The 2011 ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce will be held June 5-9 in San Jose as part of the ACM Federated Computing Research Conference. FCRC is a collection of seventeen computer science conferences with joint plenary speakers, this year featuring David A. Ferrucci, head of IBM’s Watson project, CMU professor and GWAP founder Luis von Ahn, and 2011 Turing Award winner Leslie Valiant. I’d love to someday see a true unified computer science conference in the style of the math or economics national meetings. Barring that, FCRC is the next-best thing. I hope more conferences will join.

The EC’11 list of accepted papers is out and the program looks great (including six papers from Yahoo! authors). And it’s not too late to submit a paper to one of the associated workshops. Two of particular interest, both on June 5, 2011, are:

Workshop on Social Computing and User Generated Content

The workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners from a variety of relevant fields, including economics, computer science, and social psychology, in both academia and industry, to discuss the state of the art today, and the challenges and prospects for tomorrow in the field of social computing and user generated content.

Social computing systems are now ubiquitous on the web– Wikipedia is perhaps the most well-known peer production system, and there are many platforms for crowdsourcing tasks to online users, including Games with a Purpose, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, the TopCoder competitions for software development, and many online Q&A forums such as Yahoo! Answers. Meanwhile, the user-created product reviews on Amazon generate value to other users looking to buy or choose amongst products, while Yelp’s value comes from user reviews about listed services…

SUBMISSIONS DUE April 15, 2011, 5pm EDT

Seventh Ad Auctions Workshop

In the past decade we’ve seen a rapid trend toward automation in advertising, not only in how ads are delivered and measured, but also in how ads are sold… The rapid emergence of new modes for selling and delivering ads is fertile ground for research from both economic and computational perspectives…

We solicit contributions of two types: (1) research contributions, and (2) position statements…

Submission deadline: April 15th, 2011 (midnight Hawaii Time)