Social Computing: Principles, Platforms, and Applications Amit K. - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

social computing principles platforms and applications
SMART_READER_LITE
LIVE PREVIEW

Social Computing: Principles, Platforms, and Applications Amit K. - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Social Computing: Principles, Platforms, and Applications Amit K. Chopra University of Trento Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Social Computing, 2011 Aug 29, Trento Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 1 /


slide-1
SLIDE 1

Social Computing: Principles, Platforms, and Applications

Amit K. Chopra University of Trento

Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Social Computing, 2011

Aug 29, Trento

Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 1 / 20

slide-2
SLIDE 2

Social Applications

Interaction Among Autonomous Agents

◮ Business processes

◮ Banking ◮ Car insurance ◮ Healthcare

◮ Social networks ◮ Argumentation ◮ Software engineering itself

Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 2 / 20

slide-3
SLIDE 3

Social Dependence

Commonality Across Social Applications

◮ Doctors depend on some civic body for salary ◮ One bank depends on another to settle transactions ◮ A friend depends on another not to share photos outside the circle ◮ General public depends on claims of scientific bodies that glaciers

are melting ever faster

◮ Community depends on members’ acceptance of what counts as

what

Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 3 / 20

slide-4
SLIDE 4

Social Computation

Evolution of Social Dependence

The computers are autonomous agents

◮ Humans, organizations, or their software surrogates ◮ Each independently motivated (and designed)

As agents interact, social state evolves

◮ Each agent computes social state from its own local observations

◮ No global state as such Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 4 / 20

slide-5
SLIDE 5

Social State Evolution

Car Insurance Business Process

Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 5 / 20

slide-6
SLIDE 6

Hypothesis

If we understood the nature of social dependence, many potentially diverse classes of applications could be built from the same high-level abstractions

◮ Simplifies their software engineering ◮ Common semantic basis

Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 6 / 20

slide-7
SLIDE 7

Current Software Engineering

Car Insurance Workflow

Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 7 / 20

slide-8
SLIDE 8

Current Software Engineering

Not Suited to Building Social Applications

Low-level abstractions based on control flow resulting in

◮ Overspecified systems ◮ Less reusability ◮ Less manageable designs and code ◮ Less interoperability across applications ◮ Social aspects handled offline

Commonality, if any, is at a lower-level

Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 8 / 20

slide-9
SLIDE 9

Current Software Engineering

Platforms for Social Applications

◮ Web: database abstractions ◮ WS-*: layer on top the Web, but again lacks social abstractions

Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 9 / 20

slide-10
SLIDE 10

Current Software Engineering

Machine Orientation

Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 10 / 20

slide-11
SLIDE 11

Way Forward For Social Applications

Interaction Orientation

Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 11 / 20

slide-12
SLIDE 12

Car Insurance Protocols

Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 12 / 20

slide-13
SLIDE 13

Challenge One: Social Abstractions

Promising candidates

◮ Commitment: customer is socially committed to merchant for

payment in return for goods

◮ Trust: doctors trust civic bodies to pay their salaries

Patterns over the elementary abstractions

Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 13 / 20

slide-14
SLIDE 14

Challenge Two: Social Application Specification Language

Intuition: essentially in terms of interactions protocols

◮ Agents themselves are arbitrary

Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 14 / 20

slide-15
SLIDE 15

Challenge Three: Software Engineering Principles

Do we need to revisit and reinforce them?

E.g.: Modularity

◮ Agents (roles) are the fundamental units of modularity in system

decomposition

◮ An agent’s autonomy derives from that of its principal ◮ Fail modularity: business workflows such as BPEL Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 15 / 20

slide-16
SLIDE 16

Challenge Four: Methodology

Do we need new ideas here?

Protocols and agents would be independently designed

◮ How we do design protocols and agents from stakeholder

requirements?

◮ What kinds of reasoning and tools would best support their

design?

Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 16 / 20

slide-17
SLIDE 17

Challenge Five: Social Platform

Distributed Enactment

Provides infrastructure services

◮ Would support the primitive interaction protocols ◮ Social API for programming agents ◮ Discovery services ◮ Social-level interoperability

Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 17 / 20

slide-18
SLIDE 18

Social Computer

Is Not Social Computing

Is a machine

◮ Solves social problems by considering inputs from social entities

(including other social computers) in light of social conventions

◮ Google’s PageRank: lightweight social computer if one considers a

link as a vote

Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 18 / 20

slide-19
SLIDE 19

Conclusions

Current SE approaches emphasize control instead of interaction

◮ Mismatch with the nature of social applications

Social computing emphasizes interaction and the computation of social relationships

◮ An approach for specifying, implementing, and enacting social

applications

◮ Provides a common semantic basis and platform for many diverse

kinds of applications

Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 19 / 20

slide-20
SLIDE 20

Acknowledgments

◮ Munindar Singh, Fabiano Dalpiaz, John Mylopoulos, Paolo

Giorgini, Matteo Baldoni, Nicolas Maudet, Pınar Yolum, Michael Huhns, and Michael Jackson

◮ Marie Curie Trentino Cofund

Chopra (chopra@disi.unitn.it) Social Computing Aug 29, Trento 20 / 20