Social Media for Government Services

This book highlights state-of-the-art research, development and implementation efforts concerning social media in government services, bringing together researchers and practitioners in a number of case studies. It elucidates a number of significant challenges associated with social media specific to government services, such as:  benefits and methods of assessing; usability and suitability of tools, technologies and platforms; governance policies and frameworks; opportunities for new services; integrating social media with organisational business processes; and specific case studies. The book also highlights the range of uses and applications of social media in the government domain, at both local and federal levels. As such, it offers a valuable resource for a broad readership including academic researchers, practitioners in the IT industry, developers, and government policy- and decision-makers.

Dr Surya Nepal is a Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO Data61, where he leads the distributed system research team. His main research interest is in the development and implementation of technologies in distributed systems and social networks, with a focus on security, privacy and trust. He obtained his PhD from RMIT University, Australia. At CSIRO, he undertook research in multimedia databases, web services and service oriented architectures, social networks, security, privacy and trust in collaborative environments and cloud systems and big data. He has over 100 refereed publications, with many in top international journals and conferences (e.g., VLDB, ICWS, ICSOC, International Journals of Web Services Research, IEEE Transactions on Service Computing, ACM Computing Survey and ACM TOIT.  He has edited two books and many international journal special issues. He serves as program chairs and program committee members in many international conferences and workshops. He has delivered talks/tutorials/keynotes on trusted systems in national and international venues.

Dr Cécile Paris is a Senior Principal Research Scientist Science Leader at CSIRO Data61, leading the Knowledge Discovery and Management Research Group. Cécile’s expertise is in Computational Linguistics and User Modelling, and, in the recent past, social media. Cécile received her PhD from Columbia University, New York. Prior to joining CSIRO, she worked at the Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI, California) and ITRI (University of Brighton, UK).   Cécile has over 150 referred publications; she has co-edited books and special issues of international journals.  She participated in the Human Services Delivery Research Alliance (HSDRA), a 4-yr research alliance between the Australian Department of Human Services and CSIRO, in which she defined and led projects on improving service delivery through social media. Cécile is very active in the research community, in Australia and internationally, serving on numerous conference and workshop committees, on review boards of grant-giving bodies and journals. She is the chair of the Australian professional organisation in human computer interaction, CHISIG, and received the CHISIG medal in 2011.

Professor Dimitrios Georgakopoulos joined the RMIT University in July 2014 from CSIRO, where he was a Research Director at the ICT Centre, leading the Information Engineering Laboratory, the largest Computer Science research organisation in Australia.  Prior to joining CSIRO, Dimitrios held research and management positions in industrial laboratories in the US, including Telcordia Technologies (where he helped found two of Telcordia’s Research Centers in Austin, Texas, and Poznan, Poland), Microelectronics and Computer Corporation (MCC) in Austin, Texas, GTE (currently Verizon) Laboratories in Boston, Massachusetts, and Bell Communications Research (Bellcore) in Piscataway, New Jersey. Dimitrios was successful in attracting significant ($25M+) of external research funding from industry and research funding agencies. He has extensively published and has served as the General or ProgramChair of  major international conferences. He has received two outstanding paper awards from the IEEE Computer Society (CS) and several IEEE CS service awards. He was the recipient of GTE’s Excellence Award. In Australia, he has been a co-principal investigator in four ACT iAwards, and a CSIRO divisional innovation award.