University of Edinburgh – Smart Society Project http://www.smart-society-project.eu "Hybrid and Diversity-Aware Collective Adaptive Systems: When People Meet Machines to Build a Smarter Society" Fri, 10 Feb 2017 14:56:03 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.5.2 http://www.smart-society-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/favicon1.png University of Edinburgh – Smart Society Project http://www.smart-society-project.eu 32 32 International Workshop on Diversity-Aware Artificial Intelligence (DIVERSITY 2016) at ECAI 2016 http://www.smart-society-project.eu/diversity_2016/ http://www.smart-society-project.eu/diversity_2016/#respond Sat, 05 Mar 2016 20:42:02 +0000 http://www.smart-society-project.eu/?p=2776 Continue reading ]]>

logoECAI2016

*** Daily Agenda is now out ***

Organisers

Michael Rovatsos, The University of Edinburgh, mrovatso@inf.ed.ac.uk
Ronald Chenu-Abente, University of Trento, chenu@disi.unitn.it

Background

Diversity is pervasive in human nature and culture, and is deeply rooted in the variation of natural traits and experience among individuals, the collectives they form, and the environments they inhabit. When humans reason individually, they maintain different representations, conceptualisations, and theories, and apply different rules of inference, learning, and decision making. When they interact with each other to combine their skills or resources, to coordinate their activities, and to resolve conflicts between their individual objectives, they exchange information and knowledge, negotiate and align their individual views, and adapt to each other’s behaviour dynamically. Arguably, diversity is not only a phenomenon that humans have to deal with, but it is also the vehicle for achieving some of the most impressive products of human intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence, on the other hand, has so far largely relied on a certain degree of homogeneity, not necessarily in terms of the components involved in a method or system, but in terms of the process that combines them. While various areas within AI have already developed methods that can cope with and/or exploit diversity to some extent, for example

  • electronic markets where individual agents have different goals and aim to maximise their own profit,
  • hybrid robot architectures that involve different layers of representation and reasoning,
  • knowledge sharing infrastructures where different agents use different domain ontologies, and
  • machine learning systems that combine different sources of data and/or learning units,

more often than not, these systems still involve a “monolithic”, global approach to integration. This usually derives from a global task context, a common intermediate representation layer, or a global output to be produced by the integrated system.

We believe that there is a huge potential in bringing the insights from work on problems that involve diversity – like those listed in the examples above – together to gain a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of diversity, as well as to develop principled methodological approaches that will enable us to better utilise diversity in future AI systems.

Workshop Description

The workshop seeks to explore diversity as a phenomenon that both poses a challenge for AI in terms of dealing with and managing diversity in an intelligent system (or ecosystem of intelligent human and/or artificial agents) and presents an opportunity in terms of leveraging diversity (for example through processes like crowdsourcing and collaborative knowledge production) to achieve human-like (and human-friendly) capabilities in more open-ended, incrementally evolving, and interactive AI systems.

We aim to bring together researchers from different communities that have each addressed diversity in different ways, such as

  • hierarchical and hybrid inference systems (combining representation and reasoning mechanisms),
  • semantic web and ontologies (interoperability of information sources, ontology alignment),
  • non-monotonic and defeasible reasoning (reasoning about conflicting and changing information),
  • mechanism design and social choice (reaching agreement in the presence of conflict of interest),
  • language evolution and emergent semantics (evolving shared symbol and concept spaces),
  • cross-lingual approaches to natural language understanding (integrating different natural languages),
  • teamwork and collaborative multiagent systems (integrating heterogeneous knowledge/behaviours),
  • human-AI/human-robot collaboration (aligning agents’ views and objectives with those of humans),
  • crowdsourcing and human computation (managing diverse contributions of large human collectives).

