Sunday 8 June 2014


Web Science: It's All in the Mind 




DAME WENDY HALL
University of Southampton, Electronics & Computer Science



OVERVIEW: This year we celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the World Wide Web. Twenty-five years ago there were no web sites, by 1994 there were 800, today it is estimated there are nearly a billion. The reason for this is not solely down to the technology, it is because we - as individuals, organisations and society - create the content that makes the Web grow. This socio-technical aspect of the Web was the founding principal of Web Science. In this talk we will discuss the theory and practice of Web Science – past, present and future – and conjecture the nature of collective intelligence on the Web. Will the Web ever develop a mind of it’s own?

READINGS:
    Berners-Lee, T., Hall, W., Hendler, J., Shadbolt, N., & Weitzner, D. (2006). Creating a Science of the WebScience, 313(5788), 769-771.
    Berners-Lee, T., Hall, W., Hendler, J. A., O'Hara, K., Shadbolt, N., & Weitzner, D. J. (2006). A framework for web scienceFoundations and trends in Web Science, 1(1), 1-130.
    Hendler, J., Shadbolt, N., Hall, W., Berners-Lee, T., & Weitzner, D. (2008). Web science: an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the webCommunications of the ACM, 51(7), 60-69.
    O'Hara, K., Contractor, N. S., Hall, W., Hendler, J. A., & Shadbolt, N. (2013). 
Web Science: understanding the emergence of macro-level features on the World Wide WebFoundations and Trends in Web Science4(2-3), 103-267

    Tiropanis, T., Hall, W., Shadbolt, N., De Roure, D., Contractor, N., & Hendler, J. (2013). The Web Science ObservatoryIEEE Intelligent Systems28(2), 100-104.

18 comments:

  1. Social machines are not Turing Machines? Is a network of interacting Turing machines a Turing machine? (And what about those who says people are Turing machines?)

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  2. Why we can’t predict the web effect !!!

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    1. in other way, In the beginning we didn’t have enough information about user behavior, after 20 year can we predict a web effect on an idea before lunching from micro to micro environment !!

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  3. My question for Professor Hall is more about the culture of Web Science than about social machines per se. I am happy to learn that the Web Science crowd is diverse (e.g., closer to gender parity). Why do you think Web Science attracts a group of people more diverse than, say, Computer Science (in Europe and North America)?

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  4. Coordinating efforts towards promoting web science, the European Future ICT project: http://www.futurict.eu/ can be a valuable partner.

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  5. I liked the concept "social machines". Basically social machines are instances of what is generally known as CAS - Complex adaptive systems. Such systems may involve human agents, animals, robots, institutions and more.

    At the end of the talk, a question was raised whether social machines are Turing complete or represent something more which is not realizable by a Turing machine. From a philosophical POV I do not see what can be gained from the proposition that social machines are more than a system of interacting Turing machines. It would be a very tough sell on theoretical grounds. Still, the concept gains traction because it invites a valuable multidisciplinary approach to socio-technical systems.

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  6. Web science is surely an interesting topic that extends far beyond academia. While academics started officially studying this topic in 2006, I am confident that companies standing to profit from this information researched this field beforehand and continue to do so on a scale incomparable with current academic efforts.

    Google and Facebook are surely doing web science on a massive scale, but keeping all the data for themselves. Google has 50,000 employees and an annual profit nearing 60 billion. I’m guessing that academic web science is incomparable in numbers. Perhaps we could save a lot of time and buy, or materialize, databases from Google and Facebook.

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  7. I wonder what kind of insights academics are interested in when it comes to web science. I know that businesses would be interested in insights that would drive profits, and they're already actively investigating this area. What types of questions drive academic research in this field?

    To address some of Wendy's discussion questions at the end, I think for a mind to emerge on the web, it wouldn't just happen willy nilly, but would require the right kind of dynamics (whatever those are). I do think that the internet could perhaps be a feasible medium for a mind, though: the mind would be a layer built on the existing internet protocol, and could have access to data stored in the cloud.

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    1. Businesses obviously stand to profit, yet Web science could answer many academic questions too: how humans organize socially, how we use technology, how we can use this knowledge to better health care, social equality, and so on.

      Beyond the many applications (business, government, social...) of web science, it presents a new tool to gain insight into human behaviour.

