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. So far, the attention has been mainly devoted to systems that provide or impose some form of harmonization or lightweight coordination of meaning and actions where machines do most of the computation and humans are at the periphery and only act as consumers. 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 Collective Adaptive Systems 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. Operationally, peers in the system will implement a continuous unlimited cycle in which data is sensed, interpreted, shared, elaborated and acted upon. Actions are taken on the basis of system suggestions and the way humans react to them, while generating new data thus alimenting the cycle ad infinitum.
To meet this very ambitious goal the SmartSociety project will develop foundational principles for the operations and design of hybrid and diversity-aware collective adaptive systems, paving the way to the arising of a smarter form of society.