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SUMMARY
Society is progressively moving towards a socio-technical ecosystem in which the physical and virtual dimensions of life are more and more intertwined and where people interaction often takes place with or mediated by machines. The scale at which this is happening and the differences in culture, language and interests makes the problem of establishing effective communication and coordinated action increasingly challenging.
So far, attention has been mainly devoted to collective adaptive systems (CAS) that provide or impose some form of harmonization or lightweight coordination of meaning and actions where machines do most of the computation and humans are at the periphery and only act as consumers. In these settings, collectives are generally homogeneous and are orchestrated to achieve a common global goal where knowledge adaptation only takes place locally to a single unit.
The SmartSocity project’s goal is to move towards a hybrid system where people and machines work in tandem to build a smarter society. The project envisions a new generation of CAS centred on the two foundational notions of compositionality and diversity.
To meet this ambitious goal these, the new new CAS will be hybrid, distributed, open and large scale where multitudes of heterogeneous peers producing and handling massive amounts of data can join/leave dynamically following unpredictable patterns with no central coordination and interoperating at different spatial and temporal scales.
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SOLUTIONS
- Building the next generation of collective adaptive systems (CASs) where humans and machines work synergetically
- Bridging the semantic gap between man and machine
- Implementing a continuous, unlimited cycle within the CASs in which data is sensed, interpreted, shared, elaborated and acted upon
- Identifying the right incentive schemes and privacy levels for CASs so that they can assist humans in their everyday activities, cope with the diversity of the world in terms of language, knowledge and personal experience and work with possibly imperfect information.
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LINK: http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/smart-society/index.php
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