David De Roure

Observing Social Machines Part 1

What to Observe?

Clare HooperMegan Meredith-Lobay

Kevin PageSégolène Tarte

Don CruickshankCat De Roure

Some Social Machines

Nigel Shadbolt et al

myExperiment is a Social Machineprotected by the reCAPTCHA Social Machine

Social M

achines of Spam

Whither the Social Machine?

Whither the Social Machine?

Whither the Social Machine?

What to observe? Logs Analytics Data findings

e.g. Success rate of transcription

Social sciences Qualitative study Motivation

Individual andgroup

Mixed methods Differences in

technique and scale Unlikely to be an simple

transferable metric

Trajectories

Trajectories... distinguished by purpose

Trajectories... distinguished by purpose

Trajectories through Social Machines https://sites.google.com/site/bwebobs13/

Cat De Roure

The Befriending of Raspberry Tree

• Are the tree, bot and/or dating site Social Machines?• What are their trajectories?• Cyberphysical scenario involving machine-to-machine

communication without human mediation• Illustrates automatic assembly – unintended but

purposeful• Glimpse of APIs and the service-oriented ecosystem• Bot detection algorithm illustrates observation

mechanism (human / automated?)• Machines impersonating people; e.g. people can buy

twitter followers, how do they know they’re not bots?

The Lessons of the Raspberry Tree

https://support.twitter.com/entries/18311-the-twitter-rules

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20173641

http://mqtt.org/projects/andy_house

Identify Ecosystems

Where Social Machines are1. Interacting and competing with others2. Being designed, born and co-evolving3. Variable in size, purpose, lifetime and intent4. Reflecting the trends towards cyber-physical

and machine-to-machine systems

• The constituent Social Machines and their trajectories• Technologies, humans and their interfaces, including

intersection with physical world• The design processes, and how they correlate with

successful machines• Ground rules leading to emergent behaviour

– rules by which people abide– rules encoded in design– part of community conduct– grounded in how other Social Machines behave

Analyse

• Observing Social Machines Part 2: How to Observe?

• Toolkit approach• Embrace other

observatories• Instrument the

ecosystem

Future Work

• You are all observers… • Go forth, engage with the machines• Design new ones!• The observatory is really a laboratory• Share the (methodological) toolkit• Report your findings in these workshops

Your mission should you choose to accept it…

ScholarlyMachinesEcosystem

Panel on Wednesday

david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.ukwww.oerc.ox.ac.uk/people/dder

www.scilogs.com/eresearch

@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