CPSCom 2010 Keynote Speech: Feiyue Wang

Computational modeling based on heterogeneous individual behavior and complex interactions among individuals or actors is playing an increasingly important role in management sciences and social sciences.In the past, theory building in these disciplines has been largely independent of micro-level observations due to the data availability challenge. As the Web and mobile technologies have been rapidly adopted in all walks of life, rich sets of data are becoming increasingly available at low costs in unprecedentedly detailed level of granularity and resolution. Yesterday\´s black boxes are becoming today\´s white-boxes. Economic and social theories that used to rely primarily on hypotheses such as "invisible hands" are now being re-examined with data and observations, just like their counterparts in natural sciences. In this transition of historic proportion, economic and social computing research is emerging and has drawn attention from multiple research fields. In this talk, we discuss economic and social computing from two perspectives: economic and social computing as a new methodological framework for management and social science research, economic and social computing as a new phenomenon warranting multidisciplinary investigations.