Second ACM International Workshop on Mobile Systems for Computational Social Science

Colocated with ACM UbiComp'13

Zurich, Switzerland

9 September 2013          


http://events.cs.bham.ac.uk/MCSS2013/


*Scope of the Workshop*

For decades, behavioral and social scientists have strived to understand the complex combination of factors that influence the decisions, activities and interactions of people in everyday life. Through conventional approaches, such as self-reports and controlled laboratory studies, considerable progress has been made. However, these methods have fundamental limitations in their ability to unobtrusively collect fine-grain behavioral data in natural settings.Recent advances in mobile sensing technology are promising to
overcome these obstacles by delivering radically different tools for in-situ human behavior monitoring able to operate at much larger scales than previously thought possible.

Today, mobile sensing platforms – primarily, mobile phones – are causing behavioral and social scientists to completely rethink how they study people in real-world environments. A variety of factors have combined to put mobile phones in this position. First, mobile phones are ubiquitous: there are billions of mobile phone users and the market continues to grow worldwide. Second, mobile phones are unobtrusive: due to their ubiquity, users are not consciously aware of the presence of mobile phones, unlike purpose-built devices that depend on user self-reports. Third, mobile phones are powerful and sensor rich platforms: today’s phones have many embedded sensors (e.g., accelerometer, Bluetooth, GPS, and magnetometer) that can accurately capture user behavior; they are also equipped with powerful
processors, which allow applications to exploit computationally intensive algorithms to run locally on the phones. Finally, due to their proliferation, mobile phones systems can scale: experiments based on mobile applications can potentially reach millions of people. Before we can fully leverage the potential of mobile phone sensing systems, a variety of open problems must be addressed. For example, because mobile phones are energy constrained, efficient algorithms able to make accurate behavioral inferences from sensor data  (with cloud resources exploited when needed) must be developed. Similarly, fundamental challenges remain in the management of personal data and the understanding of real-time processing of sensor workloads. If these technical challenges can be overcome mobile systems will represent a key building block for the emerging discipline of computational social science. 

The goal of this one-day workshop is to bring together researchers either active, or
interested, in mobile systems for social analysis and applications. We anticipate a lively forum to discuss recent advances in the design, implementation and evaluation of this new class of mobile systems. The workshop will be open to contributions from researchers from various domains who tackle these challenging research problems using their own unique perspective. The aim is to discuss the many open issues in this area towards identifying novel solutions to be investigated – in addition to fostering  collaborations among the workshop participants. We will especially welcome highly innovative and/or controversial contributions, debunking or confirming existing system design methodology, for example by means of new experimental results. 

We will invite to submit papers in the following areas:

- Design, implementation and evaluation of mobile systems for computational social science;
- Experiment design of social and behavioural experiments using mobile
technologies;
- Design and implementation of algorithms for mobile system applications;
- Architectural issues, including middleware and operating systems support for social applications;
- Integration of mobile technologies and cloud computing for social applications;
- Energy efficiency issues in designing socially-aware mobile systems;
- Mobile social sensing systems;
- Implementation of mobile technologies for psychological and health interventions;
- Integration of mobile and Web technologies for behavioral intervention;
- Deployment and testing of mobile systems for social analysis and applications;
- Data collection, anonomyzation and storage of social and behavioral data collected by means of mobile systems;
- Privacy issues related to the design of socially-aware systems.

*Submission format*

Page length is up to 6 pages (10pt ACM format). The proceedings will be published by ACM and will be available in
the ACM Digital Library. Papers should not be anonymized. Papers should be submitted electronically in PDF through EasyChair. Instructions are available in the workshop Website.

*Workshop Chairs*

Nicholas Lane (Microsoft Research Asia, China)
Mirco Musolesi (University of Birmingham, UK)

*Programme Committee*

Andrew T. Campbell (Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College, USA)
Tanzeem Choudhury (Information Science, Cornell University, USA)
David Coyle (Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol, UK)
Tamlin Conner (Department of Psychology, University of Otago, New Zealand)
Daniel Gatica-Perez (IDIAP, Switzerland)
Samuel Gosling (Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, USA)
Inseok Hwang (Centre for Mobile Software Platform, KAIST, South Korea)
Neal Lathia (Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK)
Mikkel Baun Kjærgaard (Department of Computer Science,
Aarhus University, Denmark)
Cecilia Mascolo (Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK)
Matthias R. Mehl (Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, USA)
Emiliano Miluzzo (AT&T Labs, USA)
Petteri Nurmi (Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Finland)
Thomas Phan (Samsung R&D Center, USA)
Veljko Pejovic (School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK)
Peter Jason Rentfrow (School of Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK)
Mark Weal (School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK)
Cornelia Wrzus (Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany)
Lucy Yardley (School of Psychology, University of Southampton)

*Workshop Webchair*

Antonio Lima (University of Birmingham, UK)



--
Mirco Musolesi
School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham
Edgbaston B15 2TT Birmingham, United Kingdom
Web: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~musolesm



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