Keynote talk at DCDC 2019, Birmingham, November 2019. The theme of the conference was "Navigating the digital shift: practices and possibilities". The talk presents six short stories of my journeys in the evolving knowledge infrastructure. Thank you to all my fellow travellers and guides. (The slides all have a black strip of 2 or 3 lines at the top - this was for live captioning.)
9. 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.
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)
10. “Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human
knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s
flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against
vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since
2007 and is still shrinking…
The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective
running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing
bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who
might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage…”
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/
2013
13. In an effort to speed up classifications to cope with the large number of galaxies we expect to receive from
new surveys, we've been working on ways to combine your classifications with those of machines, inspired
by the idea that the combination of both automatic and human classification may be more powerful than
either alone. If you choose the 'Enhanced' work flow, you will be much more likely to see the top 100
galaxies our galaxy-classifying robot thinks it needs help with in order to improve. All galaxies will be seen by
at least a few volunteers to make sure we aren't missing anything. If you'd rather just see a random
selection of available galaxies, choose 'Classic’.
15. De Roure, D., Goble, C. Stevens, R.
(2009) The Design and Realisation of
the myExperiment Virtual Research
Environment for Social Sharing of
Workflows. Future Generation
Computer Systems 25, pp. 561-7.
• A workflow commons for workflow sharing,
designed using Web 2.0 principles
• Launched open beta in November 2007, still
actively used
• Largest public collection of workflows (2900+),
for multiple workflow systems
• 2400+ entries in Google Scholar refer to
myExperiment
• Open source, REST API, part of Open Linked Data
cloud (66k triples) - lod-cloud.net
• Introduced “packs” which led to Research
Objects – www.researchobject.org
• Workflow collection studied in scientific
workflow and e-Science communities
• Service maintained by Manchester and Oxford
universities. Informs design of other workflow
sharing systems.
CaroleGoble2017
www.myexperiment.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
20. MIREX Overview
• Began as MIREX in 2005
• Tasks defined by community debate
• Data sets collected and/or donated
• Participants submit code to IMIRSEL
• Non-consumptive research
StephenDownie
Music Information Retrieval Evaluation EXchange
23. New and Emerging Forms of Data
• Internet data, derived from social media
and other online interactions (including
data gathered by connected people and
devices, eg mobile devices, wearable
technology, Internet of Things)
• Tracking data, monitoring the movement of
people and objects (including
GPS/geolocation data, traffic and other
transport sensor data, CCTV images etc)
• Satellite and aerial imagery (eg Google
Earth, Landsat, infrared, radar mapping etc)
http://www.oecd.org/sti/sci-tech/new-data-for-understanding-the-human-condition.htm
24. https://twitter.com/CR_UK/status/446223117841494016/ 2014
Some people's smartphones
autocorrected "BEAT" to
instead read "BEAR”
"Thank you for choosing an
adorable polar bear," the
reply from the WWF said "We
will call you today to set up
your adoption."
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26723457
26. Observer of
one social
machine
Observers using
third party
observatory
Observer of multiple
social machines
Human participants
in Social Machine
Human participants in
multiple Social Machines
Observer of Social
Machine infrastructure
1
4
2
3
5
6
SM
SM
SM
Social Machine
Observing Social
Machines
7
@dder
De Roure, D., Hooper, C.,
Page, K., Tarte, S., and Willcox,
P. 2015. Observing Social
Machines Part 2: How to
Observe? ACM Web Science
Tarte, S.M., De Roure, D. and Willcox, P. 2014. Working out the
Plot: the Role of Stories in Social Machines. SOCM2014: The
Theory and Practice of Social Machines, Seoul, Korea,
International World Wide Web Conferences pp. 909–914
34. Today
Non-consumptive research
Jupyter notebooks
Provenance
Social Machines
Archives of the future
Computational archival science
Artificial Intelligence
10 years ago
Open Science
Open Source
Reproducible research
In silico experimentation
Workflow commons
Automated curation
The “executable thesis”
38. “Supposing, for instance, that the
fundamental relations of pitched sounds
in the science of harmony and musical
composition were susceptible of such
expression and adaptations, the engine
might compose elaborate and scientific
pieces of music of any degree of
complexity or extent.”
1843
40. Next 10 years?Milton Court 2019
Rehearsal for
PRiSM Commissions
www.rncm.ac.uk/research/research-centres-rncm/prism/
41. “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to
originate anything. It can do whatever we know
how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis;
but it has no power of anticipating any analytical
relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in
making available what we are already acquainted
with.”
“…We may say most aptly, that the Analytical
Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the
Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.”
42. Alter is written about, and utilising, artificial intelligence. Through three
phases, it traces the development of an artificial mind: from hazy,
unformed conception to a complex and creative self. Between each
phase this curious and perfectionist mind dives into its own code to
retrain and develop itself.
Linking the imagined technology with the real, the text is entirely written
by an AI that audibly develops in coherence and philosophical scope. At
first, it merely learns from Ada Lovelace’s correspondence. This is
expanded to wider 19th-century writing and finally the extent of the
Internet through OpenAI’s GPT-2 algorithm. In this way the narrative of
the scene reflects the data science behind its production.
RobLaidlow
https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2019/event/ada-lovelace-imagining-the-analytical-engine
44. Intersection
Human & Machine
Digital & Physical
Across discipline
Across time
Automation
Computation on
and in
collections
Artificial Intelligence
Social
Machines
Innovation in the
Knowledge Infrastructure
Permission to be creative
Labs
45. “Those who have learned to
walk on the thresholds of
unknown worlds…may then
with the fair white wings of
Imagination hope to sore
further into the unexplored
amidst which we live.”
daguerreotype1842-3,courtesyofGeoffreyBond
Pip Willcox
46. Thanks to Ruth Arnhert, Sam
Blickhan, Dave Beavan, Tim
Crawford, J. Stephen Downie,
Ichiro Fujinaga, Carole Goble,
Eirini Goudarouli, Emily
Howard, Rob Laidlow, Ursula
Martin, Kevin Page, Mark
Sandler, Marcus du Sautoy,
Ségolène Tarte, and Pip Willcox.
Also Electronic Enlightenment,
FAST, PETRAS, PRiSM,
SOCIAM, TMus, & Zooniverse.