The Web has changed the landscape of how humans interact socially. With the advent of Web 2.0, Social Computing has emerged as a new paradigm for computing relational information. Social Computing involves the investigation of collective intelligence by using computational techniques such as machine learning, data mining, natural language processing, etc. on social behavioral data collected from blogs, wikis, clickthrough data, query logs, tags, etc. In this talk, I will first introduce Social Computing by taking a short historical journey and elaborate on some of the unique characteristics and aspects that are found on the various social platforms. In addition, I will highlight some of the research work being done and the applications that are being created with the new paradigm. Lastly, we examine some current challenges and potential future promises of Social Computing.

Dr. Irwin King is currently with the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received the BSc degree in Engineering and Applied Science from California Institute of Technology and his MSc and PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California.

Dr. King's research interests include machine learning, web intelligence & social computing, and multimedia processing. In these research areas, Dr. King has published over 150 refereed journal and conference manuscripts. In addition, he has contributed over 20 book chapters and edited volumes. Moreover, Dr. King has over 30 research and applied grants.

Dr. King is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks (TNN) and IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine (CIM). He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Open Information Systems Journal, Journal of Nonlinear Analysis and Applied Mathematics, and Neural Information Processing–Letters and Reviews Journal (NIP-LR). He has also served as Special Issue Guest Editor for Neurocomputing, International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics (IJICC), Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (JIIS), and International Journal of Computational Intelligent Research (IJCIR). He is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM, International Neural Network Society (INNS), and Asian Pacific Neural Network Assembly (APNNA). Currently, he is serving the Neural Network Technical Committee (NNTC) and the Data Mining Technical Committee under the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (formerly the IEEE Neural Network Society). He is also a Vice-President and Governing Board Member of the Asian Pacific Neural Network Assembly (APNNA).