Social Information Processing March 26-28, 2008 AAAI Spring Symposium Stanford University

ISI USC Information Sciences Institute March 2008AAAI Social Information Processing Symposium Definition  Social Information Processing is ­an activity through which collective human actions organize knowledge ­process which allows us to collectively solve problems far beyond any individual’s capabilities ­a new information processing paradigm enabled by the Social Web

ISI USC Information Sciences Institute March 2008AAAI Social Information Processing Symposium The Social Web  The Social Web is a collection of technologies, practices and services that turn the Web into a platform for users to create and use content in a social context ­Authoring tools  blogs ­Collaboration tools  wikis, Wikipedia ­Tagging systems  del.icio.us, Flickr, CiteULike ­Social networking  Facebook, MySpace, Essembly ­Collaborative filtering  Digg, Amazon, Yahoo answers

ISI USC Information Sciences Institute March 2008AAAI Social Information Processing Symposium Social Web features  Users create content ­Articles, opinions, creative products  Users annotate content ­Metadata (e.g., tags) ­Ratings  Users create connections ­Between content and metadata ­Between content or metadata and users ­Among users (social networks)  Users interact ­Discuss and rate content

ISI USC Information Sciences Institute March 2008AAAI Social Information Processing Symposium Social Web is interesting  Social Web as a complex dynamical system ­Complex collective behavior emerges from actions taken by many users  Patterns emerge on large scale ­Variety of interactions between users  Coordination, collaboration, conflict …  Network vs environment-mediated

ISI USC Information Sciences Institute March 2008AAAI Social Information Processing Symposium Social Web is interesting  Social Web as a knowledge-generating system ­Users express personal knowledge (through articles, tags, links, …) or modify knowledge expressed by others  Tailor information to individual user …  Personalization and recommendation  … or combine users’ knowledge to create a knowledgebase  Wikipedia, wikis  folksonomy  FAQs, …

ISI USC Information Sciences Institute March 2008AAAI Social Information Processing Symposium Social Web is interesting  Social Web as a problem-solving system ­By exposing human activity, Social Web allows users to harness the power of collective intelligence to solve problems  Manage the commons  Help the visually impaired get around in new places  Figure out who to trust

ISI USC Information Sciences Institute March 2008AAAI Social Information Processing Symposium Social Web is interesting  Lots of data for empirical studies ­Large-scale experimenation ­Social Web is amenable to analysis ­Design systems for optimal performance

ISI USC Information Sciences Institute March 2008AAAI Social Information Processing Symposium Social Web is challenging  Social Web is enormous and growing rapidly ­Some popular sites have >1 million users and >1 billion objects ­2G/day of “authored” content ­10-15G/day of user generated content [From Andrew Tomkins, Yahoo! Research]  Need new computational techniques to process massive data

ISI USC Information Sciences Institute March 2008AAAI Social Information Processing Symposium Social Web is challenging  Social Web is highly dynamic ­New users and content ­Links are created and destroyed  Need new computational approaches to deal with dynamic data

ISI USC Information Sciences Institute March 2008AAAI Social Information Processing Symposium Social Web is challenging  Social Web is highly heterogeneous ­Variety of content and media types ­Variety of information domains  Needs to be even more heterogeneous ­Ability to express knowledge at different granularity levels  Micro-tagging: tag data within pages ­Ability to express more complex knowledge  Specify relations: e.g., semantics of links  Need algorithms to combine heterogeneous data

ISI USC Information Sciences Institute March 2008AAAI Social Information Processing Symposium Social Web is challenging  Social Web is highly diverse ­User participation has power law distribution ­User expertise has power law distribution  Need approaches that go beyond ‘wisdom of crowds’ to combine knowledge from users ­Averaging is not always the best solution ­How do we best exploit diversity?  Understand incentives for user participation ­Methods for improving content/metadata quality