This is funding to increase diversity of participation in the Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction (SBP) 2012 conference, to be held at the University of Maryland, College Park, from April 2-5, 2012. The SBP conference provides an international platform for collaborative and exploratory research that advances the emerging interdisciplinary field of social computing. It attracts leading researchers in behavioral modeling and social computing from academia, industry and government, who address issues of behavior modeling, analysis, pattern mining, and prediction in domains such as healthcare, privacy, and organizations.
Analysis of attendance at previous SBP conferences has found substantial gender and racial inequalities in participation in the conference, and less disciplinary diversity than desired for this new interdisciplinary field. Project activities include (a) targeted outreach to female, Hispanic, African-American, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and schools in EPSCoR (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) states; (b) targeted outreach to underrepresented academic disciplines relevant to SPB;(c) special invitations to participate for authors in the same categories of schools and disciplines who have had a paper declined; (d) solicitations for student volunteers from the same categories of schools and disciplines; and (e) encouraging diversity in the selection of speakers for the panels held during the conference. Small travel grants and/or conference fee waivers will be used to encourage participation.
Broader Impacts: By broadening participation in the SBP conference, this project will provide new opportunities for interaction across disciplinary boundaries, fostering creative new ways of thinking about problems in social computing and behavior modeling. In addition, the project will encourage members of disadvantaged groups to become involved in STEM research through training, professional development, and community building.
The major findings for this research project are as follows. Our analysis of the data on the 2012 conference along with data from the previous conferences shows that a relative (though modest) increase in the number of Hispanics, Blacks, and American Indians in the 2012 SBP conference. For instance, the racial/ethnic make up for the 2011 and 2012 conference participants were as follows: Hispanic (2.34%; 3.36%), Black (1.56%, 5.04%), Asian (40.63%, 30.25%), White (55.47%, 60.50%), American Indian (0.00%, 0.84%). Our analysis also shows that the 2012 NSF support attracted a more diverse group of scholars to the conference. This is evident when we compare the proportion of applicants with interests in fields different from the computational sciences to the same proportion for the conference participants. Between the 2011 and 2012 conferences, we observed a relative decrease in the proportion of participants from the computational sciences (70.48%; 58.74%), while there is a relative increase in the proportion of participants from the health sciences (14.29%, 14.69%) and the social/behavioral sciences (15.24%, 26.57%). We observed a relative (though modest) increase in the number of Hispanics, Blacks, and American Indians in the 2012 and 2013 SBP conference. The increase could be partly attributed to the NSF support. In particular, the 2012 NSF support attracted a more diverse group of scholars to the conference. This is evident when we compare the proportion of applicants with interests in fields different from the computational sciences to the same proportion for the conference participants. While there is a modest improvement in ethnic and disciplinary diversity from 2011 to 2013, more work needs to be done to close the gender gap in conference participation, which is still a significant problem. With our experience with this grant, we are optimistic of attracting more underrepresented groups for the future SBP conferences.
