Difference between revisions of "Social Signals"
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Douglas Adams’s stupendous vision — the Earth transformed into a supercomputer powered by human intelligence — was fictional but reflects the potential of the most recent advances in science and technology to transform our planet into a powerful computing platform. With 6 billion human inhabitants acting as processing nodes, Earth could indeed become the computer that provides the best answers to life’s most complex and difficult questions (http://icsc.eecs.uci.edu/abstract_wed1.html). Such a platform’s computing power could even exceed the exponential growth predicted by the famous Moore’s law. | Douglas Adams’s stupendous vision — the Earth transformed into a supercomputer powered by human intelligence — was fictional but reflects the potential of the most recent advances in science and technology to transform our planet into a powerful computing platform. With 6 billion human inhabitants acting as processing nodes, Earth could indeed become the computer that provides the best answers to life’s most complex and difficult questions (http://icsc.eecs.uci.edu/abstract_wed1.html). Such a platform’s computing power could even exceed the exponential growth predicted by the famous Moore’s law. | ||
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| − | + | It might seem like science fiction at first blush, but with the Internet serving as the communication backbone that connects us all, we could reach this point sooner than we think. When Time magazine named “you” as its person of the year in 2006, it captured the infinite possibilities brought forth by connecting humans and providing a platform to harness their collective intellect, knowledge, and experiences. As much as we can’t question the role technology has played in fostering this new era of comput ing, central to its success has been the participation of people from all walks of life. Through each of our small but significant and sustained contributions, we’ve created and maintained vast repositories such as Wikipedia. We’re also helping machines organize the world’s online resources by tagging and sharing various bits of information. New tools are extracting and using the knowledge we’ve created to improve searching, browsing,we’ve embedded into what and decision-making, substantially improving on software that didn’t previously use such a collective intelligence. In this article, I introduce the exciting paradigm of citizen sensing enabled by mobile sensors and human computing—that is, humans as citizens on the ubiquitous Web, acting as sensors and sharing their observations and views using mobile devices and Web 2.0 services. | |
Revision as of 17:48, 18 January 2010
A Playground for Mobile Sensors, Human Computing, and Semantic Analytics
A computer which can calculate the Question to the Ultimate Answer, a computer of such infinite and subtle complexity that organic life itself shall form part of its operational matrix. And you yourselves shall take on new forms and go down into the computer to navigate its ten-million-year program! Yes! I shall design this computer for you. And I shall name it also unto you. And it shall be called ... The Earth.” —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams’s stupendous vision — the Earth transformed into a supercomputer powered by human intelligence — was fictional but reflects the potential of the most recent advances in science and technology to transform our planet into a powerful computing platform. With 6 billion human inhabitants acting as processing nodes, Earth could indeed become the computer that provides the best answers to life’s most complex and difficult questions (http://icsc.eecs.uci.edu/abstract_wed1.html). Such a platform’s computing power could even exceed the exponential growth predicted by the famous Moore’s law.
It might seem like science fiction at first blush, but with the Internet serving as the communication backbone that connects us all, we could reach this point sooner than we think. When Time magazine named “you” as its person of the year in 2006, it captured the infinite possibilities brought forth by connecting humans and providing a platform to harness their collective intellect, knowledge, and experiences. As much as we can’t question the role technology has played in fostering this new era of comput ing, central to its success has been the participation of people from all walks of life. Through each of our small but significant and sustained contributions, we’ve created and maintained vast repositories such as Wikipedia. We’re also helping machines organize the world’s online resources by tagging and sharing various bits of information. New tools are extracting and using the knowledge we’ve created to improve searching, browsing,we’ve embedded into what and decision-making, substantially improving on software that didn’t previously use such a collective intelligence. In this article, I introduce the exciting paradigm of citizen sensing enabled by mobile sensors and human computing—that is, humans as citizens on the ubiquitous Web, acting as sensors and sharing their observations and views using mobile devices and Web 2.0 services.
