This is funding to support a doctoral symposium and meeting of the Principle Investigators (PIs) for the NSF Social-Computational Systems (SoCS) program that will be held in July 2012. All PIs and co-PIs funded through the 2010, 2011, and 2012 SoCS programs will be invited to attend, as well as a few other distinguished researchers. The PIs will share ideas and insights with each other about research in the emerging new area of social computational systems, with the specific goal of helping to strengthen the nascent research community. A doctoral symposium will be held prior to the beginning of the PIs meeting. Participating students will experience a full day of presentations and discussions of doctoral research, mentored by a diverse set of experienced faculty.
Intellectual merit: 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). Individuals and groups have been working on particular problems in this space for decades, but this work has often been carried out in research pockets connected to existing fields, and unfortunately isolated from each other. As the introduction of the NSF SoCS program illustrates, there is good reason to believe that the widespread work in social-computational systems would benefit from cross-fertilization and from bringing together diverse researchers into a meaningful community. The SoCS doctorial symposium and PI meeting is one step in that process. 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. The PI meeting will feature tutorials that build common ground among researchers from various disciplinary backgrounds. A series of small poster sessions will allow PIs to engage with the emerging results of other SoCS-funded projects and get feedback on their own work.
Broader impacts: Many of the biggest challenges in successfully deploying computer systems in organizations come down to the difficulty of adapting technology to human organizations and vice versa. The development of the SoCS field will directly create new knowledge and understanding in how to more successfully manage the relationship between social (human) organizations and the computer tools they use to work together more effectively. This new understanding has the potential to directly benefit a wide variety of users of information technology. The development of doctoral students is itself a key broader impact. As a result of the PI Meeting, participants will be in a stronger position to do SoCS research. New collaborations and new grant proposals are two anticipated concrete outcomes.
June 17-19, 2012, a doctoral consortium and PI meeting were held in Ann Arbor, MI. 60 people attended, representing most of the grant awardees from the first two years of the NSF SoCS (Social-Computational Systems) program. Each project presented a poster. The SoCS program deliberately sought grantees with many disciplinary perspectives and achieved that diversity in the actual grants. Many of the researchers shared an interest in phenomena such as crowdsourcing and collective intelligence, but employed radically different research methods. In order to enhance the ability of scholars to learn as much possible from each other's research, the main plenary sessions of the meeting primarily consisted of "tutorials" that exposed researchers to each others' methods. The tutorial topics included: "Tools for Crowdsourcing" "Coding Qualitative Data" "Field Experiments" "Systems/Applications Research" The main outcome was cross-fertilization of ideas between projects and an enhanced ability to read, evaluate, appreciate, and learn from diverse types of research in this emerging area. In addition, nine Ph.D. students from some of the funded projects had a chance to form a cohort with each other. They had a separate dinner and a half-day workshop prior to the start of the main event. During that workshop, each student made a presentation of their ongoing work and received feedback from three or four faculty members who were not from their own university and thus whom they would not normally have had access to. The project funds were also used to support travel expenses for 24 students attending the doctoral symposium for the 2013 SoCS PI & Community Meeting, which gave them a similar opportunity to form a cohort and get feedback from faculty members at other institutions.
