBP10 was preceded by two very successful international SBP workshops (SBP08 and SBP09) in 2008 and 2009 which were attended by approximately 108 and 115 attendees, respectively. Information about these events such as presentation schedules, sponsors, presentation slides, reports) can be found at the SBP website (http://sbp.asu.edu/). The increasing attendance, lively discussion, participation from individuals representing diverse fields (such as sociology, computer science and health) from multiple spheres (industry, academia and government organizations) and strong interest in the area demonstrated at initial two workshops led to the bigger SBP10 conference. The SBP10 international conference proceedings, including full 10-page papers of each peer-reviewed oral and poster presentation, were published as a bound issue of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LCNS) series by Springer. The proceedings are available on Amazon.com and the full reference can be found in the bibliography at the end of this section. In the coming four years (2011 - 2014), we plan to hold SBP annually as an international conference. The location of SBP will rotate among various U.S. cities on both the East and West Coasts in order to maximize the information propagation and conference participation. The International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction (SBP'11) is scheduled to be held at the University of Maryland, College Park from Mar 29-31, 2011. The Conference will be preceded by tutorial sessions on Mar 28, and will include a cross- fertilization workshop. A conference that has had some overlap with SBP in terms of topics covered is the International Conference on Computational Cultural Dynamics (ICCCD). ICCCD was held from 2007 to 2009. Information about the most recent conference can be found at the ICCCD 2009 website (http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/conferences/icccd2009/index.html). Considering these similarities, the ICCCD leadership met with the SBP leadership and the two groups agreed to merge ICCCD with the SBP conference from this year forward. To reflect this change, the term cultural has been appended to the title. Based on the positive feedback from the attendees and a pressing need for a continued platform for this emerging and interdisciplinary field, SBP has moved from its humble beginnings in 2008 to a noted event on the calendar of researchers in this area. In the upcoming years, we hope to stabilize its success and make it the premier event for interdisciplinary researchers in this area to attend, educate themselves on the latest developments and disseminate their research.
