SBP 2011 Conference Highlights Through Photos

The SBP 2011 conference has been a huge success from the outstanding tutorials and great keynotes, as well as paper presentations (with a refereed proceedings volume), plus social activities.





One of the absolute highlights was sponsorship of 30 students to attend this conference!

Many, many thanks to the sponsors: NSF, NIH, ONR. AFOSR, and ARO for bringing together computer scientists, social scientists from economists to anthropologists, operations researchers and management scientists, applied mathematicians, biologists, medical professionals, cognitive scientists and psychologists, as well as engineers and network scientists!

Special thanks to the Conference Co-chairs, Professor Dana Nau of the University of Maryland and Professor Sun-ki Chai of the University of Hawaii, and to the Program Co-Chairs: John Salerno of the Air Force Research Lab and Professor Jay Yang of the Rochester Institute of Technology for such an excellently organized conference, the terrific venue, and so many stimulating discussions plus such a delicious set of lunches and coffee breaks!

Special thanks also to the Conference Committee:

Huan Liu, Arizona State University
John Salerno, Air Force Reasearch Laboratory
Sun Ki Chai, University of Hawaii
Patricia L. Mabry, Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, National Institutes of Health
Dana Nau, University of Maryland
V.S. Subrahmanian, University of Maryland

It was an honor to be on this team as the tutorial chair!

Exciting Tutorials at the International SBP 2011 Conference!

I am very pleased that the tutorials have been finalized for the 2011 SBP (Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction) Conference, which will take place March 28-31, 2011 at the University of Maryland College Park.

Confirmed tutorial givers and their tutorial titles at SBP 2011 are:

Dr. Alex "Sandy" Pentland of the Media Lab at MIT: "Toolkits for Computational Social Science: Using Honest Signals to Predict and Shape Human Responses;"

Dr. Patty Mabry of NIH and Dr. Nate Osgood of the University of Saskatchewan: "Public Health Concepts: An Introduction for Modelers;"

Dr. Allen Tien of MDLOGIX and two team members: "Social Network Analysis of Personal and Group Networks," and

Dr. Jarideep Srivastava of the University of Minnesota: "Behavioral Informatics: Data Management and Mining Techniques Enabling Computational Behavioral Science."

The above tutorials will be delivered on March 28, 2011.

Tutorials and keynote talks are some of my favorite events at professional conferences so I hope that you can join us next March.

As the tutorial chair for this conference I am delighted with the above list of speakers and look forward to their tutorials! I might add that the program committee has been wonderful in identifying outstanding keynote speakers, which include Dr. Kim Thompson of Harvard's School of Public Health and Dr. Herb Gintis of the Santa Fe Institute (and a former colleague of mine at UMass Amherst).

Keep on checking the above conference website link, as information will continue to get posted.

2011 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction (SBP) Call for Papers

Mark your calendars!

Information on the 2011 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction is now available on the conference website! The conference will take place March 29-31, 2011 at the University of Maryland College Park, with tutorials on March 28.

I enjoyed last year's conference so much at which Dr. Patrick Qiang and I presented a tutorial on Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World that I agreed to be the tutorial chair at this year's conference.

This conference is truly interdisciplinary and the researchers and practitioners that we met last year were fascinating to interact with.

Call for Papers and Posters

Papers or posters are solicited on research issues, theories, and applications. Topics of interests include, but are not limited to:

1. Military and security applications of SBP
   1. Group formation and evolution in the political context
   2. Technology and flash crowds
   3. Networks and political influence
   4. Information diffusion
   5. Group representation and profiling
2. Health applications of SBP
   1. Social network analysis to understand health behavior
   2. Modeling of health policy and decision making
   3. Modeling of behavioral aspects of infectious disease spread
   4. Intervention design and modeling for behavioral health
3. Basic research on sociocultural and behavioral processes using SBP
   1. Group interaction and collaboration
   2. Group formation and evolution
   3. Group representation and profiling
   4. Cultural patterns and representation
   5. Social conventions and social contexts
   6. Influence process and recognition
   7. Public opinion representation
   8. Viral marketing and information diffusion
   9. Psycho-cultural situation awareness
4. Methodological issues in SBP
   1. Verification and validation
   2. Sensitivity analysis
   3. Matching technique or method to research questions
   4. Metrics and evaluation
   5. Methodological innovation
   6. Model federation and integration
   7. Limitations of and barriers to SBP
   8. Research gaps and opportunities

The full call for papers can also be downloaded here in pdf format and the deadline for paper submissions is November 6, 2010.

For the 2011 SBP Conference Committee click here.