Network of Excellence in

Internet Science

Kick-off Meeting

Brussels, 21-22 December 2011

Marco Conti (CNR)

FP7-ICT-2011.1.6-288021 EINS

 

The Role of Human Sciences in the Future Internet design

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

Internet developed to guarantee host to host

communications

It is a collection of ICT solutions

Internet: from a machine network ……

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

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

…… to a human-centric network

Pervasive InternetWired

Internet

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

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

Internet is a complex techno-social system

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

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 - FP7-ICT-2007-1 (2008-2011)

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

Human social networks

5

15

50

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Increasing socialtightness

150

Human ego network

model of social relationships “seen” from an individual (ego) 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

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

On Line social networks

Popular way to connect and share» Photos, videos, blogs, profiles, news, status...» MySpace (275 M), Facebook (175 M)

Growing exponentially

Large number of social links

Large amount of information shared» Facebook (850 M photos/month)» YouTube (13 hours of video/min)» Twitter (4B tweets in Q1 2010)

Face

book

Use

rs

(mill

ion

s)

7

Are real and online social networks sharing the same structure?

Are the human social network (constraints) modified by the existence

of online social networks?

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

on-line social networks: size of the ego networks

8

• 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)

Brussels, December 21-22, 2011:EINS Kick-off Meeting9

Content-centric Internet and Self-awareness

DATA

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YS

ICA

L E

NV

IRO

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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

Network

Human being

Brussels, December 21-22, 2011:EINS Kick-off Meeting10

Content-centric Internet and Self-awareness

PH

YS

ICA

L E

NV

IRO

NM

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DATA

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Network

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

(2010-2013)

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

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

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 multidisciplinary

   

  Thanks!