Challenges in Bridging Social Semantics and Formal Semantics on the Web

This paper describes several results of Wimmics, a research lab which names stands for: web-instrumented man-machine interactions, communities, and semantics. The approaches introduced here rely on graph-oriented knowledge representation, reasoning and operationalization to model and support actors, actions and interactions in web-based epistemic communities. The re-search results are applied to support and foster interactions in online communities and manage their resources

A Storm in an IoT Cup: The Emergence of Cyber-Physical Social Machines

The concept of social machines is increasingly being used to characterise various socio-cognitive spaces on the Web. Social machines are human collectives using networked digital technology which initiate real-world processes and activities including human communication, interactions and knowledge creation. As such, they continuously emerge and fade on the Web. The relationship between humans and machines is made more complex by the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and devices. The scale, automation, continuous sensing, and actuation capabilities of these devices add an extra dimension to the relationship between humans and machines making it difficult to understand their evolution at either the systemic or the conceptual level. This article describes these new socio-technical systems, which we term Cyber-Physical Social Machines, through different exemplars, and considers the associated challenges of security and privacy.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

Cut in Tiny Pieces: Ensuring That Fragmented Ownership Does Not Chill Creativity

The market for video entertainment is growing and becoming more diverse as technology reduces barriers to entry for small, independent moviemakers and distributors and increases consumers’ ability to access the media of their choice. The growing complexity of the market, however, increases transaction costs for new entrants who must obtain licenses to copyrighted music, characters, storylines, or scenes that they incorporate into their movies. The entertainment bonanza offered by new technologies may not be realized in practice because of market failure. The purposes of the Copyright and Patents Clause are frustrated because creators of new works wishing to use new technologies to build on prior creative effort confront a legal regime intertwined with older technologies and industry structures. This Article argues that the market needs new public and private law mechanisms to make it function more efficiently, by making it easier for creators of new works to (1) find the owners of preexisting content and (2) overcome other barriers to obtaining licenses, such as strategic behavior, irrational protection of entrenched bureaucracies, and obsolete, embedded capital. This Article begins with a hypothetical story of an independent moviemaker. It explains the problems that he confronts in making his movie, explores the relationship between the structure of the market for entertainment works and the circumstances that have traditionally justified legal intervention in a market economy, analyzes various models for such intervention, and proposes legislative, common law, and equitable solutions to mitigate the problems. The proposals afford a privilege for a new creator to use preexisting works when he cannot identify the holders of rights in the preexisting work, when he is unsuccessful in communicating with those rights holders, or when he proposes a reasonable royalty and is rebuffed. The purpose of copyright law is to encourage and reward creative effort. Current conditions frustrate achievement of that goal by making it easy for copyright owners to hide and then ambush creators of new works that build upon existing works. Amendment of the Copyright Act or application of the interpretive principles proposed in this article would further the law’s purpose

From distributed coordination to field calculus and aggregate computing

open6siThis work has been partially supported by: EU Horizon 2020 project HyVar (www.hyvar-project .eu), GA No. 644298; ICT COST Action IC1402 ARVI (www.cost -arvi .eu); Ateneo/CSP D16D15000360005 project RunVar (runvar-project.di.unito.it).Aggregate computing is an emerging approach to the engineering of complex coordination for distributed systems, based on viewing system interactions in terms of information propagating through collectives of devices, rather than in terms of individual devices and their interaction with their peers and environment. The foundation of this approach is the distillation of a number of prior approaches, both formal and pragmatic, proposed under the umbrella of field-based coordination, and culminating into the field calculus, a universal functional programming model for the specification and composition of collective behaviours with equivalent local and aggregate semantics. This foundation has been elaborated into a layered approach to engineering coordination of complex distributed systems, building up to pragmatic applications through intermediate layers encompassing reusable libraries of program components. Furthermore, some of these components are formally shown to satisfy formal properties like self-stabilisation, which transfer to whole application services by functional composition. In this survey, we trace the development and antecedents of field calculus, review the field calculus itself and the current state of aggregate computing theory and practice, and discuss a roadmap of current research directions with implications for the development of a broad range of distributed systems.embargoed_20210910Viroli, Mirko; Beal, Jacob; Damiani, Ferruccio; Audrito, Giorgio; Casadei, Roberto; Pianini, DaniloViroli, Mirko; Beal, Jacob; Damiani, Ferruccio; Audrito, Giorgio; Casadei, Roberto; Pianini, Danil

