Abstract: Society is moving towards a socio-technical ecosystem in which physical and virtual dimensions of life are intertwined and where people interactions ever more take place with or are mediated by machines. Hybrid Diversity-aware Collective Adaptive Systems (HDA-CAS) is a new generation of sociotechnical systems where humans and machines synergetically complement each other and operate collectively to achieve their goals. HDA-CAS introduce the fundamental properties of hybridity and collectiveness, hiding from the users the complexities associated with managing the collaboration and coordination of machine and human computing elements. In this paper we present an HDA-CAS system called SmartSociety, supporting computations with hybrid human/machine collectives. We describe the platform’s architecture and functionality, validate it on two real-world scenarios involving human and machine elements and present a performance evaluation.

Citation: O. Scekic, D. Miorandi, T. Schiavinotto, D. I. Diochnos, A. Hume, R. Chenu-Abente, H.-L. Truong, M. Rovatsos, I. Carreras, S. Dustdar, F. Giunchiglia, SmartSociety — A Platform for Collaborative People-Machine Computation, The 8th IEEE International Conference on Service Oriented Computing & Applications (SOCA’15), 19-21 October 2015, Rome, Italy.

Download: http://bit.ly/1Wz4eN5

Dr. Rovatsos, begins by introducing us to his research, especially in what relates to systems with interacting intelligent agents, and technologies that support humans in designing such systems. He then proceeds to detail how this relates to the work done in SmartSociety, focussing mainly on the human aspect of this. Continuing, he explains how efficient task recommendation enables greater uptake and support of users. To accomplish this, we require systems that can adapt to the users’ needs and successfully integrate their individual contributions. These points are illustrated through a number of useful examples, leading to the concept of collectives. Finally, he discusses what SmartSociety means to him and the impact he expects the project will have.

You can watch the complete 10 minute interview below, or directly on Youtube, here.

Dr. Maltese, the Project Manager of SmartSociety, starts with a description of our project and goals, while giving a personal view on the most interesting aspects in this. When asked for an example, he points us to the everyday use of mobile devices, particularly when used to transmit location and activity data, as well as social networking. The interview ends with a brief discussion on the impact SmartSociety is expected to have in our lives, with particular mention to the need for raising people’s awareness on issues such as effective use, safety and privacy.

You can watch the complete 4 minute interview below, or directly on Youtube, here.

Prof. Moreau gives an overview of his current research interests, explaining the concepts of Reputation and Provenance and how their integration into applications can make the latter more trustworthy for the end user. He illustrates an example in the context of the SmartSociety project and talks about the integration of a Provenance Architecture into Collective Adaptive Systems, and designing a new Reputation System. The interview continues with the topic of how explanations to computations can be provided to users through these technologies, and ends with a discussion on his motivations and expected impact from joining SmartSociety.

You can watch the complete 7 minute interview below, or directly on Youtube, here.

Introduction: Worldwide, societies are seeing rapid change in modes of social interaction and organization. These new interaction modes are predicated on emerging forms of information infrastructure together with rapidly evolving devices, systems, and applications that are ever more deeply interwoven with our social fabric. Computers and humans complement each other, as there are activities that are difficult or impossible for one and easy for the other. We argue that the key to activating the potential for the new generation of high-impact technologies and services aimed at enhancing human problem-solving capabilities lies in realizing a tight symbiosis between human and computers. In this symbiosis, information and communications technology (ICT) becomes an unobtrusive, pervasive extension of individuals and groups, empowering and enabling them to achieve ambitious objectives. We believe that a new form of intelligence can be devised to tackle complex and challenging problems, by exploiting,in a coordinated and holistic fashion, the complementary strengths of human and machines through the integration of computers, the Internet, individuals, and society. We term this integration “social collective intelligence” (SCI).

Citation: “Programming” Social Collective Intelligence. Daniele Miorandi and Lorenzo Maggi. In IEEE Technology and Society, special issue on Technology for Collective Action (2014).

