[agents] CFP: IEEE Internet Computing Special Issue on Agents for Social Media

[Pinar Yolum]

IEEE Internet Computing
Agents for Social Media

Final submissions due: 13 February 2017
Publication issue: November/December 2017

Please email the guest editors a brief description of the article you
plan to submit by 13 January 2017.

Guest Editors: Michael Huhns and Pınar Yolum (ic6-2017 at computer.org)


Call for Papers

Social media is changing the way we access information, share
experiences, and in general, interact with others. Recent statistics
show that approximately 20 percent of time spent on the Web involves
social media. While some of this time is well spent (enjoying all its
benefits), some of the time is spent trying to overcome the challenges
that social media has introduced, such as identifying credible
information, searching for relevant content, ensuring that privacy
constraints are met, and overcoming security breaches.

A currently popular form of social media, microblogging, enables
individuals to share small pieces of information with many others whom
they might barely know. These individuals often have minimal credentials
— sometimes not even a full name. It isn’t clear whether they created
their own credentials and, if not, what the origin of those credentials
might be. Without knowing this, it’s difficult to judge the credibility
of information that microbloggers provide. Currently, users deal with
this by searching through other media to check whether the content is
actually true or try to identify ways to cross-check the information
with other users. It would be tremendously important if agents could
help identify trustworthy users in the system, as well as provide ways
to reason about the information’s provenance. Even when the
information’s credibility is guaranteed, there’s too much information to
be processed manually. Ideally, it would be helpful to have agents that
can mine social media, differentiate between important and unimportant
information, and communicate their results clearly.

A side effect of sharing information over social media is that users’
privacy is violated easily, either because shared content reaches an
unintended audience or other users share content about individuals
without the individual’s consent. Managing an individual’s privacy in
social media would be eased if personal agents could help maintain
requirements, verify whether the system abides with the requirements,
and cooperate with other agents as needed to ensure that the
requirements are met.

While most current social media is intended for sharing content, future
social media applications could offer models for other forms of
interactions, including business and government. Such models could make
use of agents that form teams, partnerships, and communities, foster
communications, and collaborate to formulate policies and reach
decisions. To realize these new forms, underlying computational
challenges would need to be addressed.

This special issue will address the questions, challenges, and
opportunities that arise at the intersection of agents and social media.
These contributions can include theoretical and applied research related
to the modeling, design, and development of agents and multiagent
systems for social media. Relevant topics include (but aren’t limited
to) the following:

    decision making in social media (application of agreement
technologies, negotiation, and argumentation);
    mining social media (data analytics and visualization);
    searching (information retrieval, information fusion, and
crowdsourcing);
    personalizing social media (including the content and view);
    ensuring cybersecurity for social media (surveillance, intrusion
detection, vulnerability analysis, and information forensics);
    respecting privacy in social media (learning users’ privacy
constraints, detecting privacy violations, and negotiating privacy
constraints on mutual posts);
    engendering trust based on provenance for social media;
    conducting business over social media (models, teamwork,
gamification, and agent-human collectives);
    playing games over social media (interaction design, social games,
and augmented reality);
    forming communities over social media (building, detecting, and
maintaining); and
    engaging the elderly.

Submission Guidelines

All submissions must be original manuscripts of fewer than 5,000 words,
focused on Internet technologies and implementations. All manuscripts
are subject to peer review on both technical merit and relevance to IC’s
international readership — primarily practicing engineers and academics
who are looking for material that introduces new technology and broadens
familiarity with current topics. We do not accept white papers, and
papers which are primarily theoretical or mathematical must clearly
relate the mathematical content to a real-life or engineering
application. To submit a manuscript, please log on to ScholarOne
(https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com:443/ic-cs) to create or access an
account, which you can use to log on to IC’s Author Center and upload
your submission.

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