SYMPOSIUM CHAIRS

Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic, Mälardalen University, Sweden.
Antonino Rotolo, CIRSFID, U. di Bologna, Italy.
Giovanni Sartor, EUI and CIRSFID, Italy.
Judith Simon, U. of Vienna, Austria and KIT, Germany.
Clara Smith, UNLP and UCALP, Argentina.

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This 2012 symposium merges the symposium entitled Social Turn: Social Computing - Social Cognition
 - Social Intelligence; and the SNAMAS symposium, focused on Social Networks and Multi-Agent 
Systems, which have precursor symposia in Social Computing at IACAP and the SNAMAS in AISB 
conferences.

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TOPICS

The field of social computing has two different foci: social and computational. There is the focus 
on socialness of social software or social web applications. Widespread examples of social software
are blogs, wikis, social bookmarking services, instant messaging services, and social networking 
sites. Social computing often uses various types of crowdsourcing techniques for aggregation of 
input from numerous users (public at large). Tools such as prediction markets, social tagging, 
reputation and trust systems as well as recommender systems are based on collaborative filtering 
and thus a result of crowdsourcing.

Another focus of social computing is on computational modeling of social behavior, among others 
through Multi-agent systems (MAS) and Social Networks (SN). MAS have an anchoring going beyond 
social sciences even when a sociological terminology is often used. There are several usages of 
MAS: to design distributed and/or hybrid systems; to develop philosophical theory; to understand 
concrete social facts, or to answer concrete social issues via modelling and simulation. MAS aim 
at modelling, among other things, cognitive or reactive agents who interact in dynamic environments
where they possibly depend on each other to achieve their goals. The emphasis is nowadays on 
constructing complex computational systems composed by agents which are regulated by various types
of norms, and behave like human social systems.

Finally, Social networks (SN) are social structures made of nodes (which are, generally, 
individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, 
such as values, visions, idea, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, conflict, trade, web 
links, disease transmission, among many others. Social networks analysis plays a critical role in 
determining the way specific problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which 
individuals succeed in achieving their goals. Social networks analysis has addressed also the 
dynamics issue, called dynamic networks analysis. This is an emergent scientific field that brings 
together traditional social network analysis, link analysis and multi-agent systems.

The symposium addresses, but is not limited to, the following topics:
- Conceptual issues such as Socialness (notions of the social used and/or enforced in social 
computing and research on social cognition or social intelligence) and Computational Models and 
mechanisms of social computing (information
processing) as well as models and social mechanisms of cognition and intelligence.
- Agency&  Action in social computing systems: How can agency be understood and/or modeled in 
systems consisting of human and non-human agents?
- Social Coordination&  Norms: Emergence of norms (e.g. in Wikipedia) and compliance including 
their computational modeling in socio-technical systems.
- Interaction&  Communication in socio-technical systems and their computational models
- Knowledge: the epistemological and ethical consequences of distributed knowledge creation in 
social computing and its computational models
- Relations between the individual and the social: Forming of individual existence in relation to 
social computing (e.g. digital identity), including its computational modeling.
- Agreement technologies.
- Electronic Institutions.
- Empirical and/or theoretical studies on a specific social or legal relationship (power, 
solidarity, legitimity, dependency...).
- Empirical and/or theoretical studies on social relations' regulations.
- Formalization of Normed Systems.
- Logical frameworks for representing, describing and analysing agent's social or legal 
relationships.
- Relations between the individual and the social: Forming of individual existence in relation to 
social computing (e.g. digital identity), including its info-computational modeling.
- Responsibility, Accountability&  Liability. What is epistemically and ethically responsible 
behavior with respect to social software and how can it be supported? What are the responsibilities of different human agents (e.g. software users, designers, researchers, etc)?
- Rules and standards.
- Social Networking Sites: philosophical implications of socialness in social networking sites 
(e.g., privacy, social structures, etc.).
- Info-computational models of social networking sites.
- The role of agents? attributes in structuring social and legal relationships.
- The role of specific social relationships in structuring groups and organizations.
- Trust in social computing. Differences and similarities between notions of trust e.g. in 
multi-agent systems, social networking sites, recommender  systems, etc. Differences and 
similarities between trust online and offline. How can trust be supported by a computational system  itself?

