social machines (6 out of 6)

Week in review: 17 - 23 July

• Spent the week in Southampton and one day in Oxford talking about decentralisation, scholarly communication, LinkedResearch, personal data stores and the like with cool people like emax, csarven, bblfish, TimBL, Wendy, Nigel, Ramine, Jun, DDR..
• Imagined eprints as a tiny LDN-powered JS app (ldprints).
• Net magazine issue 296 came out in print.. With an article about Linked Data Notifications!
• Missed a bunch of buses.
• Spent a couple of hours eating great food at the Southbank Center food market, just like summer 2014 weekends. Remembered why I love and hate London.
• Surprise visited my Mum. Now I can tweet again.

🏷 academia academic publishing decentralisation ldn linked research social machines sociam travel week in review workshop

Sun 23rd of July 2017 at 10:35am (+01:00)

"...if our scholarly infrastructure is no longer fit for purpose, can we use it to change itself?"

Dave de Roure asks the hard questions, talking about Scholarly Social Machines at EDSC2017.

🏷 https://rhiaro.co.uk/tags/eswc2017 linked research social machines https://linkedresearch.org/

Mon 29th of May 2017 at 9:30am (+02:00)

A response to "Scholarly Social Machines"

In reply to: http://www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/users/user384/scholarly-social-machines.html

This article looks at the scholarly communication ecosystem through the lens of social machines; something I have thought about a lot but only partially articulated through my contributions to Linked Research. In particular, the hypothesis that we are struggling to improve the state of scholarly communication despite advancements in technology because we are trapped in a machine we have ceased to see is interesting. I've had many conversations with people over the last couple of years who balk at any suggestion of a radical upheaval of scholarly communication, hiding behind notions of futility of incentivising researchers to do anything other than pubish or persih, the immovability of the for-profit publishing industry. They complain about the state of things, yet are transfixed by the status quo. I think that framing this problem as a 'trap' will perhaps nudge folks into looking for a way out, and social machines is a useful concept to work with, something very demonstrably real in other domains, and this might help with finding a perspective on scholarly communication.

The article mentions the 'ecosystem' and lists some of the stages. I think it's worth noting that in Linked Research: An Approach for Scholarly Communication we characterised the different stages, roles and actors in scholarly communication in detail (there's even a diagram!). It's important because this is a hard problem, too big a space, to talk about all at once, and breaking it down into smaller chunks that nonetheless interlink (and the interlinking is critical) can help.

Dave writes that we see the same articles about how to improve being published over and over again, and this is true. I assembled a collection of some of them here. People lament that it's too hard to change, and us Linked Research-y types release software and publish our work in a Webby decentralised way (just like Dave has done, for the version of his article that I'm reading) and shove it under peoples' noses and cry that here is the proof that it's not too hard, and if only a few more people would bother we could iron out the wrinkles and make it easier and easier for everyone to participate. It's catching on, but agonisingly slowly. Most people still smile sadly, with a look of concern about the non-future of our academic careers. Dave writes of the "Catch-22" of using traditional publishing to try to solve some of the problems; and it's true. Even csarven is pushing 'papers' to academic conferences about Linked Research and related tooling in the hopes that academics will pay attention (and so he can get his PhD within this broken system). We console ourselves that at least the PDFs were generated from HTML and CSS, and a link to an open access Web version remains in the abstract even from behind Springer's paywall. Yet somehow the dual effort of publishing 'properly' and demonstrating alternatives is still not ticking the right boxes! What's up with that? So we need a new tactic, and the questions raised in this article are pragmatic and challenging, and a step in the right direction.

Question 8 is important because I often find that when we provocatively push "extreme decentralisation" via Linked Research, people push back against that as too difficult, too flakey, underdeveloped. We're arguing from this end of the spectrum because we're fighting against the very other end right now. But it is a spectrum, and better - more robust, more powerful - would be something in between. One example: the response that an individual can't possibly be counted on to keep their research online for eternity ignores the roles libraries and institutions (and indeed traditional publishers) can play in archiving and indexing work over time.

Another note to reinforce the importance of stepping outside to look in at scholarly communication: people, mostly software engineers, with whom I work on decentralised Social Web technologies look on at academia with confoundment. People claiming to be Web Scientists are putting PDFs behind paywalls? Life-saving medical research is accessible to what percentage of human beings? It seems obvious to the outside that we're really screwing things up here. Dave implies that we need to push people towards revolution over evolution, but we need to open a few more eyes before this can happen.

So how do we get people to step outside and look back in? This article doesn't address this. Arguably the people who will show up to Dave's presentation of this are already eyes-open, so perhaps together we can scheme to break the spell that the status quo holds over others.

