First ACM International Workshop on Mobile Systems for Computational Social Science
Colocated with ACM MobiSys’12
Low Wood Bay, The Lake District, United Kingdom
25 June 2012
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/conference/mcss2012
*Scope of the Workshop*
For decades, behavioral scientists have struggled to understand the various factors that influence
behavior. Observational and self-report methods have shed some light on those factors, but the nature of
such methods can elicit responses that are not always completely accurate. Furthermore, such methods
usually capture behavior as it occurs in a laboratory as opposed to behavior as it naturally occurs in
everyday life. Recent advances in mobile technology provide some extremely powerful tools for
overcoming these obstacles.
Indeed, mobile phones represent an ideal platform for studying behavior and interactions in real-life
contexts. One reason is because mobile phones are ubiquitous: there are billions of mobile phone users
and the market has seen unprecedented growth in recent years. Secondly, mobile phones are unobtrusive:
because of their ubiquity, users are not generally aware of the presence of mobile phones, unlike
behavioral monitoring in laboratories or through purpose-built devices that depend on self-reports.
Thirdly, mobile phones are powerful and sensor rich platforms: modern mobile phones have many
sensors embedded in them (e.g., accelerometer, Bluetooth, GPS, and magnetometer) that can accurately
capture user behavior; they are also equipped with powerful processors, which allow applications to
exploit computationally intensive algorithms to run locally on the phones. There are many open
challenges in terms of system design: for instance, since mobile phones are battery powered, efficient
algorithms have to be developed to derive accurate inferences from sensor data, and cloud resources can
be exploited to support complex computations. Finally, given their diffusion, mobile phones allow to build
systems at scale, i.e., supporting mobile applications potentially used by millions of people at the same
time. Data collected by means of mobile phones can then be used for analysis of human behavior and
interactions. There are also many challenges in this area, especially related to the management of
personal data and real-time processing of information. Mobile systems will represent a key foundational
component of the emerging discipline of computational social science.
The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers working or interested in mobile systems for
social analysis and applications. We wish to build a lively forum to propose and discuss recent advances in
designing, implementing and evaluating this emerging class of mobile systems. The workshop will be
open to contributions from researchers tackling these challenging research problems from different
perspectives. The aim is to discuss the many open issues in this area trying to identify novel solutions to
be investigated, also by means of collaborations among the participants of the workshop. We will welcome
especially highly innovative and/or controversial contributions, debunking or confirming existing system
design methodology, for example by means of new experimental results.
We invite to submit papers in the following areas:
- Design, implementation and evaluation of mobile systems for computational social science;
- Experiment design of social and behavioural experiments using mobile technologies;
- Design and implementation of algorithms for mobile system applications;
- Architectural issues, including middleware and operating systems support for social applications;
- Integration of mobile technologies and cloud computing for social applications;
- Energy efficiency issues in designing socially-aware mobile systems;
- Mobile social sensing systems;
- Implementation of mobile technologies for psychological and health interventions;
- Integration of mobile and Web technologies for behavioral intervention;
- Deployment and testing of mobile systems for social analysis and applications;
- Data collection, anonimyzation and storage of social and behavioral data collected by means of mobile
systems;
- Privacy issues related to the design of socially-aware systems.
*Submission Format*
Page length is up to 6 pages (10pt ACM format). The proceedings will be published by ACM and will be
available in the ACM Digital Library. Papers should not be anonymized. Papers should be submitted
electronically in PDF through EasyChair. Instructions are available in the workshop Website.
*Important Dates*
Submission deadline: March 31, 2012
Notification deadline: April 22, 2012
Camera-ready deadline: TBA
Workshop date: June 25, 2012
*Organization*
Workshop Program Chairs
Cecilia Mascolo (Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK)
Mirco Musolesi (School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK)
Jason Peter Rentfrow (Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies, University of
Cambridge, UK)
Workshop Program Committee
Jan Blom (Nokia Research Centre Lausanne, Switzerland)
Andrew T. Campbell (Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College, USA)
Tamlin Conner (Department of Psychology, University of Otago, New Zealand)
David Coyle (Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol, UK)
David De Roure (Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford, UK)
Parisa Eslambolchilar (Department of Computer Science, Swansea University, UK)
Jon Froehlich (Human-Computer Interaction Lab, University of Maryland College Park, USA)
Daniel Gatica-Perez (IDIAP, Switzerland)
Samuel Gosling (Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, USA)
Nicholas Lane (Microsoft Research Asia)
Neal Lathia (Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK)
Anmol Madam (Media Lab, MIT, USA, and Ginger.io)
Matthias R. Mehl (Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, USA)
Petter Nurmi (Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Finland)
Wei Pan (Media Lab, MIT, USA)
Thomas Phan (Samsung R&D Center, USA)
Alessandro Vinciarelli (Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, UK, and IDIAP,
Switzerland)
Mark Weal (School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK)
Cornelia Wrzus (Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany)
Lucy Yardley (School of Psychology, University of Southampton)
Copyright © 2012