Highlights from the 2010 meeting

Conference Information
This conference is an invited forum for new ideas about computing, informatics and decision-making in a time of increasingly critical interdependencies among coupled social, economic, natural and engineered systems.

An informatics-centered revolution in social and cognitive science, social computing, data capture, decision support, computing and network theory is ongoing. It occurs against a backdrop of interdependent crises in governmental, economic and commercial institutions and the interconnected systems that they attempt to manage.

People and institutions confront the implications of increasingly available information due to convention-shattering changes in administrative and participatory data acquisition, the archival, search and distribution capabilities of networks and electronic databases combined with ubiquitous search engines, mobility and communication. At the same time accessible distributed high performance computing and the appearance of a new network science allow creation of integrated modeling and synthetic information with radical implications to decision-making in very large complex systems.

The science is exciting, but implications to security, financial operations and commerce, economic policy, environmental policy, social infrastructure design and operations, political activities, marketing and sales, public health, crisis management, insurance and others create a tension and urgency even for basic research.

The conference will provide a venue for a broad interdisciplinary range of researchers involved in this energized and timely topic.

Organizers
Christopher L. Barrett, Stephen Eubank, Madhav Marathe