Download: http://bit.ly/2j95LKO

Citation: Miorandi, D., Maltese, V., Rovatsos, M., Nijholt, A., Stewart, J., Social Collective Intelligence: Combining the Powers of Humans and Machines to Build a Smarter Society, Springer, 2014.

Url: http://www.springer.com/gb/book/9783319086804

Executive Summary. This report first situates and outlines the potential of social computation to provide the basis for Social Collective Intelligence (SCI) in future systems. This involves the close interaction of social groups and machines together with systems of incentives and social structures to perform tasks that would otherwise be difficult to achieve either using entirely human or entirely machine solutions. The deliverable considers the challenges both from a technical and from a social science standpoint, identifying the potential for aligning them in order to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the development of SCI systems. The paper then describes some of the challenges in developing an engineering approach to the development of such systems. Finally the paper outlines some of the “big questions” that arise from the framework for SCI research developed in the white paper.

Citation: Robertson, D., Anderson, S., Carreras, I., Miorandi, D., “D2.1 White Paper on Research Challenges in Social Collective Intelligence WP2 – Research Challenges and Strategic Analysis”, Social-IST (2013).

Download: http://bit.ly/1qzcWOx

Executive Summary. This document includes the outcomes of the activities carried out by the Social-IST Consortium on the identification and analysis of the application areas for which R&D&I initiatives on Social Collective Intelligence (SCI) can have a major impact. This serves as the basis for defining a set of recommendations and a possible roadmap to be taken into consideration when drafting future FET initiatives in the field of Social Collective Intelligence.

In a preliminary phase the Consortium identified, through desktop search, six relevant application areas for SCI, namely the Future of Work, the Future of Learning, Mobility and Transport in Cities of the Future, Healthcare and Well Being, Smart Energy and the Future of Science and Innovation. These areas have been analysed and discussed in details, in particular by means of (i) the two workshops held with the Social-IST Scientific Panel experts (ii) a Web survey open to the research community at large (iii) the final project event held in Oct. 2013. For each area, a number of scenarios were elaborated, leading to the identification of impacts on science, technology and society and of emerging research challenges.

The results of this analysis have been used for defining a roadmap for future EU initiatives in the field of SCI. This included (i) a proposal in terms of research methodology for running SCI projects and initiatives, (ii) a taxonomy of the most relevant research communities (iii) a mapping to the Horizon2020 Work programme and related calls.

This document is expected to provide some key insights on how to potentially exploit a Social Collective Intelligence approach in future calls and EU initiatives.

Citation: Carreras, I., Anderson, S., Robertson, D., Miorandi, D., “D3.1 Roadmap for FET Initiatives in Social Collective Intelligence, WP3 – High Impact Application Areas and Roadmapping”, Social-IST (2013).

Download: http://bit.ly/1p8Tmb1

Abstract. The physical and virtual dimensions of life are becoming more and more deeply interwoven. Society is merging with technology, giving rise to a global socio-technical ecosystem. In a society comprising people and machines as actors we often see people-to-people interactions mediated by machine and machine-to-machine interaction mediated by people. The speed and scale of this change and the differences in culture, language and interests make the problem of establishing effective means of communication and coordination increasingly challenging. Our vision, embodied in the SmartSociety project1, is that a new generation of systems, hybrid (i.e., including humans and artificial peers, as well as social groups), distributed, open and large-scale, is needed to tackle these issues. In such systems, multitudes of heterogeneous peers will produce and handle massive amounts of data; peers will join/leave the system following unpredictable patterns with no central coordination and will interoperate at different spatial and temporal scales. Aware of the ethical issues, and by identifying the right incentive schemes and privacy levels, these systems will assist individuals and collectives in their everyday activities, coping with the diversity of the world and working in the presence of incomplete and incorrect information.

http://eprints.biblio.unitn.it/4214/

Citation: F. Giunchiglia, V. Maltese, S. Anderson, D. Miorandi (2013). Towards Hybrid and Diversity-Aware Collective Adaptive Systems. First FOCAS Workshop on Fundamentals of Collective Systems @ECAL 2013.

Download: http://bit.ly/1STlQ0l