There will be a workshop on cognitive models of social information systems at CHI 2010, April 11th (Atlanta, GA, USA).
The main goal of this workshop is to identify, discuss and organize the current knowledge user behavior,
primarily at the individual level and to predict effects of different interface features to inform engineering
decisions in social information systems. This workshop will provide a venue for researchers in academia and
industry to collaborate on developing newer perspectives on the use of cognitive models to study social information systems.
The two key goals of this workshop are: (a) bring together researchers in academia and industry with different backgrounds
(cognitive science, computer science, HCI, psychology) to discuss how models of human cognition may inform designs of large scale,
web-based social information systems and (b) identify research ideas and methods for developing cognitive models of users in
social information systems that scale up to explain emergent behavior at the social or network levels.
Social information systems have gained significant popularity over the last several years. Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace and social tagging
systems such as del.icio.us and Bibsonomy attract several thousand users a day. While serving different social functions, these systems provide its users increased
social presence and opportunities for easy social interaction. User behavior on these systems has been generally conducted based on analysis of snapshots of
long-term user interaction patterns such as logs of user activities, connections between users, etc. But, very little is known about the underlying cognitive
mechanisms during these interactions. A deeper understanding of the individual cognitive mechanisms is important for engineering better designs that support
user behavior in social systems. Additionally, models that aim at characterizing these mechanisms can potentially complement existing research and provide a
basis for a more complete explanation of emergent social behavior in social information systems.
Potential topics of interest include user models of: information search in social information systems; information foraging, sensemaking, use of wikis,
social bookmarking systems, social networks, etc.; Other social media such as photos, videos, etc and computational models that can be used to predict behavior in
such systems. We hope to address the following research topics:
• How do
individuals use social information systems?
• Can cognitive models be used to characterize social behavior?
• How can cognitive models be developed to facilitate engineering decisions during the designs of social information systems?
• Cognitive and predictive models on the use of social information systems
Submit an 3-5 page research or position paper about your work. Papers developing models (cognitive and statistical) or presenting
from theoretical positions are also encouraged. Papers will be reviewed and selected based on their relevance to the workshop and ability
to contribute to the discussion.
Email your paper, in PDF, to socialcog2010@gmail.com with the subject line
"CHI 2010 Cognitive Models Workshop” by December 15, 2009. Authors will be notified by January 10th, 2010.
Papers should be in the ACM SIGCHI submissions format.
The selected papers will appear in the workshop proceedings. Workshop participants must register for at least one day of the CHI conference
as well as the workshop.
Wai-Tat Fu
Applied Cognitive Science Lab
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL 61801
wfu@illinois.edu
Thomas Kannampallil
Applied Cognitive Science Lab
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL 61801
thomasg@ist.psu.edu