Social Machines Oxford Hendler

Tetherless World Constellation, RPI

We are the WebThe Rise of the Social Machine

Jim HendlerTetherless World Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science

Assistant Dean of Information Technology and Web Science

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institutehttp://www.cs.rpi.edu/~hendler

@jahendler (twitter)


What is a social machine?

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


Some early social machines


“Productive” Social Machines

• It is estimated that 21% of the world’s population uses the World Wide Web – And this number is growing as cell phones and mobile

Web technologies become increasingly usable as primary browser platforms

• Modern Web sites can handle huge amounts of human time and effort– Cf. Facebook reports 4,000,000,000 minutes are spent

on the site every day (> 7500 person/years per day!)• Note: IBM < 7500 person/years per year…

Can we create technologies that make it possible to harness portions of that time and effort to help solve real-world problems?

Can we create technologies that make it possible to harness portions of that time and effort to help solve real-world problems?


A vision

Imagine• Hundreds of millions of people• Effectively able to network together• Working with the data archives of science, govts,

NGOs, etc.Working together on the Web

to cure disease, to feed the hungry,and to empower the powerless…

Is this Science Fiction?


Idea 1, do this by accident

Being explored, but how do we make this purposeful?


Harnessing this power “unknowlingly”

You have likely helped to make Optical Character Recognition better!

Von Ahn et al, 08


Harnessing the power for “fun”

Von Ahn, 06


Harnessing human knowledge for problem solving

Raddick et al, 07


Hanny’s Voorwerp(A digression or maybe the whole point)


Exploring motivation:Online meets offline in an “ad hoc” organization

Better translation: People-Powered Search


Very Misunderstood in the US media

Oct 2008 Mar 2010


HFS over time


What HFS is used for


Types of online/offline


HFS not motivated by funds (as rumor has it)

Financial reward only used in <3% of cases So what is the incentive?


Appears that HFS is different from other Web 2.0 networks


We see that Social Challenges include

• Keys to understanding on-line communities include– dynamics of online communities

• Incentives unclear• Information flows between online and offline are

largely unstudied• We can no longer assume an expert -> novice

continuum, but what replaces it?– Trust (and distrust) on Web-based

communities• Goal is to share information, not hide it – but how do

we prevent abuses?– Governance is a critical factor

• HFS is “self organizing,” which limits its scale


Example: Governance

• Wikipedia includes a lot of rules and privileged people to adjucate/enforce them– Study in 2008

(Butler etal, CHI, 08)• 44 policies (now 51)• 248 guidelines (now over 400)


Sound familiar?

How do you prevent people from ruining articles? (Defacement or vandalism)

Software robots automatically reverse obvious defacement immediately. Moreover, there are hundreds of people who spend a little time each day watching the list of recent changes on Wikipedia (see Wikipedia:Recent changes patrol)... (Wikipedia FAQ, 2010)

social machine definition:…processes in which the people do the creative work and the machine does the administration…


We see that Technical Challenges include

• Heavy programming burden– Costs a lot to build/support a non ad hoc platform

• Compare wikipedia to HFS

– Designing a successful GWAP still a black art• And a large programming challenge

– How can we create tools that a community can use by itself?

• 80% solution for everyone >> 99% for some

• Underlying models– How do we define Social Machines more rigorously?


“Semantic” Information Theory(w/J. Bao, P. Basu)


Weaver’s View on Communication - 1949

• LEVEL A (Technical). How accurately can the symbols of communication be transmitted ?

• LEVEL B (Semantic). How precisely do the transmitted symbols convey the desired meaning?

• LEVEL C (Effectiveness). How effectively does the received meaning affect conduct in the desired way?

Warren Weaver (1949), Recent Contributions to The Mathematical Theory of Communicationhttp://grace.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/cybernetics/weaver.pdf


Extending Weaver’s model

Weaver’s model (1949)


Formalize social machines based on a communication network model

Weaver’s model revisited


Who else can contribute to Social Machine work?

• Analysis and Theory• Engineering and

Technology• Social Science and

Communications• Economics and law• …


Related Technical work


Summary

• We are on the cusp of a new technology to create Web-based systems that will transform society by:– Creating new systems that allow large numbers of

users to interact over the Web to collectively solve problems.

– Creating and disseminating new Web application development technologies aimed at letting communities build and run their own social machines

• There are some important examples out there– But there’s a lot of important science to be done

• This is a truly interdisciplinary challenge in which computing, social science, informatics and communications work is all required


“We are the Web”

Imagine• Hundreds of millions of people• Effectively able to network together• Working with the data archives of science, govts,

NGOs, etc.Working together on the Web

to cure diseaseto feed the hungry,and to empower the powerless…

It’s not science fiction, let’s make it real!