Engineering Self-Adaptive Collective Processes for Cyber-Physical Ecosystems

The pervasiveness of computing and networking is creating significant opportunities for building valuable socio-technical systems. However, the scale, density, heterogeneity, interdependence, and QoS constraints of many target systems pose severe operational and engineering challenges. Beyond individual smart devices, cyber-physical collectives can provide services or solve complex problems by leveraging a “system effect” while coordinating and adapting to context or environment change. Understanding and building systems exhibiting collective intelligence and autonomic capabilities represent a prominent research goal, partly covered, e.g., by the field of collective adaptive systems. Therefore, drawing inspiration from and building on the long-time research activity on coordination, multi-agent systems, autonomic/self-* systems, spatial computing, and especially on the recent aggregate computing paradigm, this thesis investigates concepts, methods, and tools for the engineering of possibly large-scale, heterogeneous ensembles of situated components that should be able to operate, adapt and self-organise in a decentralised fashion. The primary contribution of this thesis consists of four main parts. First, we define and implement an aggregate programming language (ScaFi), internal to the mainstream Scala programming language, for describing collective adaptive behaviour, based on field calculi. Second, we conceive of a “dynamic collective computation” abstraction, also called aggregate process, formalised by an extension to the field calculus, and implemented in ScaFi. Third, we characterise and provide a proof-of-concept implementation of a middleware for aggregate computing that enables the development of aggregate systems according to multiple architectural styles. Fourth, we apply and evaluate aggregate computing techniques to edge computing scenarios, and characterise a design pattern, called Self-organising Coordination Regions (SCR), that supports adjustable, decentralised decision-making and activity in dynamic environments.Con lo sviluppo di informatica e intelligenza artificiale, la diffusione pervasiva di device computazionali e la crescente interconnessione tra elementi fisici e digitali, emergono innumerevoli opportunità per la costruzione di sistemi socio-tecnici di nuova generazione. Tuttavia, l'ingegneria di tali sistemi presenta notevoli sfide, data la loro complessità—si pensi ai livelli, scale, eterogeneità, e interdipendenze coinvolti. Oltre a dispositivi smart individuali, collettivi cyber-fisici possono fornire servizi o risolvere problemi complessi con un “effetto sistema” che emerge dalla coordinazione e l'adattamento di componenti fra loro, l'ambiente e il contesto. Comprendere e costruire sistemi in grado di esibire intelligenza collettiva e capacità autonomiche è un importante problema di ricerca studiato, ad esempio, nel campo dei sistemi collettivi adattativi. Perciò, traendo ispirazione e partendo dall'attività di ricerca su coordinazione, sistemi multiagente e self-*, modelli di computazione spazio-temporali e, specialmente, sul recente paradigma di programmazione aggregata, questa tesi tratta concetti, metodi, e strumenti per l'ingegneria di ensemble di elementi situati eterogenei che devono essere in grado di lavorare, adattarsi, e auto-organizzarsi in modo decentralizzato. Il contributo di questa tesi consiste in quattro parti principali. In primo luogo, viene definito e implementato un linguaggio di programmazione aggregata (ScaFi), interno al linguaggio Scala, per descrivere comportamenti collettivi e adattativi secondo l'approccio dei campi computazionali. In secondo luogo, si propone e caratterizza l'astrazione di processo aggregato per rappresentare computazioni collettive dinamiche concorrenti, formalizzata come estensione al field calculus e implementata in ScaFi. Inoltre, si analizza e implementa un prototipo di middleware per sistemi aggregati, in grado di supportare più stili architetturali. Infine, si applicano e valutano tecniche di programmazione aggregata in scenari di edge computing, e si propone un pattern, Self-Organising Coordination Regions, per supportare, in modo decentralizzato, attività decisionali e di regolazione in ambienti dinamici

