1,354,282 research outputs found
Socio-inspired ICT: Towards a socially grounded society-ICT symbiosis
No full textModern 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 ICTValues and TechnologyTechnology, Policy and Managemen
The superorganism of massive collective wearables
No full textPersonalized wearable ICT systems presented in fashionable and appealing lifestyle-designs have gained critical user acceptance, and comprise momentum to bring wearable computing to a socio-technical mass phenomenon within the next few years. Early indicators for this expected wearable systems "tsunami" are the "spring tide" of 5.3 billion mobile phone platforms (i.e. mobile subscribers) as of the end of 2013, an assessed market potential for 300 million smart watches in 2014, and a possible market for more than 200 million smart eye-wear systems in 2015 [1].
This workshop asks the questions on the potentials and opportunities of turning these massively deployed wearable systems to a globe spanning super-organism of socially interactive personal digital assistants. While the individual wearables are of heterogeneous provenance and typically act autonomously, we can assume that they can (and will) self-organize into large scale cooperative collectives, with humans being mostly out-of-the-loop [2]. We may not assume a common objective or central controller, but rather volatile network topologies, co-dependence and internal competition, non-linear and non-continuous dynamics, and sub-ideal, failure prone operation. We could refer to these emerging massive collectives of wearables as a "super-organism" [7], since it exhibits properties of a living organism (like e.g. 'collective intelligence') on its own. In order to properly exploit such super-organisms, we need to develop a deeper scientific understanding of the foundational principles by which they operate
Pro-Active Performance Management of Distributed Applications
No full textSelf-managing systems able to dynamically reconfigure with respect to time-varying workload mires and changing system resource availability are of growing importance in heterogeneous multicomputer environments. Advanced performance evaluation techniques ave needed to induce and assess the impact of such reconfigurations where guaranteeing timeliness of reconfiguration activities is particularly challenging. A whole new class of methods supporting "pro-active" adaptivity based on the predicted system state at the re-configuration instant are needed to alleviate the shortcomings of "re-active" systems which bring reconfigurations in effect after the system state has changed. In this paper we argue for self-contained performance management of distributed applications, i.e. integrated performance tuning with the ability to automatically adapt the application behavior to the performance characteristics of the execution environment. Particularly we study pro-active performance management for distributed simulation based on the Time Warp protocol executing on a network workload of workstations (NOWs)
HPC from a self-organisation perspective: The case of crowd steering at the urban scale
No full textHPC normally refers to the aggregation of computational capabilities in such a way that intense computations can be executed in a much shorter time than it would require on a classic end-user machine. In this paper, we propose a different point of view on such matter: focussing on situated self-organising systems, i.e. systems in which myriads of nodes deployed in a physical environment locally cooperate in order to obtain a global coherent and robust behaviour. We show how the intrinsic need of contextual information pushes towards distribution of the computation among such nodes, resembling a sort of high-performance computing system at a urban scale. We exemplify this concept by discussing an experience on designing and simulating a crowd steering application, able to provide users walking directions considering the contingencies, in this case overcrowded areas
An Agent-Based Parallel Geo-Simulation of Urban Mobility during City-scale Evacuation
No full textThe simulation of urban mobility is a modeling challenge due to the complexity and scale. The complexity in modeling a social agent is due to three reasons: (i) the agent is behaviorally complex itself due to several interrelated/overlapping modeling aspects; (ii) the setting in which a social agent operates usually demands a multi-resolution approach; and (iii) the consideration of real spatial and population data is the underpinning that has to be realized. In this paper, we propose an agent-based parallel geo-simulation framework of urban mobility based on necessary modeling aspects. The aspect-oriented modeling paradigm relates the models vertically as well as horizontally and highlights the situations requiring multi-resolution interfacing. The framework takes into consideration the importance of technological footprints embedded with social behavior along with essential space and mobility features keeping focus on the importance of the city-scale scenario. We have used a real, high-quality raster map of a medium-sized city in central Europe converting it into a cellular automata (CA). The fine-grained CA readily supports pedestrian mobility and can easily be extended to support other mobility modes. The urban mobility simulation is performed on a real parallel and distributed hardware platform using a CA compatible software platform. Considering city-wide mobility in an emergency scenario, an analysis of the simulation efficiency and agent behavioral response is presented
