A planetary nervous system for social mining and collective awareness

We present a research roadmap of a Planetary Nervous System (PNS), capable of sensing and mining the digital breadcrumbs of human activities and unveiling the knowledge hidden in the big data for addressing the big questions about social complexity. We envision the PNS as a globally distributed, self-organizing, techno-social system for answering analytical questions about the status of world-wide society, based on three pillars: social sensing, social mining and the idea of trust networks and privacy-aware social mining. We discuss the ingredients of a science and a technology necessary to build the PNS upon the three mentioned pillars, beyond the limitations of their respective state-of-art. Social sensing is aimed at developing better methods for harvesting the big data from the techno-social ecosystem and make them available for mining, learning and analysis at a properly high abstraction level. Social mining is the problem of discovering patterns and models of human behaviour from the sensed data across the various social dimensions by data mining, machine learning and social network analysis. Trusted networks and privacy-aware social mining is aimed at creating a new deal around the questions of privacy and data ownership empowering individual persons with full awareness and control on own personal data, so that users may allow access and use of their data for their own good and the common good. The PNS will provide a goal-oriented knowledge discovery framework, made of technology and people, able to configure itself to the aim of answering questions about the pulse of global society. Given an analytical request, the PNS activates a process composed by a variety of interconnected tasks exploiting the social sensing and mining methods within the transparent ecosystem provided by the trusted network. The PNS we foresee is the key tool for individual and collective awareness for the knowledge society. We need such a tool for everyone to become fully aware of how powerful is the knowledge of our society we can achieve by leveraging our wisdom as a crowd, and how important is that everybody participates both as a consumer and as a producer of the social knowledge, for it to become a trustable, accessible, safe and useful public good.Seventh Framework Programme (European Commission) (grant agreement No. 284709

A planetary nervous system for social mining and collective awareness

We present a research roadmap of a Planetary Nervous System (PNS), capable of sensing and mining the digital breadcrumbs of human activities and unveiling the knowledge hidden in the big data for addressing the big questions about social complexity. We envision the PNS as a globally distributed, self-organizing, techno-social system for answering analytical questions about the status of world-wide society, based on three pillars: social sensing, social mining and the idea of trust networks and privacy-aware social mining. We discuss the ingredients of a science and a technology necessary to build the PNS upon the three mentioned pillars, beyond the limitations of their respective state-of-art. Social sensing is aimed at developing better methods for harvesting the big data from the techno-social ecosystem and make them available for mining, learning and analysis at a properly high abstraction level. Social mining is the problem of discovering patterns and models of human behaviour from the sensed data across the various social dimensions by data mining, machine learning and social network analysis. Trusted networks and privacy-aware social mining is aimed at creating a new deal around the questions of privacy and data ownership empowering individual persons with full awareness and control on own personal data, so that users may allow access and use of their data for their own good and the common good. The PNS will provide a goal-oriented knowledge discovery framework, made of technology and people, able to configure itself to the aim of answering questions about the pulse of global society. Given an analytical request, the PNS activates a process composed by a variety of interconnected tasks exploiting the social sensing and mining methods within the transparent ecosystem provided by the trusted network. The PNS we foresee is the key tool for individual and collective awareness for the knowledge society. We need such a tool for everyone to become fully aware of how powerful is the knowledge of our society we can achieve by leveraging our wisdom as a crowd, and how important is that everybody participates both as a consumer and as a producer of the social knowledge, for it to become a trustable, accessible, safe and useful public good. Graphical abstrac

FuturICT: Participatory computing to understand and manage our complex world in a more sustainable and resilient way

We have built particle accelerators to understand the forces that make up our physical world. Yet, we do not understand the princi-ples underlying our strongly connected, techno-socio-economic systems. We have enabled ubiquitous Internet connectivity and instant, global information access. Yet we do not understand how it impacts our be-havior and the evolution of society. To fill the knowledge gaps and keep up with the fast pace at which our world is changing, a Knowledge Accelerator must urgently be cre-ated. The financial crisis, international wars, global terror, the spread-ing of diseases and cyber-crime as well as demographic, technological and environmental change demonstrate that humanity is facing seri-ous challenges. These problems cannot be solved within the traditional paradigms. Moving our attention from a component-oriented view of the world to an interaction-oriented view will allow us to understand the com-plex systems we have created and the emergent collective phenomena characterising them. This paradigm shift will enable new solutions to long-standing problems, very much as the shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric worldview has facilitated modern physics and the ability to launch satellites. The FuturICT flagship project will develop new science and technology to manage our future in a complex, strongly connected world. For this, it will combine the power of information and communication technol-ogy (ICT) with knowledge from the social and complexity sciences. ICT will provide the data to boost the social sciences into a new era. Complexity science will shed new light on the emergent phenomena in socially interactive systems, and the social sciences will provide a better understanding of the opportunities and risks of strongly net-worked systems, in particular future ICT systems. Hence, the envisaged FuturICT flagship will create new methods and instruments to tackle the challenges of the 21 st century. FuturICT could indeed become one of the most important scientific endeavours ever, by revealing the principles that make socially inter-active systems work well, by inspiring the creation of new platforms to explore our possible futures, and by initiating an era of social and socio-inspired innovations

FuturICT: Participatory computing to understand and manage our complex world in a more sustainable and resilient way

We have built particle accelerators to understand the forces that make up our physical world. Yet, we do not understand the principles underlying our strongly connected, techno-socio-economic systems. We have enabled ubiquitous Internet connectivity and instant, global information access. Yet we do not understand how it impacts our behavior and the evolution of society. To fill the knowledge gaps and keep up with the fast pace at which our world is changing, a Knowledge Accelerator must urgently be created. The financial crisis, international wars, global terror, the spreading of diseases and cyber-crime as well as demographic, technological and environmental change demonstrate that humanity is facing serious challenges. These problems cannot be solved within the traditional paradigms. Moving our attention from a component-oriented view of the world to an interaction-oriented view will allow us to understand the complex systems we have created and the emergent collective phenomena characterising them. This paradigm shift will enable new solutions to long-standing problems, very much as the shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric worldview has facilitated modern physics and the ability to launch satellites. The FuturICT flagship project will develop new science and technology to manage our future in a complex, strongly connected world. For this, it will combine the power of information and communication technology (ICT) with knowledge from the social and complexity sciences. ICT will provide the data to boost the social sciences into a new era. Complexity science will shed new light on the emergent phenomena in socially interactive systems, and the social sciences will provide a better understanding of the opportunities and risks of strongly networked systems, in particular future ICT systems. Hence, the envisaged FuturICT flagship will create new methods and instruments to tackle the challenges of the 21st century. FuturICT could indeed become one of the most important scientific endeavours ever, by revealing the principles that make socially interactive systems work well, by inspiring the creation of new platforms to explore our possible futures, and by initiating an era of social and socio-inspired innovations. Graphical abstrac