Vanilson Arruda Burégio

The Emerging Web of Social Machines

We define a notion of social machine and envisage an algebra that can describe networks of such. To start with, social machines are defined as tuples of input, output, processes, constraints, state, requests and responses, apart from defining the machines themselves, we define their connectors and conditionals that can be used to describe the interactions between any number of machines in a multitude of ways, as a means to represent real machines interacting in the real web, such as Twitter, Twitter running on top of Amazon AWS, mashups built using Twitter and, obviously, other social machines. This work is not a theoretical paper as yet, but, in more than one sense, we think we have found a way to describe web based information systems and are starting to work on what could be a practical way of dealing with the complexity of this emerging web of social machines that is all around us.

Collaborative Enterprise Applications Based on Business and Social Artifacts

This paper discusses how to design and develop collaborative enterprise applications using business and social artifacts. Business artifacts populate the business world (associated with business process management platforms) and allow to facilitate the communication between IT and non-IT practitioners over application requirements to satisfy, for example. And social artifacts populate the social world (associated with Web~2.0 applications) and abstract the online activities that are executed over Web~2.0 applications such as tagging photos. Both worlds are connected to each other through social machines that allow business artifacts to act upon Web~2.0 applications such as creating new social artifacts and checking on the statuses of existing social artifacts. A system that demonstrates business artifact and social artifact collaboration is also presented in this paper.

Towards Government as a Social Machine

Government initiatives to open data to the public are becoming increasingly popular every day. The vast amount of data made available by government organizations yields interesting opportunities and challenges - both socially and technically. In this paper, we propose a social machine-oriented architecture as a way to extend the power of open data and create the basis to derive government as a social machine (Gov-SM). The proposed Gov-SM combines principles from existing architectural patterns and provides a platform of specialized APIs to enable the creation of several other social-technical systems on top of it. Based on some implementation experiences, we believe that deriving government as a social machine can, in more than one sense, collaborate to fully integrate users, developers and crowd in order to participate in and solve a multitude of governmental issues and policy.

Personal APIs as an enabler for designing and implementing people as social machines

In this paper, we extend the initial classification scheme for Social Machines (SM) by including Personal APIs as a new SM-related topic of research inquiry. Personal APIs basically refer to the use of Open Application Programming Interfaces Open APIs) to programmatically access information about a person (e.g., personal basic info, health-related statistics, busy data) and/or trigger his/her human capabilities in a standardized way. Here, we provide an overview of some existing Personal APIs and show how this approach can be used to enable the design and implementation of people as individual SMs on the Web. A proof-of-concept system that demonstrates these ideas is also outlined in this paper.

Enterprise 2.0: Research Challenges and Opportunities

Blending Web 2.0 technologies with enterprise information systems is setting up the stage for a new generation of information systems that will help enterprises open up new communication channels with their stakeholders. Contrary to traditional enterprises with top-down command flow and bottom-up feedback flow, the same flows in Enterprise 2.0 cross all levels and in all directions bringing people together in the development of creative and innovative ideas. The power of Web 2.0 technologies stems from their ability to capture real-world phenomena such as collaboration, competition, and partnership that can be converted into useful and structured information sources from which enterprises can draw information about markets’ trends, consumers’ habits, suppliers’ strategies, etc. This paper discusses the research efforts that our international research group has put into the topic of Enterprise 2.0 (aka Social Enterprise). In particular, our research group advocates that existing practices for managing enterprise information systems need to be re-visited in a way that permits to capture social relations that arise inside and outside the enterprise, to establish guidelines and techniques to assist IT practitioners integrate social relations into their design, development, and maintenance efforts of these information systems, and last but not least to identify and tackle challenges that prevent capturing social relations.

SAND - A Dashboard for Analyzing Employees' Social Actions over Google Hangouts.

This paper presents SAN D standing forSocialActioN Dashboard. It reports from different perspectives the social actions that employees in an enterprise execute over s cial media with focus on Google Hangouts. This execution might violate the enterprise’s use policies of so cial actions forcing decision makers take corrective measures. SAN D is implemented using different technologies like Spring Bo ot and AngularJS.

A Guiding Architecture and System for Making Crime Data Available in Brazil

Brazilian Public Security Departments disclose crime data from their respective states in order to maintain transparency and openness. In fact, the opening of these data not only increases the societys awareness of the problem but also gives to it the opportunity to be more participatory. However, despite the evident benefits and effort to make this data available, there is still some issues on how such data is visualized and presented via Brazilian official portals. Most of the time, crime data is formatted in tables without any statistical information about the facts, making it difficult to have a precise overview about how crimes take place. This paper presents an architecture and system model to improve the availability and visualization of crime data in Brazil with the aim of providing a better visualization experience for those who access this information, allowing them to identify crimes hot spots as well as relevant patterns and trends.

Bridging the Gap Between the Business and Social Worlds: A Data Artifact-Driven Approach

The widespread adoption of Web 2.0 applications has forced enterprises to rethink their ways of doing business. To support enterprises in their endeavors, this paper puts forward business-data artifact and social-data artifact to capture, respectively, the intrinsic characteristics of the business world (associated with business process management systems) and social world (associated with Web 2.0 applications), and, also, to make these two worlds work together. While the research community has extensively looked into business-data artifacts, there is a limited knowledge about/interest in social-data artifacts. This paper defines social-data artifact, analyzes the interactions between business- and social-data artifacts, and develops an architecture to support these interactions. For demonstration purposes, an implementation of a socially-flavored faculty-hiring scenario is discussed in the paper. The implementation calls for specialized components known as social machines that support artifact interaction.

Programming the Universe: The First Commandment of Software Engineering for all Varieties of Information Systems

Since the early days of computers and programs, the process and outcomes of software development has been a minefield plagued with problems and failures, as much as the complexity and complication of software and its development has increased by a thousandfold in half a century. Over the years, a number of theories, laws, best practices, manifestos and methodologies have emerged, with varied degrees of (un)success. Our experience as software engineers of complex and large-scale systems shows that those guidelines are bound to previously defined and often narrow scopes. Enough is enough. Nowadays, nearly every company is in the software and services business and everything is - or is managed by - software. It is about time, then, that the laws that govern our universe ought to be redefined. In this context, we discuss and present a set of universal laws that leads us to propose the first commandment of software engineering for all varieties of information systems.