Runtime MPI Correctness Checking with a Scalable Tools Infrastructure

Increasing computational demand of simulations motivates the use of parallel computing systems. At the same time, this parallelism poses challenges to application developers. The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a de-facto standard for distributed memory programming in high performance computing. However, its use also enables complex parallel programing errors such as races, communication errors, and deadlocks. Automatic tools can assist application developers in the detection and removal of such errors. This thesis considers tools that detect such errors during an application run and advances them towards a combination of both precise checks (neither false positives nor false negatives) and scalability. This includes novel hierarchical checks that provide scalability, as well as a formal basis for a distributed deadlock detection approach. At the same time, the development of parallel runtime tools is challenging and time consuming, especially if scalability and portability are key design goals. Current tool development projects often create similar tool components, while component reuse remains low. To provide a perspective towards more efficient tool development, which simplifies scalable implementations, component reuse, and tool integration, this thesis proposes an abstraction for a parallel tools infrastructure along with a prototype implementation. This abstraction overcomes the use of multiple interfaces for different types of tool functionality, which limit flexible component reuse. Thus, this thesis advances runtime error detection tools and uses their redesign and their increased scalability requirements to apply and evaluate a novel tool infrastructure abstraction. The new abstraction ultimately allows developers to focus on their tool functionality, rather than on developing or integrating common tool components. The use of such an abstraction in wide ranges of parallel runtime tool development projects could greatly increase component reuse. Thus, decreasing tool development time and cost. An application study with up to 16,384 application processes demonstrates the applicability of both the proposed runtime correctness concepts and of the proposed tools infrastructure

avant-garde echo chamber

Avant-garde poetry looks dynamically at the world through anarchic approaches to language. With the knowledge that implicit linguistic structures shape ontology and epistemology, the contemporary avant-garde experiment inherently concerns itself with the political. My own poetry investigates various avant-garde methods of challenging the status quo. Such crimes against poetry allow us to rethink and recalculate our relationship to language’s organizing principles and its rippling impact within aesthetic and socio-political spheres. Where the avant-garde project once saw strong collective-based organization, locating these poetry groups today poses a challenge. This research explores the loss of collective presence in a decentralized avant-garde, the movement’s relationship to today’s crisis of subjectivity, as well as the viability of a contemporary avant-garde in consideration of neoliberalism’s impact on the individual as creator

New Frontiers in Information Systems Theorizing: Human-gAI Collaboration

The Journal of the Association for Information Systems has long had a reputation for promoting theory development. Yet theory development can be experienced as risky and frustrating because of a lack of divergence and convergence—both in terms of ideas and in the social dynamics among human theorists. These dichotomies can stymie progress and lead to unfinished works. Misconceptions about theory can also hamper advances. We examine the ways in which generative artificial intelligence (gAI) tools may be useful in developing theory in information systems (IS) through human-gAI collaboration, thus forging new frontiers in IS theorizing

Unifying the Modes of Existence

In this paper, I will argue that Axel Honneth’s formulation of the theory of recognition can add something valuable to Bruno Latour’s metaphysics of heterogeneous modes of existence in that it provides an account of what motivates individuals to continually participate in established patterns of interaction thereby encouraging the stability of the collective. I claim that heterogeneous modes of existence, or patterns of interaction are, in a sense, unified in the individual in that not only do they, at least in part, constitute reality for generations that are socialized into them, but participation in these instituted behaviours is also what constitutes an individual’s sense of self. I will argue that the co-constitution of society and sense of self that results from patterns of recognition can provide the explanation of stability, in terms of the perpetuation of instituted practices, and unity, in terms of the sense that those practices form a meaningful, unified whole, that is missing from Latour’s account. It is my claim that this can be done in a way that is compatible with Latour’s overall metaphysics. Given that part of the project in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence involves accounting for the actual experience of moderns while simultaneously tracing the disconnect with theory, it is important for the experience of stability and unity as described above to be located within his metaphysics. I will begin with some background on Latour’s project so as to understand the issues with modern theory that he seeks to address as well as the solution offered by the modes of existence before going on to frame what is missing from this account. I will then consider the sense of self that arises out of processes of recognition based on Axel Honneth’s account. I will then make a case for the usefulness of master narratives if they are understood in terms of symbolic universes as explained by Berger and Luckmann or symbol systems as explained by Clifford Geertz and will consider their role in processes of recognition. Finally, I will explain how the process of the co-constitution of self and society and the mechanism of recognition are consistent with Latour’s overall project