With the increase in use of social systems and growing dependency on social currency (likes, comments, shares, etc.) for showing one’s influence or popularity online, more complex patterns are evolving on how these systems are being used. In the last decade, we have witnessed the birth and rapid growth of Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and numerous other marvels of the digital age. In addition to changing the way we live, these tools---and the technological revolution they are a part of---have fundamentally changed the way we learn the social world. We can now collect data about human behavior on a scale never before possible and with tremendous granularity and precision. The evolution of social media has created not only many new opportunities for information access but also many new challenges, leading to one of the prime research areas nowadays. Different research communities such as physicist, mathematicians, computer scientists have been addressing the problem in isolation; however joint effort for this kind of inter-disciplinary areas is needed. We see Social Computing has been emerging as an independent research area and important research area.

Prominent areas of focus for the summer school: Social Network Analysis, Social Recommender Systems, Analysis of Microblogs, Affective Content Analysis - Psycho-linguistics - Theories, Resources, and Applications, Privacy and Security in Social System.

What participants will get out of the summer school: Understand how social systems work; build techniques to study, analyse the social systems from different perspectives; develop techniques to collect data about social systems.