Discovery Informatics Workshop Social Computing Challenges DRAFT

Social Computing Challenges (I) Developing a taxonomy of human computation approaches Develop theory of augmented distributed cognition Develop incentives to encourage scientists to adopt social computing techniques Develop techniques to make social computing methods reliable and trustworthy Expand the use of social computing methods to include new ways of producing, communicating, and ‘reviewing’ scientific results

Social Computing Challenges (II) Create more effective ‘augmented human-computer teams’ Track / understand goals, beliefs of people and systems Develop catalog of incentives that motivate people to participate in various circumstances Effective communication among the team members Visualization Shared representations Diversity Norms of behavior Sanctions for bad behavior One approach: partnering human creativity and brute force computational (4-color problem)

Social Computing Challenges (III) Collaborative Knowledge Creation – new affordances Citizen Science / Human Computation – understand motivations and roles and possible types of contributions Social activity monitoring and data mining (ala Google Flu Trends) Build a design science for human computation systems for scientific discovery Need to analyze lots of data points, success and failure stories Create techniques to engage retired scientists and engineers in ongoing work Make sure we analyze what scientists actually do

Social Computing: Discussion Topics (II) Defining workflows with more elaborate processes that mix human processing with computer processing Humans to do more complex tasks Can facilitate reproducibility Enticing people to participate while ensuring quality Some existing systems should be revisited to be designed as social systems Workflow libraries and reuse tools Data curation tools Open software

Social Computing: Discussion Topics (III) Systems that enable collaborations that are not deliberate but ad-hoc Opportunistic partnerships Unexpected uses of data Systems that support a marketplace of ideas and track credit New ideas/discoveries are often seen as a threat to the status quo, how do we facilitate integration Empower people to share ideas on a problem while credited Incentive structures for new models of scholarly communication, such as blogs