SACC 2015 - Social Aspects of Cognition and Computing Symposium

We invite submissions to this one-day Symposium in the area on the intersection of computer science and social sciences. Known as social computing, this intersection has far reaching consequences for many fields including AI and philosophy. In order to have a fruitful discussion we intend social computing in a broad sense to explore different levels of social behavior in computational systems, both natural and artifactual.
We welcome contributions on the following topics (but not exclusively):
I. Social computing in relation to cognitive computing and affective computing: Social computing in relation to cognitive computing (models of how the human brain senses, reasons, and responds to stimulus) and affective computing (where machine responses to emotional states of a human):
At present cognition is typically construed as rational behavior, considered separate from emotion. However Daniel Kahneman studied two modes of thinking that humans use when making decisions: fast thinking (that is intuitive, and based on gut feeling) and slow thinking (based on rational, logical reasoning).
Currently, both social computing and cognitive computing are typically dealing with rational (slow) thinking. What about quick, intuitive thinking? How does cognition relate subsymbolic and symbolic, feeling and reasoning? In connection to affective computing, we are also interested in the conceptual analysis of affective presence (Kristina Höök) and its role in social cognition.
II. Strategies for analyzing the problem of representation: A plausible strategy to analyze the problem of representation from a philosophical perspective implies the comparison between human and machine capacities and skills.
Searle presented an interesting theory of representation based on the mind’s capacities to represent objects and to the linguistic capacities to extend the representation to social entities. Brandom introduces compelling notion of representation in social terms and explores the differences between human and artificial mind. For machine representation current results in AI and cognitive robotics are of interest.
III. The relations between knowledge and categorization, and the promotion of communication among experts and users: Knowledge plays a relevant role for categorization (Smith, Brachman, Berners lee, Lassila, MacGregor, Knublauch, Oberle, Tetlow, Peroni, Signore among others) and, nowadays, there is a strong effort to promote communication among experts and users. Interesting theories focus also on the social dimension of knowledge representation and can therefore express the main goal of the Semantic Web research. The problem is to formally represent knowledge as it becomes shareable and ready to be used by humans and machines.
IV. Social computing and online relationships: Compared with personal computing, the concept of social computing attempts to capture the online relationships that exist among users, or between users and?for instance?service providers and businesses. Yet this can engender apparent contradictions. For example, one current prerequisite of online social media is that individual users interact via a (more or less formal) platform, which requires participation by these discrete agents and includes (again, more or less) rigidity of structures. Systems and modes of social engagement can be prescriptive, limiting, or can even preclude or deter offline social engagement. Just how social is social media?
V. The rise of social computing and its ethical issues: The rise of social computing has compounded existing ethical issues as well as generating new ones, including (but not limited to): informed consent and willing participation; data sharing and privacy; copyright and ownership of ideas and thoughts; ‘right to be forgotten’ legislation; manipulation by advertisers, companies and political factions; crowdsourcing and the rise of online political movements; problem of the ‘filter-bubble’; safety and identity fraud, etc.