Social-Computational Systems

The Social-Computational Systems (SoCS) program seeks to reveal new understanding about the properties that systems of people and computers together possess, and to develop theoretical and practical understandings of the purposeful design of systems to facilitate socially intelligent computing.  By better characterizing, understanding, and eventually designing for desired behaviors arising from computationally mediated groups of people at all scales, new forms of knowledge creation, new models of computation, new forms of culture, and new types of interaction will result.  Further, the investigation of such systems and their emergent behaviors and desired properties will inform the design of future systems.

The SoCS program will support research in socially intelligent computing arising from human-computer partnerships that range in scale from a single person and computer to an Internet-scale array of machines and people.  The program seeks to create new knowledge about the capabilities these partnerships can demonstrate - new affordances and new emergent behaviors, as well as unanticipated consequences and fundamental limits.  The program furthermore seeks to build models informed by disciplines ranging from computational complexity theory to behavioral sciences that will enable a scientific understanding of fundamental limits for such systems. The program seeks to foster new ideas that support even greater capabilities for socially intelligent computing, such as the design and development of systems reflecting explicit knowledge about people's cognitive and social abilities, new models of collective, social, and participatory computing, and new algorithms that leverage the specific abilities of massive numbers of human participants.

The SoCS program seeks to capitalize upon the collaborative knowledge and research methods of investigators in the computational and human sciences, recognizing that researchers in computer science and related disciplines often focus on the limits and capabilities of computation in isolation from the people that use computation, while researchers in the social sciences often focus on the use of technology or the capabilities of people with limited impact on how such knowledge can influence the design of new technologies.  Proposals that reflect collaborative efforts spanning computational and human centered approaches and perspectives are specifically encouraged.