Behavior and social science are increasingly recognized as a key component in business intelligence and problem-solving. Behavior and Social Informatics and Computing (BSIC) has been emerged as a new scientific field that studies effective methodologies, techniques and technical tools for representing, modeling, analyzing, understanding and managing human behaviors and social characteristics. Unlike traditional behavior and social science, which mainly focuses on qualitative and explicit behavior and social appearance and drivers, BSIC intends to support explicit behavioral and societal involvement through a conversion from transactional entity spaces to behavior/social feature spaces, through a better understanding of interactions between users and computing systems and better modeling of social concepts like trust, credibility, privacy, and, and influence, further genuine analysis of native behavior/social patterns and impacts, and the facilitation of deployment of information technologies in various socially-centric application domains. A typical BSIC process consists of key components including behavior/social modeling and representation, behavior/social data construction, behavior/social impact modeling, behavior/social pattern analysis and utilization, and behavior/social interplay with information technologies. Some popular examples of BSIC include web usage and user preference analysis, collective intelligence and crowd behavior, credit evaluation, exceptional behavior analysis of terrorist and criminals, and trading pattern analysis of investors in capital markets.

Recent years have witnessed increasing research attention on behavior/social-oriented analyses including behavioral and social interaction and network, behavioral/social patterns, behavioral/social impacts, the formation of behavioral/social-oriented groups and collective intelligence, and behavioral/social intelligence emergence. This trend raises the need for launching the International Workshop on Behavior and Social Informatics and Computing (BSIC). The main aim of the proposed workshop is to continue the success and impact achieved. It will become a premier forum, in which BSIC is promoted as a serious and important research forum by its own with relevant challenging problems and emerging issues to be formally addressed, and we would like to merge the contributing taskforce from these two communities into a synergy of excellence, to create a new disciplinary area with increased scientific profile and influence. BSIC’2013 aims to increase potential collaborations and partnerships by bringing together academic researchers and industry practitioners from data mining, statistics and analytics, business and marketing, finance and politics, and behavioral, social and psychological sciences with the objectives to present updated research efforts and progresses on foundational and emerging interdisciplinary topics of BSIC, exchange new ideas and identify future research directions.

Related Event: IJCAI'13 tutorial