SWITP 2012 - Workshop on Social Web of Intelligent Things & People

Communication and technology are moving out from offices and home environments into the outside world. Due to the proliferation of mobile devices, people have uninterrupted Internet connection and constant access to information in virtually any situation. As a consequence, the Social Web is taking up a very concrete role in the way people experience and interact with their surroundings. At the same time, research on the Internet of Things is evolving towards the idea of turning physical things into active participants on the Web, by endowing them with virtual counterparts that can be either embedded, hosted in the Cloud or centralized. The result is a heterogeneous space consisting of both people and objects spanning the virtual and real world, in which social relations can naturally extend to smart objects.
SWITP aims at exploring a Future Social Web where things play an active role as social agents, building a personal life memory, a sense of personal identity, and ultimately a social intelligence and behavior, based on their interaction with users and with their interrelatedness with other things and people both in the real and in the virtual world.
While the field of Artificial Intelligence has a lot to contribute to this emerging field, new challenges and issues have yet to be defined and explored.
The SWITP workshop wants in particular to investigate and discuss how Artificial Intelligence techniques and methodologies can contribute to this vision, looking into novel opportunities, challenges and open issues for AI in the context of a Social Web of Intelligent Things and People. The goal is to provide a forum for proposing innovative and open models, applications and scenarios, as well as new frameworks and methodologies for moving towards this envisioned future.
SWITP focuses on the social aspect of the Future Internet of Things. A sibling workshop, AI-AT-IE 2012, focuses on AI problems and approaches while building truly intelligent environments. If that is your area of research, you may want to check out their site.
SWITP aims at providing an open ground for discussion and exchange among researchers. For this reason we encourage the submission not only of ongoing research work, but also of demos, try-it-outs, and “open challenge” notes. For a description of these alternate types of submissions see the submissions section.