The workshop will provide an open forum for researchers from these (and other) areas to contribute their insights on diversity in order to develop a shared agenda for the future study of diversity in AI. We welcome submissions on all aspects of diversity, ranging from theoretical foundations to practical applications, case studies, and surveys. The workshop will be heavily discussion-based, with relatively short paper presentations and a focus on formulating key research questions and a longer-term research agenda for the area. To enable high-quality discussion and debate, a key evaluation criterion will be the focus of papers contributed to the workshop on the diversity “angle“ of the research reported. Specifically, papers should clearly identify

  • what type of diversity or aspects of diversity the reported research investigates or accommodates,
  • the methods the paper proposes to deal with and/or exploit diversity,
  • how the proposed method combines and/or exceeds existing diversity-oriented capabilities, and
  • what key challenges in terms of diversity it leaves open for future research.

Beyond this key requirement, we deliberately impose no restrictions on methodological approach, or maturity of the research. In particular, the workshop aims to be inclusive with regard to the types of diversity considered, including (but not limited to) diversity of representations, algorithms, systems infrastructures, datasets, agent behaviours, skills and capabilities, preferences and objectives, but also users, user populations, cultures, contexts of use, application domains, user interfaces, etc.

Also, in keeping with the Special Topic of ECAI 2016 Artificial Intelligence for Human Values, we particularly invite papers that address the ethics and social impact of AI applications related to diversity, for example addressing issues related to the social dynamics of diversity in systems comprising of humans and artificial agents, the emergence of “digital divides“ and the implications of diversity on the cohesiveness of these systems, diversity-aware accountability and privacy methods, or the potential risks and benefits of diversity-aware AI in terms of promoting human diversity in various domains.

Paper submission

We invite full (8-12 pages) and short (4-6 pages) papers for presentation at the workshop, to be submitted through the workshop’s Easychair web site using the ECAI format (which can be downloaded together with instructions from this page). Each paper will be peer-reviewed by at least two Programme Committee members, and authors will be expected to produce final versions of their papers in good time before the workshop.

All accepted papers will be made available online prior to the workshop, and distributed to all participants in hardcopy. If a sufficiently high number of high-quality papers is received, we will aim to produce a special issue in a high-quality journal where revised versions of the papers will be published alongside invited papers.

Important dates

The following is a (tentative) timeline of key dates:

  • Paper submission deadline – 14th June 2016 extended to 17th June 2016
  • Author notification – 28th June 2016 30th June 2016
  • Camera-ready versions – 15th July 2016
  • Workshop – 29th or 30th August 2016

Agenda

The following is the workshop agenda for the 29th of August:

09:15-09:30 Welcome
09:30-10:00 Towards Building Ontologies with the Wisdom of the Crowd. Paula Chocron, Dagmar Gromann and Francisco José Quesada Real
10:00-10:30 A Methodology to Take Account of Diversity in Collective Adaptive Systems. Heather S. Packer and Luc Moreau
10:30-11:00 Coffee break
11:00-11:30 Diversity-Aware Recommendation for Human Collectives. Pavlos Andreadis, Sofia Ceppi, Michael Rovatsos and Subramanian Ramamoorthy
11:30-12:00 Industry talk: Democracy by Design. Marcel van Hest
12:00-13:00 Invited talk by Antonella de Angeli
13:00-14:00 Lunch
14:00-14:20 A Semantic Distance based Architecture for a Guesser Agent in ESSENCE’s Location Taboo Challenge. Kemo Adrian, Aysenur Bilgin and Paul Van Eecke
14:20-14:40 Interdisciplinarity as an Indicator of Diversity in a Corpus of Artificial Intelligence Research Articles. Bilge Say
14:40-15:00 Managing human diversity in diverse multi-agent collaborative intelligence systems. Mark Hartswood, Kevin Page, Avi Segal, Kobi Gal and Marina Jirotka
15:00-15:20 Analysing communicative diversity via the Stag Hunt. Robert van Rooij and Katrin Schulz
15:20-15:40 Domain-Based Sense Disambiguation in Multilingual Structured Data. Gabor Bella, Alessio Zamboni and Fausto Giunchiglia
15:40-16:10 Coffee break
16:15-17:15 Panel discussion
17:15-17:30 Wrap-up

Financial Support

The workshop is sponsored by the ESSENCE (www.essence-network.com) and SmartSociety (www.smart-society-project.eu) projects, which will provide extensive financial support to participants, in particular PhD students and junior researchers who wish to participate. To be eligible for such support, interested individuals should submit a short or full paper, and email Michael Rovatsos (mrovatso@inf.ed.ac.uk) with a one-page case for support, providing a short bio, describing their interest in the workshop, and specifying the requested amount together with a justification of the anticipated expenses.

