Ognjen Scekic

Incentives and rewarding in social computing

Praise, pay, and promote crowd-member workers to elicit desired behavioral responses and performance levels.

A Serverless Real-Time Data Analytics Platform for Edge Computing

Contemporary solutions for cloud-supported, edge-data analytics mostly apply analytics techniques in a rigid bottom-up approach, regardless of the datas origin. Typically, data are generated at the edge of the infrastructure and transmitted to the cloud, where traditional data analytics techniques are applied. Currently, developers are forced to resort to ad hoc solutions specifically tailored for the available infrastructure (for example, edge devices) when designing, developing, and operating the data analytics applications. Here, a novel approach implements cloud-supported, real-time data analytics in edge-computing applications. The authors introduce their serverless edge-data analytics platform and application model and discuss their main design requirements and challenges, based on real-life healthcare use case scenarios.

Programming incentives in information systems

Information systems are becoming ever more reliant on different forms of social computing, employing individuals, crowds or assembled teams of professionals. With humans as first-class elements, the success of such systems depends heavily on how well we can motivate people to act in a planned fashion. Incentives are an important part of human resource management, manifesting selective and motivating effects. However, support for defining and executing incentives in todays information systems is underdeveloped, often being limited to simple, per-task cash rewards. Furthermore, no systematic approach to program incentive functionalities for this type of platforms exists. In this paper we present fundamental elements of a framework for programmable incentive management in information systems. These elements form the basis necessary to support modeling, programming, and execution of various incentive mechanisms. They can be integrated with different underlying systems, promoting portability and reuse of proven incentive strategies. We carry out a functional design evaluation by illustrating modeling and composing capabilities of a prototype implementation on realistic incentive scenarios.

Modeling rewards and incentive mechanisms for social BPM

Social computing is actively shaping Internet-based business models. Scalability and effectiveness of collective intelligence are becoming increasingly attractive to investors. However, to fully exploit this potential we still have to develop crowd-management frameworks capable of supporting rich collaboration models, smart task division and virtual careers. An important step in this direction is the development of models of rewarding/incentivizing processes. In this paper, we conceptualize and represent rewarding and incentive mechanisms for social business processes. Our techniques enable definition, composition, execution and monitoring of rewarding mechanisms in a generic way.

Simulation-Based Modeling and Evaluation of Incentive Schemes in Crowdsourcing Environments

Conventional incentive mechanisms were designed for business environments involving static business processes and a limited number of actors. They are not easily applicable to crowdsourcing and other social computing platforms, characterized by dynamic collaboration patterns and high numbers of actors, because the effects of incentives in these environments are often unforeseen and more costly than in a well-controlled environment of a traditional company.

Virtualizing Communication for Hybrid and Diversity-Aware Collective Adaptive Systems

Hybrid and Diversity-Aware Collective Adaptive Systems (HDA-CAS) form a broad class of highly distributed systems comprising a number of heterogeneous human-based and machine-based computing (service) units. These units collaborate in ad-hoc formed, dynamically-adaptive collectives. The flexibility of these collectives makes them suitable for processing elaborate tasks, but at the same time, building a system to support diverse communication types in such collectives is challenging. In this paper, we address the fundamental communication challenges for HDA-CAS. We present the design of a middleware for virtualizing communication within and among collectives of diverse types of service units. The middleware is able to handle numerous, intermittently available, human and software-based service units, and manages the notion of collectivity transparently to the programmer. A prototype implementation for validation purpose is also provided.

A Novel Vision of Cyber-Human Smart City

Contemporary view on Smart City is very much static and infrastructure-centric, focusing on installation and subsequent management of Edge devices and analytics of data provided by these devices. While this still allows a more efficient management of citys infrastructure, optimizations and savings in different domains, the existing architectures are currently designed as single-purpose, vertically-siloed solutions. This effectively hinders an active involvement of a variety of stakeholders (e.g., citizens and businesses) who naturally form part of the citys ecosystem and have an inherent interest in jointly coordinating and influencing city-level activities towards a common benefit. This paper presents a value-driven architecture and the defining properties of the envisioned Smart City, characterized by complex coordinated activities involving the Citys services, stakeholders and their devices. We look at existing foundational technologies for provisioning, coordination and controllability of said activities and discuss the required alignment steps towards the fulfillment of the stated vision.

Introduction to Smart Cities and a Vision of Cyber-Human Cities

The ICT role in the current Smart City vision is mostly passive and focused on collecting and analyzing data, predicting and optimizing infrastructure utilization and facilitating communication between different city services. While the citizens are undeniably winners in this process as the beneficiaries of a more optimized and cheaper infrastructure they are not taking an active role in the development and daily management of the city. In this chapter we describe the vision of Cyber-Human Smart Cities, involving a rich and active interplay of different stakeholders (primarily citizens, local businesses and authorities). Realizing such complex interplay requires a paradigm shift in how the physical infrastructure and people will be integrated and how they will interact. At the heart of this paradigm shift lies the merging of two technology/research domains, Cyber-Physical Systems and Socio-Technical Systems, into the value-driven context of a Smart City. The architecture we propose puts value generation at the top of the pyramid and fuels the generation of novel values and enhancement of traditional ones. This effectively transforms the role and broadens the involvement and opportunities of citizen-stakeholders, but also promotes the ICT from passive infrastructure to an active participant shaping the city’s ecosystem.

SmartSociety -- A Platform for Collaborative People-Machine Computation

Society is moving towards a socio-technical ecosystem in which physical and virtual dimensions of life are intertwined and where people interactions ever more take place with or are mediated by machines. Hybrid Diversity-aware Collective Adaptive Systems (HDA-CAS) is a new generation of socio-technical systems where humans and machines synergetically complement each other and operate collectively to achieve their goals. HDA-CAS introduce the fundamental properties of hybridity and collectiveness, hiding from the users the complexities associated with managing the collaboration and coordination of machine and human computing elements. In this paper we present an HDA-CAS system called Smart Society, supporting computations with hybrid human/machine collectives. We describe the platforms architecture and functionality, validate it on two real-world scenarios involving human and machine elements and present a performance evaluation.

Programming Model Elements for Hybrid Collaborative Adaptive Systems

Hybrid Diversity-aware Collective Adaptive Systems (HDA-CAS) is a new generation of socio-technical systems where both humans and machine peers complement each other and operate collectively to achieve their goals. These systems are characterized by the fundamental properties of hybridity and collectiveness, hiding from users the complexities associated with managing the collaboration and coordination of hybrid human/machine teams. In this paper we present the key programming elements of the Smart Society HDA-CAS platform. We first describe the overall platforms architecture and functionality and then present concrete programming model elements -- Collective-based Tasks (CBTs) and Collectives, describe their properties and show how they meet the hybridity and collectiveness requirements. We also describe the associated Java language constructs, and show how concrete use-cases can be encoded with the introduced constructs.