Professor Jim Hendler, the Tetherless World Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science, and Assistant Dean of Information Technology and Web Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, spoke at the Jones Seminar entitled We Are the Web: The Rise of the Social Machine on Friday, May 7th. Hendler explained the power of the web and his vision to harness that power to help solve real-world problems.
At the beginning of his lecture, Hendler presented the provocative question: “How do you use the web to cure cancer?” About twenty-four percent of the world’s population uses the worldwide web, and modern websites can take up large amounts of people’s time. For example, Facebook reports that people spent four billion minutes on the site every day, Hendler explained his vision of technologies that would make it possible to harness portions of that time and effort to help solve real-world problems. “Is this merely a science fiction idea?” he asked the audience.
Some, like Games with a Purpose (GWAP), harness this power for fun. Others, like Galaxy Zoo (galaxyzoo.org), employ human knowledge for problem solving. Continuous scans of the sky present images of many galaxies. Hendler explained that computers can recognize the existence of galaxies but have a hard time identifying their type. People, on the other hand, are really good at this. So, Galaxy Zoo allows people to contribute to scientific knowledge by identifying the type of galaxies they see in the sky scans. The Zoonometer, which measures participation on the site, reads over sixty million. This exemplifies the idea of how to use a few minutes each of hundreds of thousands of people to do something useful.
The Human Flesh Search Engine represents a “social machine”. People can rapidly distribute and share information through the website. which can rapidly distribute information. Human Flesh Search has become a phenomenon in China. For example, after a hit-and-run accident in a rural small town, people uploaded photos to the site, which helped to find the culprit within four or five days.
Furhter, Hendler explained that there are major engineering challenges to creating a social machine. The first is developing the tools that allow groups of users to create, share, and evolve a new generation of open and interacting social machines, and a read/write mechanism for both information and “governance.” The second challenge is creating the underlying architecture principles to guide the design and efficient engineering of new web infrastructure components for this new generation of social software. These must be readily distributed, open, and dynamic. The third challenge is to ensure the conformity and explicitness of user protocols regarding relevant social policy expectations of the users. These include transparency, accountability, and policy awareness.
In summary, Hendler explained that we are on the cusp of new technologies that will transform society by creating new systems that allow large numbers of users to interact over the web to collectively share problems as well as developing new web applications that would enable communities to build and run their own social machines.
Hendler closed with his vision: hundreds of millions of people effectively able to network employing data archives from scientific institutions, governments, NGOs, and many more. He believes that working together on the web to cure disease, feed the hungry, and empower the powerless is not just science fiction.