The MacArthur Foundation has announced its 2016 MacArthur Fellows, a list that features 23 individuals who “are breaking new ground in areas of public concern, in the arts, and in the sciences.” The Fellowship grants each recipient $625,000 in order to pursue their interests for the benefit of human society. This year’s list includes two computer scientists – Subhash Khot, professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU and Bill Thies, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research India. Professor Khot is a theoretical computer scientist who is focuses his research on the limits of computing, in particular the study of the Unique Games Conjecture (UGC), which postulates that the […]

Contributions to this post were made by Jenn Wortman Vaughan, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and a member of the workshop’s organizing committee.   The organizing committee for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Theoretical Foundations for Social Computing Workshop have released their workshop report. Social computing encompasses the mechanisms through which people interact with computational systems. It has blossomed into a rich research area of its own, with contributions from diverse disciplines including computer science, economics, and other social sciences. Yet a broad mathematical foundation for social computing is yet to be established, with a plethora of under-explored opportunities for mathematical research to impact social computing. This workshop, held in June 2015, brought together roughly […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Jenn Wortman Vaughan, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research.   Social computing encompasses the mechanisms through which people interact with computational systems like crowdsourcing markets, ranking and recommendation systems, online prediction markets, citizen science projects, and collaboratively edited wikis. Humans are active participants in these systems, making choices that determine the systems’ input, and therefore output. The output of these systems can be viewed as a joint computation between humans and machines, and can be richer than what either could produce alone. Social computing is blossoming into a rich research area, with contributions from diverse disciplines including computer science, economics, […]

This is a guest post, written by David W. McDonald, Chair and Associate Professor in the Human Centered Design and Engineering Department at the University of Washington. Designing a good application is hard. Designing a good computer system is harder. Designing a good system that accounts for the vagaries of people, their motivations, and their flaws is even harder. Yet that is the challenge that designers of social computing systems must solve. The difficulties of designing social computing systems derive from both the complexity of the software and hardware configurations, and the fact that some participants in a social computing system will not behave with positive goals or intent. That […]