SmartSociety -- A Platform for Collaborative People-Machine Computation

Abstract

Society is moving towards a socio-technical ecosystem in which physical and virtual dimensions of life are intertwined and where people interactions ever more take place with or are mediated by machines. Hybrid Diversity-aware Collective Adaptive Systems (HDA-CAS) is a new generation of socio-technical systems where humans and machines synergetically complement each other and operate collectively to achieve their goals. HDA-CAS introduce the fundamental properties of hybridity and collectiveness, hiding from the users the complexities associated with managing the collaboration and coordination of machine and human computing elements. In this paper we present an HDA-CAS system called Smart Society, supporting computations with hybrid human/machine collectives. We describe the platform's architecture and functionality, validate it on two real-world scenarios involving human and machine elements and present a performance evaluation.