Committees

Workshop Organisers

Michael Rovatsos, The University of Edinburgh, mrovatso@inf.ed.ac.uk
Ronald Chenu-Abente, University of Trento, chenu@disi.unitn.it

Steering Committee

Alan Bundy, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Peter Gardenfors, University of Lund, Sweden
Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento, Italy
Asuncion Gomez Perez, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain
Ben Kuipers, University of Michigan, USA
Ariel Procaccia, Carnegie-Mellon University, USA
Carles Sierra, IIIA-CSIC Barcelona, Spain
Luc Steels, Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium
Michael Wooldridge, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Gerhard Weiss, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands

Programme Committee

Yoram Bachrach, Microsoft Research Cambridge, United Kingdom
Gabor Bella, University of Trento, Italy
Sofia Ceppi, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Jerome Euzenat, INRIA Grenoble, France
Kobi Gal, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
Fabien Gandon, INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, France
Mark Hartswood, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Nick Hawes, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
Catholijn Jonker, Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands
Ian Kash, Microsoft Research Cambridge, United Kingdom
Oliver Lemon, Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Nicolas Maudet, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie Paris, France
Fiona McNeill, Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Roberto Navigli, University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy
Luc Moreau, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Iyad Rahwan, MIT, USA
Subramanian Ramamoorthy, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Katharina Reinecke, University of Washington, USA
Robert van Rooij, ILLC University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Carlos Ruiz, TAIGER S.A., Spain
Marco Schorlemmer, IIIA-CSIC Barcelona, Spain
Onn Shehory, IBM Haifa Labs, Israel
Pavel Shvaiko, Informatica Trentina, Italy
Remi van Trijp, Sony Computer Science Labs Paris, France

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Programming Model Elements for Hybrid Collaborative Adaptive Systems http://www.smart-society-project.eu/programming-model-elements/ http://www.smart-society-project.eu/programming-model-elements/#respond Fri, 25 Sep 2015 14:06:10 +0000 http://www.smart-society-project.eu/?p=2576 Continue reading ]]>

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

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SmartSociety – A Platform for Collaborative People-Machine Computation http://www.smart-society-project.eu/platform-for-collaborative-computation/ http://www.smart-society-project.eu/platform-for-collaborative-computation/#respond Fri, 25 Sep 2015 13:59:32 +0000 http://www.smart-society-project.eu/?p=2566 Continue reading ]]>

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

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SmartSociety Science Café: Interview with Michael Rovatsos http://www.smart-society-project.eu/smartsociety-science-cafe-interview-with-michael-rovatsos/ http://www.smart-society-project.eu/smartsociety-science-cafe-interview-with-michael-rovatsos/#respond Tue, 24 Feb 2015 12:58:57 +0000 http://www.smart-society-project.eu/?p=2427 Continue reading ]]> There is a new video on our new Youtube channel: SmartSocietyFP7! In the third instalment of the SmartSociety Science Café, Daniele Miorandi interviews Dr. Michael Rovatsos from the University of Edinburgh.

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.

