Taking IT for granted: a long view into the future, closing talk at IT as a Utility Conference, 20 June, Chilworth, Southampton, UK

1. Taking IT for granted: a long view
from the future
David De Roure

2. 1990s
The co-creation of
the largest scale
most
programmable and
most useable
distributed system,
ever

3. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3357073.stm

4. Now is an opportune time to
tackle the engineering of
emergent order: to identify the
engineering principles and
languages that can be used to
observe, control, organize, and
exploit the behavior of
programmable multitudes.
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/amorphous/
Communications of the ACM, May 2000.

5. Social Machines
Real life is and must be full of all kinds of social
constraint – the very processes from which society
arises. Computers can help if we use them to
create abstract social machines on the Web:
processes in which the people do the creative work
and the machine does the administration... The
stage is set for an evolutionary growth of new
social engines. The ability to create new forms of
social process would be given to the world at large,
and development would be rapid.
Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999 (pp. 172–175)

6. 2000s
Data data everywhere
The Grid versus Science 2.0

9. F i r s t

10. TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION IN PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL LIFE
October 2000 - June 2007
The central goal of the equator IRC is to investigate the integration of the
physical with the digital and the fundamental research needed to realise
systems that promote this.
In particular, we are concerned with uncovering and supporting the variety of
possible relationships between physical and digital worlds.
Our objective in doing this is to improve the quality of everyday life by
building and adapting technologies for a range of user groups and application
domains.

11. A revolutionary idea…
Open Science!
rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org

12. 2010s
The Rise of the Social
Shifts in Scholarship

13. Christine Borgman

14. Pip Willcox
@marstonbikepath
Datasets or dataflows?

15. Interdisciplinary and “in the wild”
In it not on it Pull not Push

18. The Big Picture
More people
More machines
Big Data
Big Compute
Conventional
Computation
“Big Social”
Social Networks
e-infrastructure
online
R&D
Social
Machines
deeply
about
society

19. Nigel Shadbolt et al

20. 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

21. www.zooniverse.org

22. Talk
Forum
Scientists
Image
Classification
Citizen Scientists
data reduction

23. Cat De Roure
The Befriending of
Raspberry Tree

25. RichardO’Bierne

26. 2020s
Ludere Humanum Est
Social Machines as
disruptive technology
Pip Willlcox

27. “Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all
human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that
built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and
must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—
has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking…
The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose
collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent
male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive
atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase
participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage…”
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/

28. Stories within
Social Machines
Social
Machines for
stories
Stories about Social Machines
SOCIAL MACHINES AS STORIES

29. awards me pain
of love's rite
fair beseechers kill
that thou none
sweet some vial
straight grow sad
side against myself
saw a goddess
sad slave stay
profitless usurer why
physic did except
part his function
painted beauty to
is youth some
heart from serving
for beauty's pattern
eye i eyed
doth thy beauty
compare thou thine
by spirits taught
bids my heart
beauty still three
bear all wrong
basest clouds to
their youthful sap
Pip Willlcox

30. There is no such thing as the Internet of
Things
There is no such thing as a closed
system
Humans are creative and subversive
The Rise of the Bots A Swarm
of Drones
Accidents happen (in the

31. The Big Picture
Social
Machines
More people
More machines
Big Data
Big Compute
Conventional
Computation
“Big Social”
Social Networks
deeply
about
society
Automation

32. Big data elephant versus sense-making network?
Iain Buchan
The challenge is to foster the co-constituted socio-technical
system on the right i.e. a computationally-enabled sense-making
network of expertise, data, models, software, visualisations and
narratives

33. The R Dimensions
Research Objects facilitate research that is
reproducible, repeatable, replicable, reusable,
referenceable, retrievable, reviewable, replayable,
re-interpretable, reprocessable, recomposable,
reconstructable, repurposable, reliable,
respectful, reputable, revealable, recoverable,
restorable, reparable, refreshable?”
@dder 14 April 2014
sci method
access
understand
new use
social
curation
Research
Object
Principles

34. Edwards, P. N., et al. (2013) Knowledge Infrastructures: Intellectual Frameworks and
Research Challenges. Ann Arbor: Deep Blue. http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/97552

35. FUSING AUDIO
AND SEMANTIC
TECHNOLOGIES for
INTELLIGENT
MUSIC
PRODUCTION AND
CONSUMPTION

36. 2030
Where am I?

37. david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk
www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/people/dder
@dder
Thanks to: Christine Borgman, Iain Buchan,
Cat De Roure, Dave Robertson, Nigel
Shadbolt, SégolèneTarte and Pip Willcox.
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

38. www.oerc.ox.ac.uk
david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk
@dder