信息技術的飛速發展，特別是物聯網、雲計算、社交網絡、社會媒體以及信息獲取技術的進步，數據正以巨大的速度迅速增長和積累，大數據時代已經到來．社會計算作為一種數據密集型科學，在收集和分析數據的廣度、深度以及規模上都產生了巨大的影響，社會計算作為一種新的計算範式，產生了一個新的跨學科研究與應用領域，其廣闊的研究內容與應用已引起了學術界和工業界的廣泛關注．分析了社會計算產生的歷史背景及概念、研究現狀及大數據帶來的機遇，綜述了社會計算不同的研究領域，主要有2個發展趨勢：一個面向社會科學，包括計算社會科學、計算社會學、社會網絡分析等；一個面向技術應用，包括社交應用、娛樂應用、生產應用等，這2種發展趨勢同時又相互影響．最後討論了社會計算研究領域存在的挑戰，包括跨學科合作與訓練的問題、科學研究中大數據共享問題以及隱私保護．

With the rapid development of information technology, especially sweeping progress in the Internet of things, cloud computing, social networks and social media, the era of big data is coming. As a data-intensive science, social computing is an emerging thing that leverages the capacity to collect and analyze data with an unprecedented breadth, depth and scale. It represents a new computing paradigm and an interdisciplinary research and application field. A broad comprehension of major topics involved in social computing is important for both scholars and practitioners. In this paper, we give a brief survey of the various research fields in social computing. We present key concepts and analyze state-of-the art of the field. The article not only sheds insights on social computing, but also affords conduit for future research in the field. Social computing has two distinct trends. One is on the social science issues, such as computational social science, computational sociology, social network analysis, etc; The other is on the use of computational techniques, such as social use, hedonic use and generative use. Finally some new challenges ahead are summarized, including interdisciplinary cooperation and training, big data sharing for scientific data mashups, and privacy protect.