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1-year Postdoctoral Research Associate position available http://www.smart-society-project.eu/1yrpdra_uedin_14/ http://www.smart-society-project.eu/1yrpdra_uedin_14/#respond Sat, 26 Jul 2014 15:53:16 +0000 http://www.smart-society-project.eu/?p=2073 Continue reading ]]> EdinburghUniLogoWe have an opening for a 1-year postdoctoral research associate in our SmartSociety EU-project at the University of Edinburgh. The closing date is the 4th of August for start in October. You can find the live vacancy at

https://www.vacancies.ed.ac.uk/pls/corehrrecruit/erq_jobspec_version_4.jobspec?p_id=030730

Please feel free to share. Contact details are available through the live vacancy above. I have duplicated the information there below, in case the link doesn’t work for you:

Vacancy Details
Research Associate
Vacancy Ref: : 030730 Closing Date : 04-Aug-2014
Contact Person : Jenny Chard Contact Number : 0131 650 9006
Contact Email : jenny.chard@ed.ac.uk
We have an opening for a post-doctoral researcher in adaptive coordination methods for large-scale, hybrid human-computer collectives. The post is part of Edinburgh’s contribution to the SmartSociety project (SmartSociety project website), a large-scale project funded by the EC Seventh Framework Programme that involves ten partner institutions from five countries.

The post is available from 1st October for 12 months.

Closing date: 4th August 2014

Grade: UE07 (£30,728 – £36,661)

(1) Job Details

Job title: Research Associate

School: School of Informatics

Line manager: Principal Investigator

(2) Job Purpose

The SmartSociety project conducts basic and applied research into collective adaptive systems, integrating machine and human intelligence to solve complex societal problems.

Your role in the project will be to generalise an existing lightweight orchestration architecture for Web-based collaboration among humans and artificial agents. You will be expected to work toward the definition of an executable specification language that can be used to build such systems, as well as on its implementation and evaluation. This task involves a strong element of collaboration with other project partners.

You will also contribute to dissemination aspects of the project, such as assisting in the planning and coordination of dissemination activities for the whole consortium, monitoring the production of publications, managing the project web site, and maintaining relationships with other project partners.

You will work closely together with a team of four senior academics and two junior researchers involved directly in the project within the Centre of Intelligent Systems and their Applications at the School of Informatics.

(3) Representative Work Activities

In general, the work activities associated with the post are to support the Principal Investigator of a specific project in achieving the goals of the project, under her direction.

• Undertaking a specific role in the research project under supervision
• Taking responsibility for some elements of the planned research
• Planning and carrying out a work programme appropriate to the research activity
• Developing own research portfolio in related areas
• Contributing to the writing of research grants
• Contributing to dissemination and publication of personal and/or research teams findings as appropriate.

(4) Planning and organising

The post holder will have to agree a general plan of research with the Principal Investigator and progress will be monitored at pre-scheduled meetings.

(5) Problem Solving

The problems to be faced are purely scientific and you will supply the detailed expertise for delivering a solution. You will be expected to achieve this under instruction by and with advice from the Principal Investigator and other academic and senior research staff.

(6) Decision making

The post holder will determine the specific techniques and approaches to be used in the course of the research, in agreement with the Principal Investigator.

(7) Key contacts/relationships

The post holder will principally interact with the Principal Investigator and other project staff and students. More generally, you will discuss the work, and other questions of scientific interest, with other members of the project at other sites and with other members of the School of Informatics. The post holder will be expected to represent the University externally, by presenting your work at specialist meeting or workshops in the relevant research area. They may also be required to provide advice and support to relevant students.

(8) Knowledge, skills and experience

The post holder should have:
• A PhD (or near completion) in Computer Science or a related discipline.
• Expertise in one or more of the following areas – service-orientated computing, declarative methods and languages, workflow systems, Semantic Web technologies, and open/linked data.
• Proven ability to develop formal models of computation and reasoning, using, for example, logic-based formalisms, probabilistic models, or process calculi.
• Solid programming skills, especially in the area of RESTful web-based applications.

It would be beneficial for the post holder to also have:
• Experience with AI problem solving techniques (search, planning, constraint satisfaction), human-based and social computation, crowdsourcing, linked/open data, and/or distributed workflow systems.
• Advanced software engineering skills (formal specification, testing and validation, documentation, maintenance and evolution).
• Excellent teamwork and communicative skills, and enthusiasm about collaborating with a diverse range of international partners, which will involve a significant amount of travel.

(9) Dimensions

There are no line management responsibilities associate with this post.

