The SOCIAM project aims to understand and develop social machines over 5 years with £6.15M in funding. Social machines harness human and computational resources to solve problems at scale. The project will explore how to design social computations and curate data to support them, while ensuring privacy, accountability and trust. It will build social machines for health, transport and policing using open data. An observatory will monitor social machines to understand their evolution and impacts. The goal is to understand how to coordinate large numbers of people through social machines to address important problems.

1. SOCIAM
The Theory and Practice of Social
Machines
Nigel Shadbolt

2. Investigator Team
Principal Investigator 5 years 2012-17
Nigel Shadbolt EPSRC funding£6.15M
Co-Investigators EP/J017728/1
Wendy Hall
Tim Berners-Lee
mc schraefel
Luc Moreau
David De Roure
David Robertson
Peter Buneman

3. The order of social machines
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

4. An Example Social Machine
• The Kenyan election on the 27th
December 2007…
• wave of riots, killings and
turmoil…
• African blogger Erik Hersman
read a post by another blogger
Ory Okolloh…
• Resulted in Ushahidi…
• “Nobody Knows Everything, but
Everyone Knows Something.”
• local observers to submit
reports using the Web or SMS
messages from mobile phones

5. Variants of the
Ushahidi Social Machine
Port au Prince Haiti
Washington Snowmageddon
Japan Fukashima
Middle East Gaza

6. Characteristics of this social machine?
(i) problems solved by the scale of human
participation on the Web
(ii) timely mobilisation and of people, technology
and information resources
(iii) incentive to participate with which increases as
more partipate
(iv) access to or else the ability to generate large
amounts of relevant data
(v) confidence in the quality of the data
(vi) trust in the agents and process
(vii) intuitive interfaces and user-centred
(viii) works cross platform
(ix) efficient, effective and equitable
(x) exploits the power of open - Open Source,
Open Standards, Open Data, Open Licences

7. Social Machines the New Frontier

8. Social Machines in Context
Big Data Social
More machines
Big Compute Machines
Conventional Social
Computation Networking
More people

9. Another perspective on Social
Machines
• People supply or refine
data
• People are elementary
problem solvers
• People generate/test
partial solutions

10. Another perspective on Social
Machines
• People supply or refine
data
• People are elementary
problem solvers
• People generate/test
partial solutions

11. Another perspective on Social
Machines
• People supply or refine
data
• People are elementary
problem solvers
• People generate/test
partial solutions

12. Social Machines – Embarrassingly
Parallel
• Human Flesh Search
– Accessibilitly
– Popularisation
– Centreless
– Timeliness
– Convergence

13. Social Machines – Embarrassingly
Parallel
• DARPA Balloon challenge
• Social machines support
• timely communication,
• wide-area team-building,
• urgent mobilization
• required to solve broad-
scope, time-critical
problems

14. Social Machines can be Dark
ShadowCrew (SC), Carderplanet (CP),
Cardersmarket (CM) and Darkmarket (DM)
carders have
traded security
for efficiency
Carderplanet most fragmented network out of
the four networks studied… one explanation
for distinctive fragmentation is due the
diversity of members which includes Russian
speakers, English speakers as well as Chinese,
Japanese and Koreans.

15. Some early social machines

16. Social Machines in the Age of Big Data

17. The dimensions of Social Machines –
Social Machines vary depending on
• Number of people • Empowering of
• Number of machines individuals, groups or
• Scale of data crowds
• Varieties of data • Time criticality
• Type of machine problem • Extent of wide area
solving communication
• Type of human problem • Need for urgent
solving mobilization
• Specification of goal state

18. Social Machines are NOT Turing
Machines
• they do contain conventional algorithmic
components
• but much else is different
• a social machine will start with an incomplete
specification that grows and evolves to cover more
of the problem via interaction
• a social machine achieves participation through
local incentives which become reinforced as the…
• incentive for an individual to supply data to the
algorithm increases as more individuals participate
• a social machine has a notion of completeness that
is a social rather than mathematical issue
• a social machine will not usually have a notion of
the correct output or termination… rather it runs
continuously

19. The SOCIAM Project Structure

20. What will SOCIAM do
Theme 1 Social Computation
• Understand how to design
social computations
• so that people can deal with
the complexity of the problem
solving;
• building scaleable algorithms to
pull data from individuals or the
Web more generally;
• generating new information of
higher utility from individuals
based on social interaction;
• and returning information to
individuals to reinforce their
participation in the algorithm.

