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Interesting Lecture – The Impact of Social Computing: Challenges and Opportunities for Europe

by Yves Punie.

http://videolectures.net/forum2010_punie_tisc/

“Apart from the unexpected and impressive growth of social computing applications there are two fundamental aspects of SC that are expected to lead to major impacts on society and the economy: (1) the fact that users are taking the lead in the way products and services are shaped and used, leading to user empowerment and to users taking up taking up new roles in the digital society and economy and (2) the trend towards peer-produced resources and towards harnessing collective knowledge whereby the sum of the shared contributions from people are providing more added value than could be produced by groups, networks or communities that are small, closed and inwards-looking.

Social Computing poses the risk of a new ‘digital divide’, as new applications and technologies arise and people need to learn the critical skills and knowledge about information accuracy, reliability, quality of content. Major threats related to security, safety and privacy are also emerging, either new or more threatening than before.

If well managed however, social computing can have an important positive impact on the key challenges the EU is facing for 2020 and lead to increases in public service quality and democratic governance and business productivity.”

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Socialize or Perish: Relating Social Behavior at a Scientific Conference to Publication Citations

Scientific progress depends on communication and exchange of ideas. Among others, scientific conferences are considered to be the primary venues for connecting with fellow scientists. Would those who are more active in the conference have more impact in terms of the citations today? In this paper we present an analysis of human behavioral data collected at a scientific conference by means of SpotMe devices distributed to the participants. These handheld devices allow conference participants to connect to others, receive alert once others are in the proximity, and to send messages. We complement the behavioral data gathered at the conference with measures of scientific productivity over nine years following the conference, and draw conclusion out of this joint data set. It is confirmed that social activity during the conference is significantly correlated with citation counts for full papers.

publishorperish

 

M. Funk, J. Hu, and M. Rauterberg, “Socialize or Perish: Relating Social Behavior at a Scientific Conference to Publication Citations,” in ASE International Conference on Social Informatics (SocialInformatics 2012), Washington D.C. USA, 2012, pp. 113-120.
FULLTEXT: PDF HTML REFERENCE: BibTeX EndNote
DOI: 10.1109/SocialInformatics.2012.48