Techno-Social Smart Systems

Since its inception, the Internet has evolved into an ubiquitous connectivity tool that pervades all technologies in everyday use. Overall, the Internet has profoundly changed the society we live in, the way we behave (online and offline), as well as our activities, preferences, and performance. Connectivity and sensing are key features that pervade online social platforms, fitness trackers, smartphones and smartwatches, and increasingly more digital devices that generate a wealth of human-centric data used by researchers to uncover the complex dynamics of human behavior in social and techno-social systems.

"Future Internet: Techno-Social Smart Systems" covers a broad range of human-centered computing research: from online social media dynamics, to the study of network phenomena such as information diffusion and influence using statistical and computational methods, from human-centric experiments with sensors to affective computing, from natural experiments to massive-scale simulations, the goal of "Future Internet: Techno-Social Smart Systems" is to become the premium venue for open-access publication of human-centered computing research.

Examples of topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

(1) Online Social Media:

- Social innovation and affecting change through social media
- Social mobilization and protest
- Prediction of real world phenomena from social media data (politics, economics, health, crises, etc.)
- Credibility of online content, trust, disinformation, and bots
- Technology-mediated information on social media: search, navigation, ranking, visualization
- Methods for content analysis: sentiment and emotions, linguistic cues, topics, metadata, etc.

(2) Social Network Structure, Dynamics, and Network Science Methods:

- Link prediction and missing data recovery in social networks
- Temporal networks and dynamics of social interactions
- Community structure in social systems and collective human behavior in networks
- Data mining and machine learning for high-dimensional social network data
- Group formation, evolution and group behavior analysis
- Modeling, tracking and forecasting dynamic groups in social media
- Community detection and dynamic community structure analysis

(3) Diffusion Phenomena, Contagion and Influence:

- Information propagation and behavioral diffusion in socio-technical systems
- Statistical and causal inference methodologies for human and social systems
- Anomaly and change-point detection in social systems
- Social contagion in temporally evolving networks
- Interdependent social contagion processes
- Viral propagation in online social networks
- Temporal and geographical patterns of information diffusion

(4) Human Dynamics, Behaviors, and Performance:

- Data-driven and theoretical approaches to influence modeling
- Human performance in social systems including games, forums and experiments
- Analysis and detection of characteristic patterns in human and social systems
- Cognitive dynamics, limited attention, bounded rationality, and belief formation
- Coevolution of network and behavior
- Location, human mobility, and mobile behavior
- Motivational affordances, engagement, retention, incentives, and gamification

(5) Natural and Human-Centric Experiments:

- Real-world applications in social network analysis
- Natural experiments in techno-social and economic systems
- Hybrid experiments, crowdsourcing, and Mechanical Turk experiments

(6) Human-Centered Sensing Technologies:

- Affective computing and affective technologies
- Interaction design and mechanism design
- Human-subject experiments with sensors, smartphones, and other devices

(7) MAS and ABM:

- Multi-Agent systems (MAS) and agent-based modeling (ABM) simulations of human systems
- Empirical calibration and validation of agent-based social models
- Detecting, modeling and simulating dynamics on and of social networks
- Social simulation. Cultural, opinion, and normative dynamics