21. What will SOCIAM do
Theme 2 Curated Data and Social Computation
• Understand how to design data and
databases in support of social
computations
• the information and data needed to
drive social machines and collaborative
problem solving will exists in many
different place and forms on the Web;
• some of it – perhaps most – will be user
generated; Eric Fisher CC BY 2.0
• this material will need to be given links
and made capable of discovery and
integration; Kingsley Idehen CC BY 2.0
• other data will exist in databases and
spread sheets;
• The challenge is to surface and link all of
this information and understand its
relevance in the context of the social
computations of the social machine.
Mike Bergman CC BY 2.0

22. What will SOCIAM do
Theme 3 Privacy, Accountability and Trust
• Understand how to build Social
Machines that respect privacy,
are trusted and accountable
• ensure that appropriate levels
of privacy are available with
data having different privacy
policies associated with it
• how to establish and associate
trust or at least accountability in
the data and in the social
computation
• how and why trust in data,
processes or participants is
established or breaks down in
the Web

23. What will SOCIAM do
Theme 4 Interaction
• Understand how to build Social
Machines that support effective
interaction
• effective interaction requires we
understand the contexts of use;
• how the components of the social
computation determine the shape
of the interaction;
• provide tools to support rich sense
making of the data presented in a
social computation;
• principles on which to design the
interfaces to access, represent, and
manipulate data, processes and
participants as they are introduced

24. What will SOCIAM do
Theme 5 Social Machine Implementations
• Understand how to build Social Machines for
Health Care, Transport and Policing
• the work will be driven by the availability of
open data for these sectors;
• UK is in a unique position to explore the
construction of social machines that mix open
and private, national and individual data sets;
• These areas have the potential of substantial
contributions by individuals and social groups
for both content and problem solving;
• testbeds that will ensure heterogeneous and
distributed data can be elicited, integrated and
analysed; groups to organize and determine
additional data collection, analysis or
coordinated action in the physical world via
algorithmic social computations; via
interaction, to visualize and explore the data,
to make sense of it; alongside mechanisms of
trust and accountability for the various data,
judgments, processes and participant

25. What will SOCIAM do
Theme 6 Web Observatory
• Understand Social Machines through an
observatory that observes, monitors and
classifies social machines - both those of the
project and more widely on the Web - as
they evolve;
• it will also act as an early warning facility for
new disruptive social machines elsewhere
on the Web;
• to understand how Social Machines reach
tipping points, longitudinal observational
data will reveal how they grow once
launched;
• whether they coalesce into larger machines
or fragment into micro machines that still
have utility;
• what signals need to be observed, what is a
fair and faithful sample of Web behaviour;
• this is likely to call attention to appropriate
governance, ethical and legal issues.

26. A Broader View of SOCIAM
Social computation
Engagement with Algorithms harnessing social
social capacity, composed by social
computations means.
Real-time Real-time
People
inference from assimilation of
Using personal devices;
data, from local data, from social
interacting with sensors.
to social to local
Linked data
Curation of Curating local data with social use in
personal data mind; connecting distributed data .

27. A vision for SOCIAM
• How can we coordinate 10 million people to stop crime?
• Or millions of people supporting themselves and others
in the delivery of efficient transportation?
• Or any scale of people supporting themselves and others
in the delivery of well being?
• If we can put a man on the moon with 100,000 what can
we do with 100,000,000?
• Social machines to delight and empower, absorb and
empower…