Socio-inspired ICT

Modern ICT (Information and Communication Technology) has developed a vision where the “computer” is no longer associated with the concept of a single device or a network of devices, but rather the entirety of situated services originating in a digital world, which are perceived through the physical world. It is observed that services with explicit user input and output are becoming to be replaced by a computing landscape sensing the physical world via a huge variety of sensors, and controlling it via a plethora of actuators. The nature and appearance of computing devices is changing to be hidden in the fabric of everyday life, invisibly networked, and omnipresent, with applications greatly being based on the notions of context and knowledge. Interaction with such globe spanning, modern ICT systems will presumably be more implicit, at the periphery of human attention, rather than explicit, i.e. at the focus of human attention. Socio-inspired ICT assumes that future, globe scale ICT systems should be viewed as social systems. Such a view challenges research to identify and formalize the principles of interaction and adaptation in social systems, so as to be able to ground future ICT systems on those principles. This position paper therefore is concerned with the intersection of social behaviour and modern ICT, creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of pervasive, globe-spanning, omnipresent and participative ICT. a e-mail: ferscha@pervasive.jku.at 402 The European Physical Journal Special Topics 1 The rise of aware ICT Modern ICT, building on the ever progressing miniaturization of technology (processing, storage, communication) as well as at the ever growing globe spanning networks, has postulated to invisibly integrate technology into everyday objects like tools, appliances, objects of everyday use, and environments like offices, homes and cars in such a way, that these objects turn into “smart things” or “smart environments”. Built with networked embedded systems technology, such “smart” things and environments have become increasingly interconnected, diverse and heterogeneous, and together with IP networking technology have created a whole new generation of ICT as we see it today (e.g. the “Internet-of-Things”, “Smart Buildings, Cars, Cities”, “Smart Grids”, even the “Smart Planet”). Only networking and communication capabilities, however, cannot make things and environments appear “smart”, unless coping with the challenge of an operative, and semantically meaningful interplay among each other. One approach to address the challenge of “smart” ICT has been to design and implement systems able to manage themselves in a more or less autonomous way, with little or no human interaction. While self-management stands for the ability of single smart thing to describe itself, to select and use adequate sensors to capture information describing its context, self-organizing stands for the ability of a group of possibly heterogeneous peers to establish a spontaneous network based on interest, purpose or goal, and to negotiating and fulfilling a group goal. Self-management relates to an individual smart thing, and concerns adaptation to changing individual goals and conditions at runtime, while self-organization relates to whole ensembles of smart things, and concerns adaptation in order to meet group goals. A prerequisite for self-management, even more so for self-organization is the ability to autonomously perceive, recognize, and even anticipate phenomena and their consequences, i.e. being “aware”. Early signs “aware ICT” have been observed by contributions from Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing over the past two decades, starting with systems being aware about the physical situation they are operated in (“context aware ICT”)[134], and later on with systems being aware about the user and his activities (“activity aware ICT”) [120,132] (see Fig. 1). More recent trends tend to make ICT aware about social (“socially aware ICT”) [96,118], emotional (“emotion aware ICT”) [9] and even cognitive aspects (e.g., “attention aware ICT”) [47]. We look at this evolution in more detail. 1.1 From context aware ICT to socio-technical fabric Quoting from Weiser’s (1991) vision “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of every day life, until they are indistinguishable from it” [151] conveys the most common understanding of the origins of a computer science research branch today known as Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (PUC). Weiser’s seminal vision was pathbreaking, and still represents the corner stone for what might be referred to as a first generation of research, aiming towards embedded, hidden, invisible, but networked ICT systems. This first generation definitely gained from the technological progress momentum (miniaturization of electronics, gate packaging), and was driven by the upcoming availability of technology to connect literally everything to everything (Connectedness, Late Nineties), like wireless communication standards and the exponentially growing internet. Networks of systems emerged, forming communication clouds of miniaturized, cheap, fast, powerful, wirelessly connected, “always on” systems, enabled by the massive availability of miniaturized computing, storage, communication, and embedded systems technologies. Special purpose computing and information appliances, ready to spontaneously Participatory Science and Computing for Our Complex World 403 Fig. 1. The Evolution of Aware ICT Systems. communicate with one another, sensor-actuator systems to invert the roles of interaction from human to machine (implicit interaction), and organism like capabilities (self-configuration, self-healing, self-optimizing, self-protecting) characterize this generation. The second generation PUC research inherited from the then upcoming sensor based recognition systems, as well as knowledge representation and processing technologies (Awareness, around the turn of the century), where research issues like e.g. context and situation awareness, self-awareness, future-awareness or resourceawareness reshaped the understanding of pervasive computing. Autonomy and adaptation in this generation was reframed to be based on knowledge, extracted from low level sensor data captured in a particular situation or over long periods of time (The respective “epoch” of research on “context aware” systems was stimulated by Schillit, Adams and Want [134], and fertilized by the PhD work of Anind Dey [31], redefining the term “context” as: “. . . any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. An entity is a person, place, or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and application themselves.”). One result out of this course of research are autonomic systems [72], and later autonomic elements, able to capture context, to build up, represent and carry knowledge, to self-describe, -manage, and –organize with respect to the environment, and to exhibit behaviour grounded on “knowledge based” monitoring, analysing, planning and executing were proposed, shaping ecologies of ICT systems, built from collective autonomic elements interacting in spontaneous spatial/temporal contexts, based on proximity, priority, privileges, capabilities, interests, offerings, environmental conditions, etc. Finally, a third generation of PUC is approaching, building upon connectedness and awareness, and attempting to exploit the (ontological) semantics of systems, services and interactions (i.e. giving meaning to situations and actions). Such systems are often referred to as highly complex, orchestrated, cooperative and coordinated “Ensembles of Digital Artefacts” (FP7 FET). An essential aspect of such an ensemble is its spontaneous configuration towards a complex system, i.e. a “... dynamic network of many agents (which may represent cells, species, individuals, nations) acting in parallel, constantly acting and reacting to what the other agents are doing where the control tends to be highly dispersed and decentralized, and if there is to be any coherent behavior in the system, it has to arise from competition and cooperation 404 The European Physical Journal Special Topics among the agents, so that the overall behavior of the system is the result of a huge number of decisions made every moment by many individual agents” [19]. Ensembles of digital artefacts as compounds of huge numbers of possibly heterogeneous entities constitute a future generation of systems to which we refer as SocioTechnical Fabric [49], weaving social and technological phenomena into the ‘fabric of technology-rich societies’. Indications of evidence for such large scale, complex, technology rich societal settings are facts like 10 – 10 “things” or “goods” being traded in (electronic) markets today, 10 personal computer nodes and 10 mobile phones on the internet, 10 cars or 10 digital cameras with sophisticated embedded electronics – even for internet access on the go, etc. Today’s megacities approach sizes of 10 citizens. Already today some 10 users are registered on Facebook, 10 videos have been uploaded to YouTube, like 10 music titles haven been labeled on last.fm, etc. Next generation research directions are thus going away from single user, or small user group as addressed in the first two generations, heading more towards complex socio-technical systems, i.e. large scale to very large scale deployments of PUC and the respective concerns on a societal level. 1.2 Key future ICT research challenges identified by the scientific community To better understand the trends and impacts of future ICT systems, as well as the research challenges posed by them, we have conducted a large scale solicitation initiative to pave future generation ICT research roadmaps The voices raised by active researchers in the field can be c