Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Social Machines.

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI

Social Machines


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


How BIG is Big?


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?

Can we create technologies that make it possible to harness portions of that time and effort to help solve real-world problems?


Some early social machines


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?


Idea 1, do this by accident

Being explored, but how do we make this purposeful?


Harnessing this power “unknowlingly”

You have likely helped to make Optical Character Recognition better!

Von Ahn et al, 08


Harnessing the power for “fun”

Von Ahn, 06


Games + Social Web


Harnessing human knowledge for problem solving

Raddick et al, 07


Millions of galaxies classified


Hanny’s Voorwerp(A digression or maybe the whole point)


Galaxy Zoo communities

Bipana Bantawa, OII


Exploring motivation:Online meets offline in an “ad hoc” organization

Better translation: People-Powered Searchw/F-Y Wang, D. Zheng, CAS/ASU


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).


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


South China Tiger Communities

Wang et al, IEEE Computer, 2011©Science, 2007


What HFS is used for


Appears that HFS is different from other Web 2.0 networks


Distribution Statement

Wikipedia community


Distribution Statement

Slashdot community


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


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)


Wikipedia History visualization


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…


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?


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


Who else can contribute to Social Machine work?

• Analysis and Theory• Engineering and

Technology• Social Science and

Communications• Economics and law• …


Policy Aware WEB


HTTPa (Oshani Seneviratne, MIT)

Adds machine readable policies and accountability to basic Web protocols


Related Technical work


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

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Tetherless World Constellation, RPI Social Machines.

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