Social networks and collective intelligenceA return to the Agora

21/09/2012, ITU Copenhagen

Manuel Mazzara

The School of Athens

Joint work with:

Luca Biselli

Antoine Chamot

Luca Chiarabini

Simona De Nicola

Nicola Dragoni

Emanuela Goldoni

Pier Paolo Greco

Antonio Marraffa

Georgios Papageorgiou

Nafees Qamar

A Fantastic New Era (!?!)

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

Thomas Edison

Web 2.0 Technologic Backbone

Google

Yahoo!

Blogs

Wiki’s

Instant Messaging

Facebook

LinkedIn

MySpace

Wikipedia

eBay

YouTube

Twitter

Flickr

Skype

Why Social Computing ?

DO’S & DON’TS of SOCIAL DO’S & DON’TS of SOCIAL NETWORKINGNETWORKING

Old Problems Made Worse

Trustworthy?

Relevant?Newsworthy?

Traditional Media Gatekeeping

World Audience

Plurality of information or an information cartel?

Reuters bought by Canadian financial data provider Thomson in a deal worth about £8.7bn [BBC, 15 May 2007]

Reuters prohibited any individual from owning 15% or more

The Thomson family now own 53%

Agenda-setting

Salience transfer the ability of a mass medium to transfer relevant issues

from its news media agendas to public agendas

The agenda-setting theory McCombs, Shaw, 1972 McCombs, 2004

The spiral of silence theory Noelle-Neumann, 1974

“There are no facts, only interpretations”

(Friedrich Nietzsche)

Power of Media (!?!)

Hegelian Dialectic (spot how/where/when it is used!)

The thesis is an intellectual proposition

The antithesis is the negation of the thesis, a reaction to the proposition

The synthesis solves the conflict between the thesis and antithesis by reconciling their common truths, and forming a new proposition

Example(s): Thesis: the French revolution/fire of Rome Antithesis: the terror which followed Synthesis: the constitutional state of free citizens/blaming the

Christians

Power of Illusion

Overcoming Gatekeeping ?

Internet offers an open platform where users can

interactively exchange information

News is multimedia, multi-dimensional, timely/timeless

The user can control relevance The user is able to choose topics, sources … The user can interact with authors, other

readers/followers …

Traditional/New Media Synopsis

Traditional media

Search engines Social networks

Relevance/presence of the news

Decided by the

publisher

Decided by the algorithm

Decided by the network

Interaction / feedback

Not allowed Not allowed Possible

TopicContent

Decided by the

publisher

Decided by the user

Decided by the network

Expand topic Not allowed Allowed Allowed

Deciding Source Not allowed Allowed Allowed

Individual (trust-based) ranking

Absent Absent Absent

We will either find a way, or make one ...

”Aut inveniam viam aut faciam”

Maslow’s Law of the Instrument

”It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

- H. Maslow, The Psychology of Science:A Reconnaissance.

Harper & Row, 1966

Create a virtual agora where people can freely discuss and exchange information

From greek “poly", meaning many or several and “doxa" meaning common belief or popular opinion

More control over the news/information

Think! Discuss! Verify! Interact! Take an active role! Take (better?) decisions!

Time for Polidoxa now!

The core ranking parameters:

Configurable static parameters trustworthiness of contacts (decided by the user) trustworthiness of sources/domains… (by the user)

Dynamic Parameters depending on network activities and contact’s distance evaluate (among other things) “like” and “dislike”

many “like” for a post is and indication of how your network perceives it

Polidoxa Ranking Algorithm (the „how“)

Trustworthyness and ranking

www.page-x.com 40%

www.page-z.com 60%

www.page-y.com 30%

News from z

News from x

News from y

Some details about the algorithm…

If you can't explain it to

a six year old,

you don't understand

it yourself.” Albert Einstein

Polidoxa@Twitter

Twitter is less studied than FB etc…

Only text analysis, therefore simpler (for now)

At each search the trust is recalculated for each contact and the results are presented accordingly (higher trust first) Trust is in range 0..100

This prototype is just a proof of concept

FB application is the next step

Static/Dynamic Trust

Static trust is chosen by the user Dynamic trust is calculated according to the following

parameters : Number of retweet Number of Favourites Number of Mentions Number of hashtags #FF Number of user’s tweets containing the searched

keyword

Static Trust Setup

Trust Formula

Static_Trust = chosen by the user

Nbr_favorites = Number of tweets sent by the contact and favoured by the user

Nbr_retweets = Number of tweets sent by the contact and retweeted by the user.

Nbr_mentions = Number of tweets sent by the user containing mentions referring this contact ("@username")

Nbr_FridayFollows = Number of tweets sent by the user containing FridayFollows referring to this contact (hashtag #FF)

Results_count = number of tweets belonging to this contact in which the search term appears

Trust goes up and down (like in real life) Coefficients are application parameter set by the admin

(not the user)

When beyond 100% all trust values are rescaled to be within the range

The oldest interactions (in the current prototype more than one year old) are removed This actually decreases the trust value for the contacts

who have been ignored for some time

Configuration of Coefficients

Search Results

Polidoxa

PolidoxaRelevance of the news Decided by the user

Interaction / feedback Allowed

Topiccontent

Decided by the user and his/her network

Expand topic Allowed

Deciding Source Allowed

Individual trust-based ranking Possible

Relationships = Links Individuals = NodesEvolution du monde des idées

Social Structure = Technology

Evolution of Plato’sWorld of Ideas

(Iperuranio)

Community = Network

Where do you want to go today (with Polidoxa)?

Collective Intelligence

“Collective intelligence is a distributed capacity of communities to evolve towards higher order integration and performance through collaboration and innovation”

Innovative democratic process?

Collective Intelligence

Biosphere

ForecastingSustainable

consumption and

productionFinancesTaxes

Regu

latio

nJust

ice LegislationExecution

Be creative when solving problems, use your right brain hemisphere more often!