Call for papers: Cooperation of Self-Interested Agents and Collective Learning in Social Networks

A special issue of International Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing

The manipulation of self-interested collective agents can significantly affect the global optimisation goal of the designed algorithms. However, it requires provably optimal solutions to the NP hard (non–polynomial) optimisation problem and thus cannot be applied to large problems. Therefore, one interesting open question is how to achieve the desired social properties with approximation algorithms such as local search optimisation algorithms. A promising direction is to use computational complexity to prevent manipulations from bounded-rational agents.

However, most results in the literature rely on the worst-case complexity, which is not applicable in practice because many NP-hard problems are easy in the average case. For example, social blog analysis and collective learning can easily be incorporated with natural swarm learning. This could be a sound implementation of business modelling, to investigate adaptive questionnaire-based collective responses for a particular product segment and thus to infer choice models of individual groups.

To summarise, this special issue will be dedicated in developing new hybrid intelligence-based local search algorithms that achieve both efficiency and socially-desired behavior, and applying these techniques to emerging applications of combinatorial optimisation. Papers from a wide range research, from theoretical investigations to practical applications, are welcome.

Suitable topics include, but are not limited to:

• Software testing
• Fundamentals and theories of social computing
• Social network analysis and application
• Community identification; expert finding
• Recommender systems; collaborative filtering; social recommendation
• Question and answering analysis; opinion mining
• Weblogs, microblogs, wikis, forums, newsgroups, community media sites analysis
• Human-computer interaction; social media tools; navigation and visualisation
• Web 2.0 and semantic web
• Crowdsourcing in social computing
• Social behaviour modelling
• Information diffusion and viral marketing in social networks
• Social system design and architectures

Important Dates
Submission deadline: 15 March, 2013 (extended)