Social Information Processing
Encyclopedia
Social Information Processing is "an activity through which collective human actions organize knowledge." It is the creation and processing of information by a group of people. As an academic field Social Information Processing studies the information processing
power of networked social systems.
Typically computer tools are used such as:
Although computers are often used to facilitate networking and collaboration, they are not required. For example the Trictionary
in 1982 was entirely paper and pen based, relying on neighborhood social networks and libraries. The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary
in the 19th century was done largely with the help of anonymous volunteers organized by help wanted adds in newspapers and slips of paper sent through the postal mail.
Tagging : Tagging
has already attracted the interest of the AI community. While the initial purpose of tagging was to help users organize and manage their own documents, it has since been proposed that collective tagging of common documents can be used to organize information via an informal classification system dubbed a folksonomy
. There is hope that folksonomies will eventually help fulfill the promise of the Semantic Web.
Human-based computation
and collective intelligence
: What type of problems are amenable to human swarm computing approaches? How can we design the "wisdom of crowds" effect to benefit our problem solving needs?
Incentives to participation
: How to elicit quality metadata and content from users? How can users resistant to tagging be encouraged to tag content?
Social networks : While users create social networks for a variety of reasons --- e.g., to track lives of friends or work or opinions of the users they respect --- network information is important for many applications. Globally, an information ecosystem may arise through the interactions among users, and between users and content. A community of users interested in a specific topic may emerge over time, with linkages to other communities giving insight into relationships between topics.
Evolution of social media
and information ecosystems : How does content, and its quality, change in time? There is increasing interest in peer-production systems, for example in how and why some open-source projects like Linux and Wikipedia are successful. Under what circumstances are user-generated content sites likely to succeed and what implications does this have for information-sharing and learning within communities?
Algorithms : Before we can harness the power of the social information processing, we need new approaches to structured data analysis, specifically algorithms for synthesizing various types of metadata
: e.g., social networks and tagging. Research in this area will provide a principled foundation for the development of new algorithms for social search
, information discovery
and personalization
and other approaches that exploit the power of the social information processing.
Information processing
Information processing is the change of information in any manner detectable by an observer. As such, it is a process which describes everything which happens in the universe, from the falling of a rock to the printing of a text file from a digital computer system...
power of networked social systems.
Typically computer tools are used such as:
- Authoring tools: e.g., blogs
- Collaboration tools: e.g., wikis, in particular, e.g., WikipediaWikipediaWikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
- TaggingTag (metadata)In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information . This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching...
systems (social bookmarking): e.g., del.icio.usDel.icio.usDelicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, and by the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs...
, FlickrFlickrFlickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...
, CiteULikeCiteULikeCiteULike is based on the principle of social bookmarking and is aimed to promote and to develop the sharing of scientific references amongst researchers. In the same way that it is possible to catalog web pages or photographs , scientists can share information on academic papers with specific... - Social networking: e.g., FacebookFacebookFacebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
, MySpaceMySpaceMyspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....
, EssemblyEssemblyEssembly is a non-partisan political social networking website that allows its users to connect with one another based on political opinions, participate in unmoderated discussion, and organize for political action. It was founded in 2005 by Joe Green, a Harvard graduate and college roommate of... - Collaborative filteringCollaborative filteringCollaborative filtering is the process of filtering for information or patterns using techniques involving collaboration among multiple agents, viewpoints, data sources, etc. Applications of collaborative filtering typically involve very large data sets...
: e.g., DiggDiggDigg is a social news website. Prior to Digg v4, its cornerstone function consisted of letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Digg's popularity prompted the creation of copycat social networking sites with story submission and voting systems...
, the Amazon Product Recommendation SystemAmazon.comAmazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
, Yahoo answers, UrtakUrtakUrtak is a free collaborative public opinion website founded in 2008. An urtak survey can be created by any individual for his or her community. The users of an urtak survey can add questions of their own to the survey, as well as answer questions that have been asked by other users... - Social Information Aggregation: e.g., scratchmysoul.com
Although computers are often used to facilitate networking and collaboration, they are not required. For example the Trictionary
Trictionary
Trictionary is a 400-page trilingual English/Spanish/Chinese translation wordbook. It covers about 3,000 words in each language. The book was compiled by anonymous volunteers, mostly younger students from New York City whose native language was English, Spanish or Chinese...
in 1982 was entirely paper and pen based, relying on neighborhood social networks and libraries. The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
in the 19th century was done largely with the help of anonymous volunteers organized by help wanted adds in newspapers and slips of paper sent through the postal mail.
Current state of knowledge
The website for the AAAI 2008 Spring Symposium on Social Information Processing suggested the following topics and questions.Tagging : Tagging
Tag (metadata)
In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information . This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching...
has already attracted the interest of the AI community. While the initial purpose of tagging was to help users organize and manage their own documents, it has since been proposed that collective tagging of common documents can be used to organize information via an informal classification system dubbed a folksonomy
Folksonomy
A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging...
. There is hope that folksonomies will eventually help fulfill the promise of the Semantic Web.
Human-based computation
Human-based computation
Human-based computation is a computer science technique in which a computational process performs its function by outsourcing certain steps to humans...
and collective intelligence
Collective intelligence
Collective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans and computer networks....
: What type of problems are amenable to human swarm computing approaches? How can we design the "wisdom of crowds" effect to benefit our problem solving needs?
