Web Science and the Social Machine

We now live in a world of "Social Machines", from those we use every day (Facebook, Twitter, Google) to the World Wide Web itself. But, how do these socio-technical systems actually work, and what are some of the implications of increasingly relying on them? How could we observe them in order to design better systems, but not lose ourselves as "humans" in the process? This is the work of Web Science and the "theory and practice of Social Machines", work that takes the idea of the Semantic Web further into different fields of academic research. This meetup, co-organised with Web Science Australia (www.webscienceaustralia.org), will host some speakers from the University of Southampton and the Web Science Trust's network of research labs around the world which focuses on the Social Machine, and links research to practice. In particular, we will have presentations to showcase research projects currently being undertaken in Europa and in Australia, for example, a project with the Government of South Australia (funded by the Australian and New Zealand School of Government) which looks at Government as itself a "Social Machine".

Speaker bios ... Thanassis Tiropanis - http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/tt2

Thanassis is a senior lecturer with the Web and Internet Science Group, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton and is interested in distributed linked data infrastructures, linked data for higher education, social networks and social machines. Prior to that he was assistant professor with the Athens Information Technology Institute (AIT) in Greece working on Web technologies and e-learning. Prior to AIT, Thanassis was a research fellow with University College London (UCL) where he worked on network and service management research for telecommunication services. He holds a PhD in computer science from UCL, and a DipIng in computer engineering and informatics from the University of Patras, Greece. He is a senior member of IEEE, a chartered IT professional with BCS, a fellow of the Higher Education academy in the UK and a member of the Technical Chamber of Greece.

Anni Rowland-Campbell - http://intersticia.com/who_we_are.html#anni
Anni Rowland-Campbell is Director of Intersticia, and serves on the Board of the Web Science Trust and Web Science Australia. She works with ANZOG (The Australian and New Zealand School of Government) developing programs for public sector managers in digital communications and the Web, and currently leads a research team focusing on the concept of "Government as a Social Machine". Anni recently delivered the 2014 Solomon Lecture, and works closely with the research team at the University of Southampton.