28 July 2008 - CFP

I found this fascinating. It's a hook for the phd that brings me more in line with Freddy's interests. It's sufficiently 'intellectual' and I just find it very compelling.

Journal of Information Sciences

"The optimal usage of distributed computing, data and knowledge resources has always been the means in order to tackle hard problems in fields, such as science, engineering and medicine. The SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, Berkeley, USA) project is one prominent example in this category followed by the Human Genome project. It is no surprise that projects like e-Science, as recently launched by the K government, and the GRID computing are meant to create a computing paradigm, where “the computer is the network”. In all these approaches, however, the problem seems to be well defined and no synergies across participants from different cultural and professional backgrounds are requested in order to create a solution…

with the rise of the Social and Semantic Web, however, the answer of “what is a network” has been relaxed by the inclusion of users and user communities, which form social networks via computerized means. Ecosystems of humans and machines have been created where the involvement of human beings as creators and consumers of data and knowledge as well as in problem solving and learning tasks has been of paramount importance. Clusters of computers have been enhanced by clusters of humans. Formation of social groups follows the same principles of social behaviour, common interests, e.g., studies, hobbies, games. Wikipedia has been a success story of a collaborative environment for knowledge creation and sharing. Facebook, MySpace, del.icio.us, Flickr have been further success stories of social networking with digital media…This special issue explores the notion of this human-machine model of Collective Intelligence (CI) and its potential to become a new computing paradigm for creating solutions or strategies to tackle difficult problems, where the synergistic interactions of a group of people with diverse cultural and professional backgrounds are requested. This issue aims at studying the move from (system-) collected knowledge and intelligence, to collective knowledge and intelligence and exploring the challenge of boosting the collective IQ of organizations and society where both human and machine contribute actively to the resulting intelligence with each doing best what they do best."