Abstract: As the European Union (EU) funded SmartSociety project aims to create a toolset for rapidly and systematically engineering collective intelligence systems to support daily living, it simultaneously wants to ameliorate the risks to individuals of participating in these types of hyper-connected digital systems. This paper reports on a panel session at the close at of the 2015 IFIP summer school that reflected upon a keynote speech covering SmartSociety concepts, technologies and ethical dilemmas. The panel session was conceived as a consultative exercise as part of the ongoing Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) approach embedded within the SmartSociety project. In this chapter we present an analysis of the panel session discussion, which touched on several key issues, including the relationships between technology and society, what we should expect from a ‘SmartSociety’, barriers and horizons in managing ethical issues, and brokerage as a methodological approach to weaving multiple perspectives into design.

Citation: Hartswood, Mark, and Marina Jirotka. “SmartSociety: Collaboration Between Humans and Machines, Promises and Perils.” In Privacy and Identity Management. Time for a Revolution?, Aspinall, D., Camenisch, J., Hansen, M., Fischer-Hübner, S.,Raab, C. (Eds.) pp. 30-48. Springer.

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Abstract: Hybrid Diversity-aware Collective Adaptive Systems (HDA-CAS) is a new generation of socio-technical systems where both humans and machine peers complement each other and operate collectively to achieve their goals. These systems are characterized by the fundamental properties of hybridity and collectiveness, hiding from users the complexities associated with managing the collaboration and coordination of hybrid human/machine teams. In this paper we present the key programming elements of the SmartSociety HDA-CAS platform. We first describe the overall platform’s architecture and functionality and then present concrete programming model elements – Collective-based Tasks (CBTs) and Collectives, describe their properties and show how they meet the hybridity and collectiveness requirements. We also describe the associated Java language constructs, and show how concrete use-cases can be encoded with the introduced constructs.

Citation: O. Scekic, T. Schiavinotto, D. I. Diochnos, M. Rovatsos, H.-L. Truong, I. Carreras, S. Dustdar, Programming Model Elements for Hybrid Collaborative Adaptive Systems, 1st IEEE International Conference on Collaboration and Internet Computing (CIC’15), 27-30 October 2015, Hangzhou, China.

Citation: http://bit.ly/1p8SJOP

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

Important Dates

Submissions due: February 7, 2014
Notification of Acceptance: February 28, 2014 Upload of Final
Publication Files: March 10, 2014

Aim and Scope

Contemporary collaboration settings are often associated with huge, ever-increasing amounts of multiple types of data, which may vary in terms of relevance, subjectivity and importance, ranging from individual opinions to broadly accepted practices. In such settings, collective sense making is crucial for well-informed decision making. This sense making process may both utilize and provide input to intelligent information analysis tools.

This session aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from different scientific fields and research communities to exchange experiences and discuss the topic of how data-intensive and cognitively-complex sense making and decision making within diverse types of teams can be facilitated and augmented. The session will offer a venue for targeted discussion on the development and evaluation of innovative services that shift in focus from the mere collection and representation of large-scale information to its meaningful assessment, aggregation and utilization. Of particular interest are approaches that bring together the reasoning capabilities of the machine and the humans in contemporary collaborative settings.

In parallel, much interest is given to larger issues surrounding analytical practices and data sharing practices in the above settings.

Submissions are expected to cover a number of main themes (research issues), including:

• Innovative approaches to the exploration, delivery and visualization of the pertinent information.
• Novel collaboration tools and platforms for handling ill-defined domains.
• Collaborative sense making of real-world multi-faceted data.
• Novel mechanisms for understanding collaborative patterns and
  intelligent probing.
• Advances in cloud computing and scalable high-performance data
  mining for data-intensive collaboration.

Co-chairs:
Nikos Karacapilidis, University of Patras & CTI, Greece Lydia Lau,
University of Leeds, UK Pavlos Peppas, University of Patras, Greece

Submissions:
See: http://idt-14.kesinternational.org/submission.php

Contact:
Nikos Karacapilidis
University of Patras & CTI
GR 26500 Rion-Patras, Greece
Tel: (+30)-2610-997906
nikos@mech.upatras.gr
http://www.mech.upatras.gr/~nikos/