In a new article for FoCAS (a Coordination Action sponsored by the European Union Future and Emerging Technology Unit) Michael Rovatsos discusses the challenges, and possibilities, emerging from a new generation of users empowered as producers of services.

Read the original article for details on how SmartSociety approaches these challenges and what our plans are for the future.

In this issue of FoCAS Newsletter, you can read about Lucia Pannese‘s hands-on report from the 2014 FoCAS Summer School, as well as other exciting Smart Society news.

Original post here.

Summer 2014

Download Issue Two of the FoCAS Newsletter (PDF)

Original post here.

Winter 2014

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

From the FoCAS Inter-project meeting, Barcelona, June 2013.

Stuart Anderson is Deputy Head of School of Informatics at The University of Edinburgh and a member of the SmartSociety project. His research is in the area of safety, trust and the dependability of socio-technical systems. Current projects are looking at supporting training activities in radiology, the role of trust in health settings and joint work with the World Health Organisation on disease control systems.

Download Issue One of the FoCAS Newsletter (PDF)

Original post here.

Summer 2013

FoCAS has announced a summer school taking place on Crete, Greece between Monday June 23 and Friday June 27, 2014:

http://focas.eu/summer-school-2014/

Details are to be announced soon.

This book is about understanding, designing, controlling, and governing adaptive collective systems. It is intended for readers from master’s students to Ph.D. students, from engineers to decision makers, and anyone else who is interested in understanding how technologies are changing the way we think and live.

The authors are academics working in various areas of a new rising field: adaptive collective systems.

Stuart Anderson (The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom | SmartSociety)
Nicolas Bredeche (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, France)
A.E. Eiben (VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands | FoCAS CA)
George Kampis (DFKI, Germany | Allow Ensembles and SmartSociety)
Maarten van Steen (VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Book Sprint collaborative writing session facilitator: Adam Hyde
Editor: Sandra Sarala
Designer: Henrik van Leeuwen

View the FoCAS Book Sprint process with full details and photos here.

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