Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Social Machines

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI What is a social machine? Real life is and must be full of all kinds of social constraint – the very processes from which society arises. Computers can help if we use them to create abstract social machines on the Web: processes in which the people do the creative work and the machine does the administration… The stage is set for an evolutionary growth of new social engines.. Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI How BIG is Big?

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI How BIG is Big? Can we create technologies that make it possible to harness portions of that time and effort to help solve real-world problems?

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Some early social machines

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI A vision Imagine Hundreds of millions of people Effectively able to network together Working with the data archives of science, govts, NGOs, etc. Working together on the Web to cure disease, to feed the hungry, and to empower the powerless… How could we do this?

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Idea 1, do this by accident Being explored, but how do we make this purposeful?

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Harnessing this power “unknowlingly” You have likely helped to make Optical Character Recognition better! Von Ahn et al, 08

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Harnessing the power for “fun” Von Ahn, 06

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Games + Social Web

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Harnessing human knowledge for problem solving Raddick et al, 07

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Millions of galaxies classified

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Hanny’s Voorwerp (A digression or maybe the whole point)

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Galaxy Zoo communities Bipana Bantawa, OII

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Exploring motivation: Online meets offline in an “ad hoc” organization Better translation: People-Powered Search w/F-Y Wang, D. Zheng, CAS/ASU

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Our definition HFS is a Web-facilitated crowd behavior aimed at accomplishing a goal-oriented task of common interest to participants (social) through the online sharing and disseminating information acquired from both online and offline sources (machine).

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI On-line communities HFS reveals a community that is –Largely self-organizing –Resilient to government threat –Self-policing Made up of multiple subcommunities –Example: the “South China tiger” Exposed fraud in scientific publication

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI South China Tiger Communities Wang et al, IEEE Computer, 2011 ©Science, 2007

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI What HFS is used for

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Appears that HFS is different from other Web 2.0 networks

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Distribution Statement Wikipedia community

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Distribution Statement Slashdot community

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI We see that Social Challenges include Keys to understanding on-line communities include –dynamics of online communities Incentives unclear Information flows between online and offline are largely unstudied We can no longer assume an expert -> novice continuum, but what replaces it? –Trust (and distrust) on Web-based communities Goal is to share information, not hide it – but how do we prevent abuses? Who do you trust (really)? –Governance is a critical factor HFS is “self organizing,” which limits its scale

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Example: Governance Wikipedia includes a lot of rules and privileged people to adjudicate/enforce them –Study in 2008 (Butler etal, CHI, 08) 44 policies (now 51) 248 guidelines (now over 400)

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Wikipedia History visualization

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Sound familiar? How do you prevent people from ruining articles? (Defacement or vandalism) Software robots automatically reverse obvious defacement immediately. Moreover, there are hundreds of people who spend a little time each day watching the list of recent changes on Wikipedia (see Wikipedia:Recent changes patrol)... (Wikipedia FAQ, 2010) social machine definition: …processes in which the people do the creative work and the machine does the administration…

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI We see that Technical Challenges include Heavy programming burden –Costs a lot to build/support a scalable, governed platform Compare Wikipedia to HFS –Designing a successful GWAP still a black art And a large programming challenge –How can we create tools that a community can use by itself? 80% solution for everyone >> 99% for some Underlying models –How do we define Social Machines more rigorously ?

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Engineering challenges Creating tools that allow groups of users to create, share and evolve a new generation of open and interacting social machines –Declarative mechanism for sharing –Read/write mechanism for both information and “governance” Creating the underlying architectural principles to guide the design and efficient engineering of new Web infrastructure components for this new generation of social software –Distributed, open and dynamic (aka Web-like) Creating mechanisms to guarantee that use protocols are explicit and conform to the relevant social policy expectations of the users. –Transparency, accountability, policy awareness

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Who else can contribute to Social Machine work? Analysis and Theory Engineering and Technology Social Science and Communications Economics and law …

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Policy Aware WEB

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI HTTPa (Oshani Seneviratne, MIT) Adds machine readable policies and accountability to basic Web protocols

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Related Technical work

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Summary We are on the cusp of a new technology to create Web-based systems that will transform society by: – Creating new systems that allow large numbers of users to interact over the Web to collectively solve problems. –Creating and disseminating new Web application development technologies aimed at letting communities build and run their own social machines There are some important examples out there –But there’s a lot of important science to be done This is a truly interdisciplinary challenge in which computing, social science, informatics and communications work is all required