Presentation at SOCM workshop at WWW2013 on Monday 13th May 2013

1. David De Roure
Observing Social Machines Part 1
What to Observe?
Clare Hooper
Megan Meredith-Lobay
Kevin Page
Ségolène Tarte
Don Cruickshank
Cat De Roure

2. Some Social Machines

3. Nigel Shadbolt et al

5. myExperiment is a Social Machine
protected by the reCAPTCHA Social Machine

7. SocialMachinesofSpam

10. Whither the Social Machine?

11. Whither the Social Machine?

12. Whither the Social Machine?

13. What to observe?  Logs
 Analytics
 Data findings
e.g. Success rate
of transcription
 Social sciences
 Qualitative study
 Motivation
Individual and
group
 Mixed methods
 Differences in
technique and scale
 Unlikely to be an simple
transferable metric

14. Trajectories

15. Trajectories... distinguished by purpose

16. Trajectories... distinguished by purpose
Trajectories through Social Machines https://sites.google.com/site/bwebobs13/

17. Cat De Roure
The Befriending of
Raspberry Tree

18. • Are the tree, bot and/or dating site Social Machines?
• What are their trajectories?
• Cyberphysical scenario involving machine-to-machine
communication without human mediation
• Illustrates automatic assembly – unintended but
purposeful
• Glimpse of APIs and the service-oriented ecosystem
• Bot detection algorithm illustrates observation
mechanism (human / automated?)
• Machines impersonating people; e.g. people can buy
twitter followers, how do they know they’re not bots?
The Lessons of the Raspberry Tree

19. https://support.twitter.com/entries/18311-the-twitter-rules

20. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20173641
http://mqtt.org/projects/andy_house

21. Identify Ecosystems
Where Social Machines are
1. Interacting and competing with others
2. Being designed, born and co-evolving
3. Variable in size, purpose, lifetime and intent
4. Reflecting the trends towards cyber-physical
and machine-to-machine systems

22. • The constituent Social Machines and their trajectories
• Technologies, humans and their interfaces, including
intersection with physical world
• The design processes, and how they correlate with
successful machines
• Ground rules leading to emergent behaviour
– rules by which people abide
– rules encoded in design
– part of community conduct
– grounded in how other Social Machines behave
Analyse

23. • Observing Social
Machines Part 2:
How to Observe?
• Toolkit approach
• Embrace other
observatories
• Instrument the
ecosystem
Future Work

25. • You are all observers… 
• Go forth, engage with the machines
• Design new ones!
• The observatory is really a laboratory
• Share the (methodological) toolkit
• Report your findings in these workshops
Your mission should you choose to
accept it…

26. Scholarly
Machines
Ecosystem
Panel on Wednesday

27. david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk
www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/people/dder
www.scilogs.com/eresearch
@dder
SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines is funded by the UK
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under grant
number EPJ017728/1 and comprises the Universities of Southampton,
Oxford and Edinburgh. See sociam.org