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

The social scaffolding of machine intelligence

The Internet provides access to a global space of information assets and computational services. It also, however, serves as a platform for social interaction (e.g., Facebook) and participatory involvement in all manner of online tasks and activities (e.g., Wikipedia). There is a sense, therefore, that the Internet provides an unprecedented form of access to the human social environment. It provides insight into the dynamics of human behavior (both individual and collective), and it additionally provides access to the digital products of human cognitive labor (again, both individual and collective). This is important, for the human social environment looks to be of crucial importance when it comes to the evolutionary and developmental origins of the human mind. In the present paper, we combine these ideas to develop a theoretical account that sees the Internet as providing opportunities for online intelligent systems to function as socially-situated agents. The result is a vision of machine intelligence in which advanced forms of cognitive competence are seen to arise from the creation of a new kind of digital socio-ecological niche. The present paper attempts to detail this vision with respect to the notion of socially-scaffolded cognition. It also describes some of the forms of machine learning that may be required to enable online systems to press maximal cognitive benefit from their new-found contact with the human social world

The role of crowdsourcing in the emerging Internet-of-Things

In this position paper we wish to propose and discuss several open research questions associated with the IoT. In particular, we wish to consider how crowdsourcing can be used as a scalable, reliable, and sustainable approach to support various computationally difficult and ambiguous tasks recognised in IoT research. We illustrate our work by examining a number of use cases related to healthcare and smart cities, and finally consider the future development of the IoT ecosystem with respect to the socio-technical philosophy and implementation of the Web Observatory

Web observatories: Gathering data for internet governance

In this chapter we argue that, while it is important to address various Internet governance issues at the protocol level (or design level), it is also critical to understand the affordances of Internet use for the interactions among stakeholders. For that, effective, ethical, and secure methods of gathering and sharing data will be required. In this chapter, we consider the challenges to creating and disseminating such methods and describe an architecture for that purpose, which we call the Web Observatory. While the Web Observatory is situated in the web context, using web protocols to organize data, its value for Internet governance stems from the importance of the web as the gateway to the use of the Internet. The architecture is designed to meet a set of technical, social, and legal challenges that will stand in the way of any kind of evidence-based Internet governance

Where the smart things Are: social machines and the Internet of Things

The emergence of large-scale social media systems, such as Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter, has given rise to a new multi-disciplinary effort based around the concept of social machines. For the most part, this research effort has limited its attention to the study of Web-based systems. It has also, perhaps unsurprisingly, tended to highlight the social scientific relevance of such systems. The present paper seeks to expand the scope of the social machine research effort to encompass the Internet of Things. One advantage of this expansion is that it helps to reveal some of the links between the science of social machines and the sciences of the mind. A second advantage is that it furthers our conceptual understanding of social machines and supports the quest to derive a philosophically-robust definition of the term “social machine.” The results of the present analysis suggest that social machines are best conceived as systems in which a combination of social and technological elements play a role in the mechanistic realization of system-level phenomena. The analysis also highlights the relevance of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind to our general understanding of systems that transcend the cyber, physical, and social domains

Observlets: empowering analytical observations on web observatory

The Web observatory is proposed as a global catalogue for sharing data-sets and analytic applications to support researchers from a variety of disciplines for analysing huge amount of research data for Web Science research. However, often these users fail to understand various transformations and consequences of complex data processing involved in a data analytic application. Therefore, there is a need to enable these users develop and re-use analytic applications on web observatory. In this study, we propose formal design patterns called "Observlets" for analytic applications to "observe" various web phenomena. The observlets provide abstract definitions for intermediate analysis required for a data analytic application. The users can share observlets across distributed web observatory nodes. The observlets are aimed to enhance end-users' awareness and engagement on web observatory and support programmers for innovating various data analytic application