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IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline: February 1, 2012.
Notification of acceptance: March 1, 2012.
Camera ready version deadline: March 30, 2012.
Symposium: 2nd ? 3rd July, 2012.

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PAPER SUBMISSION

Guidelines for paper submission are as follows:
- The paper should be written in English.
- The maximum length of a paper is 6 A4-sized pages in ECAI format (format download:
http://www.aisb.org.uk/convention/aisb08/download.html).
- The paper should be in PDF format.
- Please choose one track between SOCIAL TURN and SNAMAS, and submit via the online paper 
submission system to the corresponding track at:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=socialturnmasaisbiac

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PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Doris Allhutter, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria.
Frederic Amblard, IRIT, U. Toulouse, France.
Giulia Andrighetto, ISTC-CNR, Italy.
Carlos Areces, UN Córdoba, Argentina.
Guido Boella, University of Torino, Italy.
Pompeu Casanovas, UAB Institute of Law and Technology, Spain.
Cristiano Castelfranchi, ISTC-CNR, Italy.
Mark Coeckelbergh  University of Twente, Netherlands Diego Compagna, University Duisburg-Essen, Germany.
Rosaria Conte, ISTC-CNR, Italy.
Charles Ess, Aarhus University, Danmark.
Ricardo Guibourg, UBA, Argentina.
Hamid Ekbia, Indiana University, Indiana Lars-Erik Janlert, Umeå University, Sweden Matthias Mailliard, Cemagref, France.
Antonio A. Martino, U. Salvador, Argentina.
Jeremy Pitt, Imperial College London, UK.
Leon Van der Torre, U Louxembourg, Louxembourg.
Serena Villata, University of Torino, Italy.
Jutta Weber, University Paderborn, Germany.
Christian Fuchs, Uppsala University, Sweden.

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POSTERS AND SYSTEM DEMONSTRATIONS
There will be one session for system demonstrations, and one day poster exhibition.

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PROCEEDINGS AND POST PROCEEDINGS
There will be a separate proceedings for each symposium, produced before the Congress. Each 
delegate at the Congress will receive, on arrival, a memory stick containing the proceedings of all symposia.

Selected papers of the Symposium, under a second review process, will be considered for a special 
issue of the AI&  Law Journal, Springer http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/journal/10506; and for 
the open access TripleC journalhttp://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC  .

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ABOUT THE CONGRESS

The Congress serves both as the year's AISB Convention and the year's IACAP conference. The 
Congress has been inspired by a desire to honour Alan Turing, and by the broad and deep 
significance of Turing's work to AI, to the philosophical ramifications of computing, and to 
Philosophy and computing more generally. The Congress is one of the events forming the Alan 
Turing Year (http://www.mathcomp.leeds.ac.uk/turing2012/).

The intent of the Congress is to stimulate a particularly rich interchange between AI and 
Philosophy on any areas of mutual interest, whether directly addressing Turing's own research 
output or not.

The Congress will consist mainly of a number of collocated Symposia on specific research areas, 
interspersed with Congress-wide refreshment breaks, social events and invited Plenary Talks. All 
papers other than the invited Plenaries will be given within Symposia.

This symposium is closely connected to UmoCoP, Symposium on Understanding and Modelling Collective 
Phenomena, which will be held on July 3rd-5th 2012. There will be a joint panel from both symposia 
on July 3rd.

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CONTACTS

For further inquiries please contact any of the chairs:
gordana.dodig-crnkovic@mdh.se,judith.simon@univie.ac.at  (SOCIAL COMPUTING - SOCIAL COGNITION - 
SOCIAL NETWORKS) antonino.rotolo@unibo.it,giovanni.sartor@libero.it,
csmith@info.unlp.edu.ar  (MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS)