The document discusses the potential for social networks and collective intelligence to enable a return to the ancient Greek Agora, or public space for open discussion. It argues that the internet offers an open platform where users can interactively exchange information and take a more active role in deciding what is relevant, verifying information, and making decisions. It proposes creating a virtual "Polidoxa" space to allow open discussion from diverse viewpoints. The document also outlines an algorithm for ranking information on social networks like Twitter based on static trust levels set by users and dynamic factors like retweets, mentions, and hashtags. The goal is to leverage collective intelligence through social computing.

1. Social networks and collective intelligence
A return to the Agora
Manuel Mazzara
21/09/2012, ITU Copenhagen

2. The School of Athens

3. Joint work with:
Luca Biselli
Antoine Chamot
Luca Chiarabini
Simona De Nicola
Nicola Dragoni
Emanuela Goldoni
Pier Paolo Greco
Antonio Marraffa
Georgios Papageorgiou
Nafees Qamar

4. A Fantastic New Era (!?!)

6. I have not failed. I've just found
10,000 ways that won't work.
Thomas Edison

12. Web 2.0 Technologic Backbone
 Google  MySpace
 Yahoo!  Wikipedia
 Blogs  eBay
 Wiki’s  YouTube
 Instant Messaging  Twitter
 Facebook  Flickr
 LinkedIn  Skype

13. Why Social Computing ?

14. DO’S & DON’TS of SOCIAL
NETWORKING

15. Old Problems Made Worse
Trustworthy?
Newsworthy?
Relevant?

16. Traditional Media Gatekeeping
World Audience

17. Plurality of information or
an information cartel?
 Reuters bought by Canadian financial data
provider Thomson in a deal worth about £8.7bn
[BBC, 15 May 2007]
 Reuters prohibited any individual from owning
15% or more
 The Thomson family now own 53%

18. Agenda-setting
 Salience transfer
 the ability of a mass medium to transfer relevant issues
from its news media agendas to public agendas
 The agenda-setting theory
 McCombs, Shaw, 1972
 McCombs, 2004
 The spiral of silence theory
 Noelle-Neumann, 1974

19. Power of Media (!?!)
“There are no facts,
only interpretations”
(Friedrich Nietzsche)

20. Hegelian Dialectic
(spot how/where/when it is used!)
 The thesis is an intellectual proposition
 The antithesis is the negation of the thesis, a reaction to the
proposition
 The synthesis solves the conflict between the thesis and
antithesis by reconciling their common truths, and forming a
new proposition
 Example(s):
 Thesis: the French revolution/fire of Rome
 Antithesis: the terror which followed
 Synthesis: the constitutional state of free citizens/blaming the
Christians

21. Power of Illusion

22. Overcoming Gatekeeping ?
Internet offers an open platform where users can
interactively exchange information
 News is multimedia, multi-dimensional,
timely/timeless
 The user can control relevance
 The user is able to choose topics, sources …
 The user can interact with authors, other
readers/followers …

23. Traditional/New Media Synopsis
Traditional Search engines Social networks
media
Relevance/presence Decided by Decided by the Decided by the
of the news the algorithm network
publisher
Interaction / Not allowed Not allowed Possible
feedback
Topic Decided by Decided by the Decided by the
Content the user network
publisher
Expand topic Not allowed Allowed Allowed
Deciding Source Not allowed Allowed Allowed
Individual (trust- Absent Absent Absent
based) ranking

24. We will either find a way, or make one ...
”Aut inveniam viam aut faciam”

25. Maslow’s Law of the Instrument
”It is tempting, if the only
tool you have is a hammer,
to treat everything as if it
were a nail.”
- H. Maslow, The Psychology of
Science:A Reconnaissance.
Harper & Row, 1966

26. Time for Polidoxa now!
 Create a virtual agora where people can freely discuss and exchange
information
 From greek “poly", meaning many or several and “doxa" meaning
common belief or popular opinion
 More control over the news/information
 Think!
 Discuss!
 Verify!
 Interact!
 Take an active role!
 Take (better?) decisions!

27. Polidoxa Ranking Algorithm (the „how“)
The core ranking parameters:
 Configurable static parameters
 trustworthiness of contacts (decided by the user)
 trustworthiness of sources/domains… (by the user)
 Dynamic Parameters
 depending on network activities and contact’s distance
 evaluate (among other things) “like” and “dislike”
 many “like” for a post is and indication of how your
network perceives it

28. Trustworthyness and ranking
www.page-x.com 40% News from z
www.page-z.com 60% News from x
www.page-y.com 30% News from y

29. Some details about the algorithm…
If you can't explain it to
a six year old,
you don't understand
it yourself.”
Albert Einstein

30. Polidoxa@Twitter
 Twitter is less studied than FB etc…
 Only text analysis, therefore simpler (for now)
 At each search the trust is recalculated for each contact and
the results are presented accordingly (higher trust first)
 Trust is in range 0..100
 This prototype is just a proof of concept
 FB application is the next step

31. Static/Dynamic Trust
 Static trust is chosen by the user
 Dynamic trust is calculated according to the following
parameters :
 Number of retweet
 Number of Favourites
 Number of Mentions
 Number of hashtags #FF
 Number of user’s tweets containing the searched
keyword

32. Static Trust Setup

33. Trust Formula
Static_Trust = chosen by the user
Nbr_favorites = Number of tweets sent by the contact and favoured by the
user
Nbr_retweets = Number of tweets sent by the contact and retweeted by the
user.
Nbr_mentions = Number of tweets sent by the user containing mentions
referring this contact ("@username")
Nbr_FridayFollows = Number of tweets sent by the user containing
FridayFollows referring to this contact (hashtag #FF)
Results_count = number of tweets belonging to this contact in which the
search term appears

34. Trust goes up and down
(like in real life)
 Coefficients are application parameter set by the admin
(not the user)
 When beyond 100% all trust values are rescaled to be within
the range
 The oldest interactions (in the current prototype more than
one year old) are removed
 This actually decreases the trust value for the contacts
who have been ignored for some time

35. Configuration of Coefficients

36. Search Results

37. Polidoxa
Polidoxa
Relevance of the news Decided by the user
Interaction / feedback Allowed
Topic Decided by the user and
content his/her network
Expand topic Allowed
Deciding Source Allowed
Individual trust-based ranking Possible

38. Where do you want to go today
(with Polidoxa)?
Community = Network
Relationships = Links Individuals = Nodes
Evolution of Plato’s
Evolution du
World of Ideas
monde des idées
(Iperuranio)
Social Structure = Technology

39. Collective Intelligence
“Collective intelligence is a distributed capacity of communities to
evolve towards higher order integration and performance through
collaboration and innovation”

40. Innovative democratic process?
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41. Be creative when solving problems, use your
right brain hemisphere more often!