The Role of Human Sciences in the Future Internet design

Kick-off Meeting

Brussels, 21-22 December 2011

Marco Conti (CNR)

FP7-ICT-2011.1.6-288021 EINS

Network of Excellence in Internet Science

Internet: from a machine network

Internet developed to guarantee host to host communications It is a collection of ICT solutions

EINS Kick-off Meeting

Brussels, December 21-22, 2011

 to a human-centric network
Internet is the centre of the Cyber-Physical world Convergence: blending ICT and physical world in a unique techno-social system

Wired Internet

Pervasive Internet

EINS Kick-off Meeting

Brussels, December 21-22, 2011

Internet is a complex techno-social system

Internet is emerging as a Big Data lab for studying and understanding the human behaviour; i.e., a microscope of the human society to investigate
Mobility (e.g., human mobility patterns) Lifestyle and Economics (e.g., how people behave, what people buy) Sentiment analysis, opinion dynamics, . Analysis of social relationships .

At the same time the human behavior is affecting the Internet design and structure

EINS Kick-off Meeting

Brussels, December 21-22, 2011

Internet is evolving toward a: Human and Content-centric network

Real, electronic and virtual communities have a major impact on the Future Internet design

Ref: SOCIALNETS (Social Networking for Pervasive Adaptation) FET Perada project - FP7ICT-2007-1 (2008-2011)
EINS Kick-off Meeting Brussels, December 21-22, 2011

Human social networks

Human ego network model of social relationships seen from an individual (ego)
o o o

concentric layers of decreasing intimacy (emotional closeness) size increases approximately with a factor 3 contact frequency is proportional to the emotional closeness

the strength of the social links determines the willingness to provide a service and the trust in the services we receive

Dunbar number ~ 150

EINS Kick-off Meeting Brussels, December 21-22, 2011

On Line social networks

Popular way to connect and share Are real and online social networks sharing the  Photos, videos, blogs, profiles, news, status...  MySpace (275 M),same structure? Facebook (175 M) Growing exponentially social network (constraints) Are the human Large number of social links modified by the existence of online social Large amount of information shared networks?  Facebook (850 M photos/month)
 YouTube (13 hours of video/min)  Twitter (4B tweets in Q1 2010)

Facebook Users (millions)

EINS Kick-off Meeting

Brussels, December 21-22, 2011

on-line social networks: size of the ego networks

We defined the dimension of a Facebook ego-network as the number of active friends of a user (the subset of friends with perceived Facebook tie strength > 0) Our sample: Min = 29 Max = 368 Mean = 108,17 and SD = 85,5

The number of active friends is correlated with the number of status updates The number of status updates is significantly correlated with the communication variables

Ref: SCAMPI (Service platform for social Aware Mobile and Pervasive computIng ) FIRE project - FP7-ICT-2009-1.6 (2010-2013)
EINS Kick-off Meeting Brussels, December 21-22, 2011

Content-centric Internet and Self-awareness

Human being

Collect and discovery information through a wide range of sources, including sensors Ability to manage huge quantities of information and extract relevant knowledge to establish the context and to decide how to react also with uncertain information Learn from the information and implement effective content-management policies
To remot e storag e

DATA

PHYSIC AL ENVIRO NMENT

Network
EINS Kick-off Meeting Brussels, December 21-22, 2011

Content-centric Internet and Self-awareness

The human brain has developed effective strategies to define what is relevant when exposed to a large amount of information (like in a content-centric Internet) and to elaborate and react to that information The human brain is able to adjust, adapt, and resolve situations based on imperfect information; this is achieved with high resource efficiency. Cognitive sciences has shown that cognitive process are algorithmic in nature (based on heurisitcs) The models of the cognitive behaviour of the brain provide a powerful basis for self-awareness in a content centric internet

DATA

PHYSIC AL ENVIRO NMENT

Ref: RECOGNITION (Relevance and cognition for self-awarenessin a content-centric Internet) FET Awareness project - FP7-ICT-2009-8.5 (2010-2013)

EINS Kick-off Meeting

Brussels, December 21-22, 2011

The need for a new multi-disciplinary science

Future Internet will be human centric and hence human sciences must work together with ICT to understand and design the Future Internet, and to investigate how the Internet is affecting and changing the organization of the human society. Sociology, Anthropology, Cognitive Sciences, Psychology are just some relevant examples. Contributions are also expected from economics, political sciences, Important contributions can also come from other sciences. For example, complex networks researchers contribute with the studies of network graph structure and dynamics. .

The Internet Science is Thanks! multidisciplinary

EINS Kick-off Meeting Brussels, December 21-22, 2011