Talk at Geospatial World Forum, Geneva, 8th May 2014 in session on Emerging and disruptive technologies shaping the future

1. Emerging and disruptive technologies
shaping the future: Social Machines
David De Roure
e-Research Centre, University of Oxford
@dder

2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3357073.stm

3. Edwards, P. N., et al. (2013) Knowledge Infrastructures: Intellectual Frameworks and
Research Challenges. Ann Arbor: Deep Blue. http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/97552

4. The Big Picture
More people
Moremachines
Big Data
Big Compute
Conventional
Computation
“Big Social”
Social Networks
e-infrastructure
online
R&D
Social
Machines
deeply
about
society

5. 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. The ability to create new forms of
social process would be given to the world at large,
and development would be rapid.
Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999 (pp. 172–175)
Social Machines

6. SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines is funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under
grant number EPJ017728/1 and comprises the Universities of Southampton, Oxford and Edinburgh. See sociam.org

7. Scientists
Talk
Forum
Image
Classification
data reduction
Citizen Scientists

8. Nigel Shadbolt et al

9. The Web
Observatory
Tiropanis, T., Hall, W., Shadbolt, N., De Roure, D., Contractor, N., and Hendler, J.
The web science observatory. IEEE Intelligent Systems 28, 2 (2013), 100–104.

12. F i r s t

13. Pip Willcox
@marstonbikepath
Datasets or dataflows?

14. A revolutionary idea…
Open Science!
rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org

15. Join the W3C Community Group www.w3.org/community/rosc
Jun Zhao
www.researchobject.org

16. The R Dimensions
Research Objects facilitate research that is
reproducible, repeatable, replicable, reusable,
referenceable, retrievable, reviewable, replayable,
re-interpretable, reprocessable, recomposable,
reconstructable, repurposable, reliable,
respectful, reputable, revealable, recoverable,
restorable, reparable, refreshable?”
@dder 14 April 2014
sci method
access
understand
new use
social
curation
Research
Object
Principles

17. Big data elephant versus sense-making network?
The challenge is to foster the co-constituted socio-technical
system on the right i.e. a computationally-enabled sense-making
network of expertise, data, models, software, visualisations and
narratives
Iain Buchan

18. • Technology doesn’t disrupt – people do disruptive
things with it
• People are increasingly empowered to do this. Think
about Social Machines meets Internet of Things.
• Research practice is changing – are our processes of
research and scholarship fundamentally limiting and
are they due for disruption?
• Risks and ethics of automation, of burning paradigms
into the infrastructure. Always ask hard questions.
Take home messages

19. david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk
www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/people/dder
@dder
SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines is funded by
the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
under grant number EPJ017728/1 and comprises the Universities of
Southampton, Oxford and Edinburgh. See sociam.org
Slide and image credits: Iain Buchan, Nigel Shadbolt,
Pip Willcox.

20. www.oerc.ox.ac.uk
david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk
@dder