Socio-Technical Network Analysis from Wearable Interactions
No full textcomplexity and computational social sciences. This paper draws from explicit (phone calls, SMS messaging) and implicit (proximity sensing based on Bluetooth radio signals) interaction patterns collected via smartphones and reality mining techniques to explain the dynamics of personal interactions and relationships. We consider three real human to human interaction networks, namely physical proximity, phone communication and instant messaging. We analyze a real undergraduate community's social circles and consider various topologies, such as the interaction patterns of users with the entire community, and the interaction patterns of users within their own community. We fit distributions of various interactions, for example, showing that the distribution of users that have been in physical proximity but have never communicated by phone ts a gaussian. Finally, we consider the types of relationships for example friendships, to see whether significant differences exist in their interaction patterns. We find statistically significant differences in the physical proximity patterns of people who are mutual friends and people who are non-mutual (or asymmetric) friends, though this difference does not exist between mutual friends and never friends, nor does it exist in their phone communication patterns. Our findings impact a wide range of data-driven applications in socio-technical systems by providing an overview of community interaction patterns which can be used for applications such as epidemiology, or in understanding the diffusion of opinions and relationships.LIDIA
A New Opportunity to Urban Evacuation Analysis: Very Large Scale Simulations of Social Agent Systems in Repast HPC
No full textDue to catastrophic disasters induced by forces of nature like flooding or tsunamis, terrorism or nuclear power plant accidents, understanding the dynamics of urban evacuation systems has elicited massive interest over the past years. While discrete event simulations of evacuation models become prohibitively complex dealing with the time, space and individual behavior, multiagent based models have revealed to be a potentially more effective. This paper introduces models of configurations of social agents at a massive scale, which, together with the most recent supercomputing technology, allows for a simulation analysis of realistic evacuation models at the level of large cities ( agents). Agent based models of demographics and the morphology of cities together with population densities, mobility patterns, individual decision making, and agent interactions are implemented into a tool chain which ultimately generates Repast HPC code, which is then executed on a 2,048 node shared memory multiprocessor server (SGI Altix UV-1000). We demonstrate how different evacuation strategies can be assessed based on costly, yet feasible simulation runs - thus evidencing, that a whole class of demanding, very complex simulation problems has found a convincing solution.</p
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Transformative Experience Design
No full textUntil now, information and communication technologies have been mostly conceived as a mean to support human activities – communication, productivity, leisure. However, as the sophistication of digital tools increases, researchers are start- ing to consider their potential role in supporting the fullfilment of higher human needs, such as self-actualization and self-transcendence. In this chapter, I introduce Transformative Experience Design (TED), a conceptual framework for exploring how next-generation interactive technologies might be used to support long-lasting changes in the self-world. At the center of this framework is the elicitation of transfor- mative experiences, which are experiences designed to facilitate an epistemic expan- sion through the (controlled) alteration of sensorial, perceptual, cognitive and affec- tive processes
Agent Perception Modeling for Movement in Crowds
No full textThis paper explores the integration of a perception map to an agent based model simulated on a realistic physical space. Each agent's perception map stores density information about the physical space which is used for routing. The scenario considered is the evacuation of a space given a crowd. Through agent interactions, both in physical proximity and through distant communications, agents update their perception maps and continuously work to overcome their incomplete perception of the world. Overall, this work aims at investigating the dynamics of agent information diffusion for emergency scenarios and combines three general elements: (1) an agent-based simulation of crowd dynamics in an emergency scenario over a real physical space, (2) a sophisticated decision making process driven by the agent's subjective view of the world and effected by trust, belief and confidence, and (3) agent's activity aimed at building relationships with specific peers that is based on mutual benefit from sharing information.</p
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