Incentives to participation
Online participation
Several motivations lead people to contribute to virtual communities. Various online media , are becoming ever greater knowledge-sharing resources. Many of these communities are highly cooperative and establish their own unique culture...
: How to elicit quality metadata and content from users? How can users resistant to tagging be encouraged to tag content?
Social networks : While users create social networks for a variety of reasons --- e.g., to track lives of friends or work or opinions of the users they respect --- network information is important for many applications. Globally, an information ecosystem may arise through the interactions among users, and between users and content. A community of users interested in a specific topic may emerge over time, with linkages to other communities giving insight into relationships between topics.
Evolution of social media
Social media
The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,...
and information ecosystems : How does content, and its quality, change in time? There is increasing interest in peer-production systems, for example in how and why some open-source projects like Linux and Wikipedia are successful. Under what circumstances are user-generated content sites likely to succeed and what implications does this have for information-sharing and learning within communities?
Algorithms : Before we can harness the power of the social information processing, we need new approaches to structured data analysis, specifically algorithms for synthesizing various types of metadata
Metadata
The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...
: e.g., social networks and tagging. Research in this area will provide a principled foundation for the development of new algorithms for social search
Social search
Social search or a social search engine is a type of web search that takes into account the Social Graph of the person initiating the search query...
, information discovery
Information discovery
Information Discovery is a term used in the legal and corporate industry which refers to the steps involved in distilling a corporation’s data corpus down to the most pertinent evidence pertaining to a court-related matter or compliance directive...
and personalization
Personalization
Personalization involves using technology to accommodate the differences between individuals. Once confined mainly to the Web, it is increasingly becoming a factor in education, health care Personalization involves using technology to accommodate the differences between individuals. Once confined...
and other approaches that exploit the power of the social information processing.
See also
- Computer-mediated communicationComputer-mediated communicationComputer-mediated communication is defined as any communicative transaction that occurs through the use of two or more networked computers...
- Social computingSocial computingSocial computing is a general term for an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It has become an important concept for use in business. It is used in two ways as detailed below....
- Social information processing theorySocial Information Processing theorySocial information processing theory is an interpersonal communication theory which proposes that given time and opportunity to interact, relationships between individuals can form in online environments and that online interpersonal relationship development might require more time to develop...
- Social mediaSocial mediaThe term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,...
- Social translucenceSocial translucenceSocial translucence is a term that was proposed by Thomas Erickson and Wendy A. Kellogg to refer to "design digital systems that support coherent behavior by making participants and their activities visible to one another"....
- Decision makingDecision makingDecision making can be regarded as the mental processes resulting in the selection of a course of action among several alternative scenarios. Every decision making process produces a final choice. The output can be an action or an opinion of choice.- Overview :Human performance in decision terms...
External links
- Amazon Mechanical Turk
- BootB
- HP Research, Social Computing Lab
- Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPho) Project
- IBM Research, Social Computing Group
- InnoCentive
- Long Now Bets
- Microsoft Research, Social Computing Group
- PARC blog: Augmented Social Cognition
Additional sources
- AAAI, Social Information Processing Symposium, Stanford, AAAI, March 2008.
- Camerer, Colin F., and Ernst Fehr, "When Does ‘‘Economic Man’’ Dominate Social Behavior?"
- Chi, Ed H., " Augmenting Social Cognition: From Social Foraging to Social Sensemaking," (video) (at Google), February 2007. (pdf), AAAI Symposium, March 2008, (video) (at PARC), May 2008.
- Denning, Peter J., "Infoglut," ACM, July. 2006.
- Denning, Peter J. and Rick Hayes-Roth, "Decision Making in Very Large Networks," ACM, Nov. 2006.
- Hogg, Tad, and Bernardo A. Huberman, "Solving the organizational free riding problem with social networks"
- Huang, Yi-Ching (Janet), "You are what you tag," (ppt) AAAI Seminar, March 2008.
- Huberman, Bernardo, "Social Dynamics in the Age of the Web," (video) (PARC) January 10, 2008.
- Judson, Olivia, "Feel the Eyes Upon You," The New York Times, August 3, 2008,
- Lerman, Kristina, "Social Information Processing in News Aggregation," IEEE Internet Computing, November–December 2007.
- Lerman, Kristina, "Social Information Processing," (video) (at Google). June 2007.
- Nielsen, Michael, The Future of Science. A book in preparation.
- Nielsen, Michael, Kasparov versus the World. A blog post about a 1999 chess game in which Garry Kasparov (eventually) won a game against a collective opponent.
- Page, Scott E., The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, Princeton University Press, 2007.
- Segaran, Toby, Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications, O'Reilly, 2007.
- Shalizi, Cosma Rohilla, "Social Media as Windows on the Social Life of the Mind"
- Smith, M., Purser, N. and Giraud-Carrier, C. (2008). Social Capital in the Blogosphere: A Case Study. In Papers from the AAAI Spring Symposium on Social Information Processing, K. Lerman et al. (Eds.), Technical Report SS-08-06, AAAI Press, 93-97.
- Spinellis, Diomidis, Wikipedia Faces no Limits to Growth (ACM article, subscription required).
- Stoyanovich, Julia, "Leveraging Tagging to Model User Interests in del.icio.us," (ppt) AAAI Seminar, March 2008.
- Whitaker, Steve, "Temporal Tagging," AAAI Symposium, March 2008.