Social Machines
Three Shifts in Digital Scholarship
David De Roure
6TH UCL BLOOMSBURY CONFERENCE
Provocations to Frame Discussion
Three shifts in scholarly practice
1. Hypothesis-led – data-centric
2. Scientist – public
3. Human – computer
The Problem

INT.
VERSE
VERSE BRIDGE VERSE BRIDGE VERSE OUT.
Datascopes
telescopes for the naked mind
NRAO/AUI/NSF
From Signal to Understanding
BioEssays,, 26(1):99–105, January 2004
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/fourthparadigm/
PolicyGrid
m
Current Nodes
Rural communities
DE Hubs
DAMES d
ds
Harnessing advances in digital
technology and practice to
achieve world-class social
research with maximum impact
DE DTCs
Demonstrators
& Sustainability
Social Inclusion
highwire NeISS
CQeSS Genesis
s
m
e-Social Science
MoSeS
m
Obesity e-Lab ss
HUB
m
DReSS
Horizon
Creative Industries
Finance
mm
d MiMeG Healthcare Genesis
OeSS GeoVUE
mm eStat m
d
m
Entertainment
Web Science
ncrmLifeGuide
www.digitalsocialresearch.net
Media
NCRM phase 3
NCRM phase 2
A
A
B
B
C
+
-
F
F
+
C
E
E
D
D
Theories of
Self interest
-
Theories of
Exchange
Theories of
Balance
A
A
B
B
F
+
C
F
- +
C
E
D
Novice
Expert
D
Theories of
Collective Action
Theories of
Homophily
Theories of
Cognition
E
Web Observatory Community Group
• Will articulate the business and technical
requirements for the Web Observatory
• Need all observatory stakeholders
• Starting by identifying existing observatories, current
practice and use cases
• Preliminary discussions: need to describe
observatories, datasets, data flows, policies, and to
share results and methods
• Announced at WWW2012 and WEBIST 2012
• http://www.w3.org/community/webobservatory/
method
data
http://www.myexperiment.org/
Three Provocations for Framing
Boundaries changing between
1. Hypothesis-led and data-centric
2. Scientist and public
3. Human and computer
The Zooniverse principles
1. Telling people about the
purpose of the research
and about its context is a
good thing
2. Treat participants as
collaborators not as
subjects
3. Do not waste people’s
time
4. All volunteers, and their
contributions, are of equal
value to the project
Versus…
• The Deficit model – the
layperson is irrational,
ignorant, and even
intellectually vacuous
• Human-based computation
– a computer science
technique in which a
computational process
performs its function by
outsourcing certain steps to
humans
http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley/library/special/projects/whats-the-score
23,000 hours of
recorded music
Digital Music
Collections
Student-sourced
ground truth
Music Information
Retrieval Community
Community
Software
Supercomputer
Linked Data
Repositories
SOCIAM
The Theory and Practice of
Social Machines
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
Some Social Machines?
More machines
Social Machines in Context
Big Data
Big Compute
Social
Machines
Conventional
Computation
Social
Networking
More people
The users of a website, the website, and
the interactions between them, together
form our fundamental notion of a “machine”
Three Provocations for Framing
Boundaries changing between
1. Hypothesis-led and data-centric
2. Scientist and public
3. Human and computer
http://force11.org/
Paul’s
Paul’s
Pack
Research
Object
QTL
Workflow 16
Results
produces
Included
in
Published in
Included in
Feeds into
Logs
produces
Included in
Included in
Metadata
Slides
produces
Paper
Published in
Common pathways
Workflow 13
Results
The R dimensions
Reusable. The key tenet of Research Replayable. Studies might involve
Objects is to support the sharing and single investigations that happen in
milliseconds or protracted processes
reuse of data, methods and
that take years.
processes.
Referenceable. If research objects
Repurposeable. Reuse may also
are to augment or replace traditional
involve the reuse of constituent
publication methods, then they must
parts of the Research Object.
be referenceable or citeable.
Repeatable. There should be
sufficient information in a Research
Object to be able to repeat the
study, perhaps years later.
Reproducible. A third party can
Revealable. Third parties must be
able to audit the steps performed in
the research in order to be convinced
of the validity of results.
Respectful. Explicit representations
start with the same inputs and
methods and see if a prior result can of the provenance, lineage and flow
of intellectual property.
be confirmed.
Replacing the Paper: The Twelve Rs of the e-Research Record” on http://blogs.nature.com/eresearch/
The Executable Thesis
new data
PhD Student
executable
thesis
new results
Computational Research Objects
Research Objects that are
1. The research record for repeatable, reproducible, ... etc
2. Describe process (method) for enactment/execution
3. Usable by machines as well as humans
– Social Objects
– Semantically described
– Programmatically accessible
– Designed for assistance and automation
– Designed for scale and heterogeneity
4. Composable with a distributed computational model?
Notifications and automatic re-runs
Autonomic
Curation
Self-repair
New research?
Machines are users too
Knowledge Infrastructures
Knowledge infrastructures
comprise robust networks
of people, artifacts, and
institutions that generate,
share, and maintain
specific knowledge about
the human and natural
worlds
So what about impact?
•
•
•
Filter then publish -> publish then filter
Scholarly publishing is a Social Machine*
•
Science is already crowd-sourced
•
Authors, Readers, Reviewers, …
If outreach and impact are measured by
scale of reuse, we have mechanisms for
scaling
* merry-go-round?
david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk
www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/people/dder
blogs.nature.com/eresearch
@dder
Slide credits: Christine Borgman, Ichiro Fujinaga, Malcolm
Atkinson, Noshir Contractor, Nigel Shadbolt, Paul Fisher
www.myexperiment.org/packs/286
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
D. De Roure, C. Goble and R. Stevens. The Design and Realisation of the
myExperiment Virtual Research Environment for Social Sharing of Workflows
Future Generation Computer Systems 25, pp. 561-567.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2008.06.010
S. Bechhofer, I. Buchan, D De Roure et al. Why linked data is not enough for
scientists, Future Generation Computer Systems
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2011.08.004
D. De Roure, David and C. Goble, Anchors in Shifting Sand: the Primacy of Method
in the Web of Data. WebSci10, April 26-27th, 2010, Raleigh, NC, US.
D. De Roure, S. Bechhofer, C. Goble and D. Newman, Scientific Social Objects, 1st
International Workshop on Social Object Networks (SocialObjects 2011).
D. De Roure, K. Belhajjame, P. Missier, P. et al Towards the preservation of scientific
workflows. 8th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES
2011). Singapore.
David De Roure, Kevin R. Page, Benjamin Fields, Tim Crawford, J. Stephen Downie
and Ichiro Fujinaga An e-Research Approach to Web-Scale Music Analysis", Phil.
Trans. R. Soc. A 28 August 2011 vol. 369 no. 1949 3300-3317 doi:
10.1098/rsta.2011.0171
Carole A. Goble, David De Roure and Sean Bechhofer Accelerating scientists’
knowledge turns. Will be available at www.springerlink.com
http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:17de32c4-518f-4be6-bf78-1ecd6c761b81