Informal enquiries

Applicants are strongly encouraged to contact Dr Michael Rovatsos (mrovatsos@inf.ed.ac.uk) for further information and to discuss their suitability for the post.

Application Procedure

All applicants should apply online by clicking the apply link at the bottom of this page. The application process is quick and easy to follow, and you will receive email confirmation of safe receipt of your application. The online system allows you to submit a CV and other attachments.

Please ensure you submit a full CV with a detailed publication record, a personal statement, and PDF copies of up to three recent publications together with the other application materials.

We anticipate interviews will be held in mid-August. If you have not been invited for interview by then, we regret that you have not been successful on this occasion.

The closing date is 5pm GMT on Monday 4 August.

Eligibility to Work

In accordance with the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 the University of Edinburgh, as an employer, has a legal responsibility to prevent illegal working and therefore must check that all employees are entitled to work in the United Kingdom (UK).

To do so, the University of Edinburgh requires to see original documents evidencing right to work in the UK before commencement of employment and this is normally carried out at interview. Details will be provided in any letter of invitation to interview.

For further information on eligibility to work please visit our Eligibility to Work website

If you are not currently eligible to work in the UK, it may be possible for the University of Edinburgh to sponsor you to obtain a Tier 2 (General) visa to enable you to take up the appointment should you be successful at interview.

For applicants interested in sponsorship information is available on our Working in the UK website

However, if you have previously been sponsored by an employer within the UK but your leave has expired or lapsed and you are no longer in the UK, according to UK Border Agency rules you cannot apply for sponsorship under any category of Tier 2 for a period of 12 months after the date your visa expired and/or you left the UK.

Conditions of Employment

Pension Scheme

This role is grade UE07 and therefore the post holder is automatically included in membership of the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), subject to the USS membership criteria, unless they indicate that they choose not to join the Scheme.

For further information please visit our Pensions website.

Salary

The role is grade UE07 and attracts an annual salary of £30,728 to £36,661 for 35 hours each week. Salary is paid monthly by direct transfer to your Bank or Building Society account, normally on the 28th of the month. Salaries for part-time staff are calculated on the full-time scales, pro-rata to the Standard Working Week.

The University reserves the right to vary the candidate information or make no appointment at all. Neither in part, nor in whole does this information form part of any contract between the University and any individual.

Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications
CISA undertakes basic and applied research and development in knowledge representation, automated reasoning and computational logic. It has interests in agent systems, and in data-intensive research. Through its Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI), it works with others to deploy the technologies associated with this research.

http://www.cisa.inf.ed.ac.uk

The School of Informatics
Informatics is the study of how natural and artificial systems store, process and communicate information. Research in Informatics promises to take information technology to a new level, and to place information at the heart of 21st century science, technology and society. The University has adopted our vision of the future of Informatics, as a discipline central to a new enlightenment in scholarship and learning, and critical to the future development of science, technology and society.

The School provides a fertile environment for a wide range of studies focussed on understanding computation on both artificial and natural systems. The research draws on concepts from computer science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology and biology.

More details about these research activities can be found at http://www.informatics.ed.ac.uk/research

Informatics is one of seven schools in the College of Science and Engineering, at the University of Edinburgh. It was the only department in the UK awarded the top 5*A rating in Computer Science in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. With 87.1 research active staff submitted for assessment, we are also the UK’s biggest research group in this area. We received a top excellent rating in the most recent SHEFC Teaching Quality Assessment exercise. Edinburgh came top in the last two Research Assessment Exercises (RAE). RAE 2008 results have confirmed Edinburgh’s position as the largest and best Informatics research centre in the UK. The various institutes in The School of Informatics have come together and are now housed under one roof in the new £40 million Informatics Forum Building on Crichton Street.

