Day Two of the Royal Society's Web Science Conference. Overall it was an excellent 2 days, probably the best conference I ahve been to for quite a while as it was by and large "real" web stuff rather than the hype that so many Web conferences are full of these days. Sara Fletcher has
done a liveblog, so I have copied a pen picture from her blog plus my comments / takeaways on the morning sessions (Afternoon sessions will be in a following post - tempus fugit etc):
Nature of Collective Intelligence - Pierre Levy
The mind is not material in nature. It does contain ideas, and connections between ideas, networks of ideas, and as others have said the future of human sciences will involve the application of graph theory to this network of ideas. He defines "idea" as having concepts - abstract classes and categories, percepts, images - sense data, and emotional affects.
We can try to represent ideas in computational form. The mind can be viewed as a consistent universe of operations on ideas in a structured semantic space. We can gather data, images etc electronically and categorise these. We cannot however represent the concept electronically, the meaning. We can represent truth in binary form but not much more. We cannot "see" the concept, it is always represented by signifiers (images, audio etc), and concepts are always networked, always linked to other concepts, like a giant grid of concepts, so a concept itself is a network. He outlines a semantric machine which takes signifiers, manipulation mechanisms, mechanisms to manipulate the signified and semantic circuits.
I'm starting to find this a bit confusing and desperately trying to recall discussions of signifiers and semantics from my philosophy of science course but it's all a bit hazy now!
I will be honest - I didn't have a bloody clue about what he was on about - he used a heck of a lot of very long words, many of them interchangeably it seemed. At the end he put up some diagrams and it turns out what what he was saying (as I far as I could tell) was that in essence we will need more metadata than data in semantic webs, there are different layers and levels required, and a number of mathematical transforms are required to move from on level to another, and he has re-invented the earlier Semantic Web's stuff.
Social Networks in the Internet - what Social Research knows about it - Manuel Castells
The web is providing tools for individual autonomy - creative, political and social. Internet use empowered people though security influence and led to increased happiness, and this is true for groups that need empowering, for example women (?) who are at the heart of the family and social networks, according to a study by Michael Wilmott. This is circular - the more people use the web, the more autonomous they become, the more they use the web.
The deepest social transformation from the internet has come in the last decade with social networks. Social networks passed email use in June 2009 in both time and number of users. Interestingly when people find their needs are not being met by existing platforms they create a new one. The new social platforms are not just about conversation, but about actually doing things, taking action, creating content. There is a connection between the development of social networks and social life, but individuals are taking control of how these develop, not controlled by governments or corporations. The big sites cannot control how people interact - if they do someone will create a new site that does what they want and everyone will migrate there. If facebook tried to go nasty it will disappear, as AOL did, as seen when Facebook tried to charge and retracted this three days later as people went away.
Engaging speaker, but blotted his copybook (in my view) because:
(i) he got some of his facts wrong ( For example he said first social network was in 2002 and was Friendster. No it wasnt - what about 6degrees, FriendFinder etc said the Twittersphere!)
(ii) this may be part of the issue with web science coming in from so many diferent angles, but much of his "what social research knows about it" stuff was fairly old hat if you have been reading the field. To be fair, talking with
Jemima Knight over tea break she felt he had pitched correctly for the audience which were all at very different levels of undersyanding.
(iii) he was very much a Panglossianist, ie it's all for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and I think the fact that nearly all the questions were challenging him on this spoke for itself.
New Models of Government via the Web - Helen Margetts
The Big Society concept does allow for social media tools to come to the fore, single citizen accounts, citizen surveillance to replace audit systems, social web services within government. Digitization allows for quasi-voluntary compliance with DIY forms, government supers-sites, open data projects freeing public information are all good for governments looking at austerity measures. Delivery of all government information online can reduce costs elsewhere.
Mainly discussed their Digital Area Governance (DEG) as a solution to the "old" model of governance, which is fairly standard stuff among the Government 2.0 crowd, but she injected a dose of realism that is often missing among this crowd as:
(i) The current climate has a cash shortage, and that reduces the options - the cheap stuff will be done, the expensive stuff will be left alone
(ii) These organisms won't change fast - as she noted, of c 240 million transactions at the Dept of Work and Pensions in 2008, about 0.6% was online
I asked a question about what to do about the 1/3rd of people who won't use the 'Net (ie there are no savings as you still have to use the old services for them). Her view is that you move the effort to intermediaries between those people and the web, but as far as I can see that just transfers the cost (at best - at worst you then have to police the intermediaries)
Augmented Intelligence - Luis von Ahn
This is the guy who invented the Capcha - he tooks us through the current 2 word capcha (did you know its being used to digitise all the world's books? They are using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) but its not perfect so the words that OCR cannot recognise are now being used in 2-word Captchas (one is a control word). Now 750 million people have solved a word through captcha - 10% of the global population.
He asks, "If we can use 100,000 people to get to the moon and build the pyramids, what can we do with 100 million?" He has a project to translate the most important pages on the web into the world's major languages. A project called Duolingo uses people who are learning foreign languages to act as translators. This can act not only on text but also subtitling videos and training speech recognisers, simultaneously helping the user in listening and speaking languages. This could enable, for example, wikipedia could be translated from English to Spanish in 80 hours with 1 million users.
In conclusion: we should stop being parasites on computers and allow them to use our brains for processing. Excellent talk from very charismatic speaker!
Engaging speaker doing good stuff - what's not to like with all of us being little angels in the Web Architecture? Questioners quickly homed in on the issue that while his stuff is For The Common Good, other organisations - especially those driving the Walled Wide Web - may not be so benign.
