Socially and biologically inspired computing for self-organizing communications networks

The design and development of future communications networks call for a careful examination of biological and social systems. New technological developments like self-driving cars, wireless sensor networks, drones swarm, Internet of Things, Big Data, and Blockchain are promoting an integration process that will bring together all those technologies in a large-scale heterogeneous network. Most of the challenges related to these new developments cannot be faced using traditional approaches, and require to explore novel paradigms for building computational mechanisms that allow us to deal with the emergent complexity of these new applications. In this article, we show that it is possible to use biologically and socially inspired computing for designing and implementing self-organizing communication systems. We argue that an abstract analysis of biological and social phenomena can be made to develop computational models that provide a suitable conceptual framework for building new networking technologies: biologically inspired computing for achieving efficient and scalable networking under uncertain environments; socially inspired computing for increasing the capacity of a system for solving problems through collective actions. We aim to enhance the state-of-the-art of these approaches and encourage other researchers to use these models in their future work

Electronic social capital for self-organising multi-agent systems

It is a recurring requirement in open systems, such as networks, distributed systems, and socio-technical systems, that a group of agents must coordinate their behaviour for the common good. In those systems—where agents are heterogeneous—unexpected behaviour can occur due to errors or malice. Agents whose practices free-ride the system can be accepted to a certain level; however, not only do they put the stability of the system at risk, but they also compromise the agents that behave according to the system’s rules. In social systems, it has been observed that social capital is an attribute of individuals that enhances their ability to solve collective action problems. Sociologists have studied collective action through human societies and observed that social capital plays an important role in maintaining communities though time as well as in simplifying the decision-making in them. In this work, we explore the use of Electronic Social Capital for optimising self-organised collective action. We developed a context-independent Electronic Social Capital framework to test this hypothesis. The framework comprises a set of handlers that capture events from the system and update three different forms of social capital: trustworthiness, networks, and institutions. Later, a set of metrics are generated by the forms of social capital and used for decision-making. The framework was tested in different scenarios such as two-player games, n-player games, and public goods games. The experimental results show that social capital optimises the outcomes (in terms of long-term satisfaction and utility), reduces the complexity of decision-making, and scales with the size of the population. This work proposes an alternative solution using Electronic Social Capital to represent and reason with qualitative, instead of traditional quantitative, values. This solution could be embedded into socio-technical systems to incentivise collective action without commodifying the resources or actions in the system

The Social Construction of “Shared Reality” in Socio-Technical Systems

International audienceAs the size, complexity and ubiquity of socio-technical systems increases, there is a concomitant expectation that humans will have to establish and maintain long-lasting ‘relationships’ with many types of digital artefact: for example with humanoid robots, driverless cars or software agents running on ‘smart’ devices. Rather than being limited to one-off interactions, these relationships will continue over longer time frames, correspondingly increasing the likelihood of errors occurring from numerous causes. When digital errors occur, often complete human mistrust and distrust is the outcome. The situation is exacerbated when the computer can make no act of reparation and no avenue of forgiveness is open to the human. In the pursuit of designing long-lasting socio-technical systems that are fit-for purpose, this position paper reviews past work in relevant social concepts and, based on the sociological theory of social constructivism, proposes a new approach to the joint human-computer construction of a “shared reality”

A collective adaptive socio-technical system for remote- and self-supervised exercise in the treatment of intermittent claudication

Vascular surgeons have recognised that the condition of many patients presenting with intermittent claudication and peripheral arterial disease is better treated by physical exercise rather than endovascular or surgical intervention. Such exercise causes pain, though, before and until the health improvements are realised. Therefore, patients experiencing pain tend to stop doing that which causes it, unless they are supervised performing the necessary exercise programmes. However, supervised exercise is an extremely costly and time-consuming use of medical resources. To overcome this series of problems, we propose to develop and deploy a healthcare application which provides patient exercise programmes that are both centrally organised and remotely supervised by a health practitioner, and self-organized and self-supervised by the patients themselves. This demands that two dimensions of adaptation should be addressed: adaptation prompted by the health practitioner as the patient group improves and meets programme targets; and adaptation prompted from within the patient group enabling them to manage their own community effectively and sustainably. This position paper explores this application from the perspective of engineering a collective adaptive system for a mobile healthcare application, providing both remote- and self-supervised exercise. This requires, on the one hand, converging recent technological advances in sensors and mobile devices, audio and video connectivity, and social computing; with, on the other hand, innovative value-sensitive and user-centric design methodologies, together with formal methods for interaction and interface design and specification. The ultimate ambition is to create a ‘win-win-win’ situation in which the benefits of exercise as a treatment, the reduced costs of supervision, and the pro-social incentives to perform the exercise are all derived from computer-supported self-organised collective action

Knowledge Management for Democratic Governance of Socio-Technical Systems

International audienc