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  8. I am interested to know more about her work for digital literacy (more than just digital skills, she said) and how that relates to the gender gap in computer science (and the seeming lack thereof in web science).
    Dame Hall mentioned she watched a BBC documentary which said that the internet creates a culture which condones misogyny. I am curious how the gender gap in Silicon Valley/computer science balances with Heylighen's ideas of the global brain moving towards utopia. Will that utopia be a utopia for all, or just White/Asian males who can speak fluently to machines? Will the negative cultural aspects of the web like misogyny be ironed out soon or will that be a continual challenge as web culture grows?

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    1. I think the web community will become more socially equitable as digital literacy becomes more widespread. The web provides a more-or-less equal voice to those who know how to use it. Rather than publishing a formal article or making a movie, every internet user has the power to publish media in whichever form they want while reaching a wide audience.

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  9. I found the distinction between social machine and Turing machine very interesting. Dame Hall asserted that an important difference between them is that social machine doesn't imply notion of correct output. But people are part of the social machine and they have values. What if we replace correct output by values? It seems that there is correct values that are shared by most people. Think about justice in web (anonymous). Could we considere those kind of act as a response to uncorrect output, in order to do some which are correct?

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  10. I wish there had been more focus on the "social machine" concept—and maybe not just in comparison with the Turing machine—as it seems to be a defining feature of web science. It seems to me it might be a much more flexible, more accurate alternative to a concept like the "global brain"—reflecting on the cognitive aspect of the phenomenon without leaving out the peculiarities of non-individual cognition.

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  11. Thank you Madame Wendy Hall. Internet today is the reflect our global society. Therefore, we should pay more attention to our role and our products into web science

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  12. Dear Wendy, It was an attractive presentation ! We mention frequently Wikipedia during this summer school on relations between the web science and the mind. I would like to think that Wikipedia would be a main component of the global brain that we dream all about. Understanding between multiplex dimensions would be difficult with communalities into definitions. Ontology like DBPedia from Wikipedia is mainly based on named entities and less on concepts, so with less problems of ambiguity. Do you think it’s possible/useful to stabilize the semantics of terms into Wikipedia to have a consistent semantic web?

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  13. The graph on "Internet Growth - Usage Phases - Tech Events" slide has Google Glass as final event and Dame Wendy Hall's comment "imagine if all of us come to the room with Google Glass on and stream online real time". I would like to stretch it a little bit further:
    Imagine people wearing 'augmented reality glasses' such as:
    - https://www.spaceglasses.com/
    - http://ca.oakley.com/en/product/W0OO7049
    - https://atheerlabs.com/
    - or http://www.oculusvr.com/
    which allow to overlay digital content pretty much on the whole visual field and to merge it with the 'analogue information'; imagine streaming data, comments etc. to each other real time; imagine searching internet for information about technologies mentioned in the graph and projecting this information real time in the visual field, plus sharing it with others. After checking links mentioned above it may not seem too far fetched....

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  14. On the "Internet Growth - Usage Phases - Tech Events" slide, wHen we look at the graph, we can see some key events that led to the astounding increase on web users, beginning by the apparition of Google, Broadband and wi-fi introduction. However, the rate of new users per year dramatically increased during the transition from the read/write web to the social web. Facebook, twitter and the smartphones may account for a big part of the web exanding phenomena. What do you think was the major event that changed the course of the web towards the global phenomenon it is now? Or do you think it was just a natural chain of events?
    Also, I really liked the idea of the Web as a Social Machine. We, as a society, shaped and changed the web and as a parallel process web also changed us and our dynamics as a society. However, I think society's vices and defects are also reflected on the internet. Therefore, I consider privacy issues and cybersecurity the major challenges. Does the internet has something as "implicit laws"? Or does cybersecurity and privacy are only legislated through the laws of each country. Will soemthing as a "Universal Internet Usage Law" Will ever be developped? Do you think it is necessary?

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  15. I find this "social machine" concept intriguing because it encompasses several dimensions or layers of interacting systems. Firstly, there are the users of the web, which are social/biological systems. Then, there are the web protocols themselves, which constitute rules that govern how information is delivered across the network infrastructure of the web. Finally, there are the applications that are built on top of this platform of standardized web protocols, which provide an interface through which users can access informational resources. Of course, these applications are composed of rules and back-end architectures that influence how they are used and how data is stored and accessed. Hall addresses the interdisciplinary nature of web science, but from what I can tell, modelling this complex interplay of systems operating on different substrates (biological, digital, etc.) would be a very challenging task. Would such a model not require the utilization of these multiple substrates in order to make accurate predictions? Especially given the fact that the users and the technology mutually influence each other?

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