SmartSociety: hybrid and diversity-aware collective adaptive systems: where people meet machines to build a smarter society

Society is progressively moving towards a socio-technical ecosystem in which the physical and virtual dimensions of life are more and more intertwined and where people interaction often takes place with or mediated by machines. The scale at which this is happening and the differences in culture, language and interests makes the problem of establishing effective communication and coordinated action increasingly challenging.

Our goal is to move towards a hybrid system where people and machines tightly work together to build a smarter society. We envision a new generation of CAS centred on the two foundational notions of compositionality and diversity where humans and machines “compose” by synergically complement each other thus bridging the semantic gap between low-level machine and high-level human interpretation of data and where they interoperate collectively to achieve their possibly conflicting goals both at individual and societal levels.

By identifying the right incentive schemes and privacy levels, these systems should assist humans in their everyday activities, be able to cope with the diversity of the world in terms of language, knowledge and personal experience and to work in presence of possibly imperfect information.