The School of Informatics holds a Silver Athena SWAN award, in recognition of our commitment to advance the representation of women in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.

http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/informatics

College of Science and Engineering (http://www.ed.ac.uk/science-engineering)
The College of Science and Engineering (CSE) is one of the largest and highest-ranked science and engineering groupings in the UK. Headed by Professor Lesley Yellowlees, CSE comprises seven Schools (Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Engineering, GeoSciences, Informatics, Mathematics, and Physics and Astronomy). Informatics is located in the University’s Central Area near George Square, with the other six 2 miles further south at the King’s Buildings. The College has over 2,700 academic and support staff, and educates some 6,000 undergraduates, 800 taught postgraduates and 1,500 research students. It is in the front rank of UK university science and engineering groupings for research quality and income (£130M in 2001/12), and is a key player in many European and international research collaborations.

Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2008
In the 2008 RAE over 600 research active staff were returned. 96% of the College submission was of international quality in its originality, significance and rigour with 66% of the submission being rated internationally excellent.

The University of Edinburgh
For more than four centuries, our people and their achievements have rewritten history time and again. They’ve explored space, revolutionised surgery, published era-defining books, paved the way for life-saving medical breakthroughs and introduced to the world many inventions, discoveries and ideas from penicillin to Dolly the sheep. We have believed that anything is possible.

We still do. The latest Research Assessment Exercise highlighted our place at the forefront of international research. This adds to our international reputation for the quality of our teaching and our student experience excellence.

As a member of staff you will be part of one of the world’s leading universities, with 22 Schools spread over 3 Colleges that offer more than 500 undergraduate and 160 postgraduate courses to over 30,000 students each year. Professional services are critical to this success as well as our world-class teaching, research and student facilities. In fact, we are one of the top employers in Edinburgh, with over 11,700 people spread across a wide range of academic and supporting roles.

The University is proud of its success with online teaching initiatives, with 1905 students currently studying its online distance learning postgraduate programmes, and a total to date of 471,695 enrolments for Edinburgh MOOCs.

As a world-changing, world-leading university we are an exciting, positive, creative, challenging and rewarding place to work. We give you support, nurture your talent, develop and reward success and integrate academic, professional and personal career goals, as well as give your career the benefit of a great and distinguished reputation.

The University of Edinburgh holds a Bronze Athena SWAN award in recognition of our commitment to advance the representation of women in science, mathematics, engineering and technology. We are also Stonewall Scotland Diversity Champions actively promoting LGBT equality.

The University has a range of initiatives to support a family friendly working environment. See our

University Initiatives website

The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

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Michael Rovatsos – Society of Computation / Computation of Society http://www.smart-society-project.eu/michael-rovatsos-society-of-computation-computation-of-society/ http://www.smart-society-project.eu/michael-rovatsos-society-of-computation-computation-of-society/#respond Sat, 17 May 2014 18:30:25 +0000 http://www.smart-society-project.eu/?p=1969 Continue reading ]]>

Filmed at TEDxUniversityofEdinburgh at The Pleasance, Edinburgh on 21st February 2014.

Michael Rovatsos is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Informatics of the University of Edinburgh where he leads the Agents Group at the Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications. His past research has been in multi-agent systems. Part of the SmartSociety project, his research now involves social computation systems where humans and artificial agents work together to solve hard societal problems.

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Social-IST: D2.1 White Paper on Research Challenges in Social Collective Intelligence, WP2 – Research Challenges and Strategic Analysis http://www.smart-society-project.eu/social-ist-d2-1-white-paper-on-research-challenges-in-social-collective-intelligence/ http://www.smart-society-project.eu/social-ist-d2-1-white-paper-on-research-challenges-in-social-collective-intelligence/#comments Tue, 28 Jan 2014 13:15:30 +0000 http://www.smart-society-project.eu/?p=1465 Continue reading ]]>

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

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Social-IST: D3.1 Roadmap for FET Initiatives in Social Collective Intelligence, WP3 – High Impact Application Areas and Roadmapping http://www.smart-society-project.eu/social-ist-d3-1-roadmap-for-fet-initiatives-in-social-collective-intelligence/ http://www.smart-society-project.eu/social-ist-d3-1-roadmap-for-fet-initiatives-in-social-collective-intelligence/#respond Tue, 28 Jan 2014 13:12:12 +0000 http://www.smart-society-project.eu/?p=1464 Continue reading ]]>

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).

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