Framing this (improving the scholarly comms ecosystem) as an interdisciplinary research problem could be emphasised more. Certainly we could solve all of the technical problems, but the social and political ones remain. I hope that we can take some inspiration from SOCIAM in tackling this in the years to come.

🏷 academic publishing edsc2017 linked research reviews social machines https://linkedresearch.org/

Sat 27th of May 2017 at 3:47pm (+02:00)

In reply to: http://sociam.org/

Amy planned a trip from to

🏷 attendee event meeting phd rsvp social machines sociam

Sun 21st of February 2016 at 3:58pm (-05:00)

Notes about the Semantic Web and social machines

J. Hendler, T. Berners-Lee, From the Semantic Web to social machines: A research challenge for AI on the World Wide Web, Artificial Intelligence (2009), doi:10.1016/j.artint.2009.11.010

Powerful human interactions enabled by futuristic high-speed infrastructure.

Empower Web of people via coupling of AI, social computing and new technologies. "humanity in the loop".

Social machine: "...processes in which people do the creative work and the machine does the administration." (Weaving the Web, p172).

Struggling with social mechanisms to control predatory behaviour and threats to privacy.

-> Tech must be developed that allows user communities to construct / share / adapt social machines, so successful models evolve through trial, use and refinement.

Claims a new generation of Web Technologies needed to overcome barriers to this; cross-disciplinary approach needed.

• creating tools
• creating principles and guidelines
• extending Web infrastructure re: information sharing and address privacy and user expectations of data use.

"...a revolutionarily more powerful platform for the individual, enabled by realizing that the individual is also a member of a community" (/ies)

"architecture of the future Web must be designed to allow the virtually unlimited interaction of the Web of people" (vs. documents now)

Giant Global Graph - dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/215

SW deployment:

• [3] T. Berners-Lee, J. Hendler, O. Lassila, The semantic web, Scientific American (May 2001) 28–37.
• [10] J. Hendler, Web 3.0 emerging, IEEE Computer 42 (1) (January 2009).
• [11] I. Jacobs, N. Walsh (Eds.), Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One, 2004, W3C Recommendation 15 December 2004, http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-webarch-20041215/.

"disruptive potential" of SWt, "important paradigm shift"

"little work in understanding the impact of their new capability"

"the smaller we can make the individual steps of this transformation, the easier it will be to find humans who can be incentivized to perform those steps."

"need to develop mechanisms to enable [connections between people]"

Lack structure for formally computing qualities like:

• trustworthiness
• reliability
• expectations about use of information
• privacy
• copyright
• (etc)

"requires data structures... to treat social expectations and legal rules as first-class objects" ("declarative rule-based infrastructure that is appropriate for the Web").

"open and distributed nature of the Web requires that rule sets be linked together."Cross-context use, sometimes unanticipated.Inconsistency sure to arise. No logics that control contradiction have been shown to scale well.

New approaches to problem of specifying contexts (need).

SMs must be able to apply different policies based on context.

Work in ontologies must extend to allow user communities to identify bias and share different interpretations.

Current security models / mechanisms insufficient.

[1] - formal models for privacy: L. Backstrom, C. Dwork, J. Kleinberg, Wherefore art thou r3579x?: Anonymized social networks, hidden patterns, and structural steganography, in: Proceedings of the 16th International World Wide Web Conference, Banff, 2007, pp. 181–190.

Provenance important in determining trustworthiness.

[20] information accountability, legal and public policy: D. Weitzner, H. Abelson, T. Berners-Lee, J. Feigenbaum, J. Hendler, G. Sussman, Information accountability, Communications of the ACM (June 2008).

policy-rule-based languages.Reasoners that can interpret policy and determine which uses of data are policy-compliant.-> How to tackle scaling?

RespectMyPrivacy dig.csail.mit.edu/2009/SocialWebPrivacy

[4] Lit review: T. Berners-Lee, W. Hall, J. Hendler, K. O’Hara, N. Shadbolt, D. Weitzner, A framework for web science, Foundations and Trends in Web Science 1 (1) (2006).

🏷 http://vocab.amy.so/blog#Doing http://vocab.amy.so/blog#Doing online communities paper phd semantic web social machine social machines

Sun 3rd of March 2013 at 8:44pm (Z)

Last modified: Mon 1st of April 2013 at 12:06am (Z)

PhD in Informatics

School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Something something linked data something social profiles something context-aware self-representation on the web doodah online personas social machines uhhhh decentralisation.

I guess I'll update this when I'm feeling more sure of myself.

Graduation expected: July 2016 (funding runs out) / late 2017 (more realistically)

Publications: See /pub

Humoured Supervised by: Ewan Klein and Dave Robertson.

🏷 academia cv education informatics linked data online personas phd resume semantic web social machines social profiles social web university of edinburgh user-generated content

Mon 1st of October 2012 at 9:00am (+01:00)