PSC 2015 - International workshop on Platforms for social computing

Social computers have been characterised as complex systems that harness the innate problem solving, action and information gathering powers of humans and the environments in which they live to tackle social and economic problems:
The hardware of a social computer is supplied by humans (taken as individuals as well as collectively in the form of human-powered institutions) and the environment where these humans live, including all relevant artifacts which can be natural or man-made, as well as computational devices.
The software of a social computer is comprised of human capabilities, organisational and social rules and norms, social conventions, as well as computer software.
The algorithms of social computation are defined by socially accepted goals and corresponding actions which can be taken to achieve local as well as global goals.
Finally, the processing of algorithms in social computers are collective, decentralised, goal-oriented actions whose emergent results can be iteratively evaluated and steered towards active goals.
Social computers can be found in natura in a variety of scenarios, as well as designed to tackle specific issues of social and economic relevance. They are evolving social systems, whose components (i.e. their hardware, software, algorithms and processing) are dynamically and evolutionarily designed together with their goals and available resources. The analysis and design of social computers require novel methodological practices, blending existing techniques and experiences from applied social sciences and computational sciences.
In order to design, implement and continuously refine social computers, specialised languages are required to build specifications, and corresponding computational platforms are required to support, manage and provide a computational realisation of social computations. An essential aspect to be represented in such languages is interaction between components of social computers, so that the internal behaviour of these components can be abstracted and the resulting systems can be analysed as a whole. Additionally, since these languages should be used to communicate specifications as well as processing results to participants in social computers (including humans who behave as components in social computers), they should be concise and simple to understand. Finally, in order to build social computers whose behaviour can be verified with respect to desired requirements and attributes, these languages should have a formal underpinning and the corresponding specifications and processing results should be formally verifiable.
In the present workshop we invite authors to present ongoing efforts to model complex systems as social computers, as well as initiatives to build platforms to design and implement social computers which fulfill, at least partially, the list of requirements outlined in the previous paragraph.