Social Life Networks
In our research group, we are developing a framework that we termed Social Life networks because this is a network of people, sensors, and actuators to solve important social life problems, such as emergency response, traffic management, wellness, water management, and similar problems. We believe that the core of most societal systems involves connecting people’s needs efficiently, effectively, and promptly to appropriate resources. Thus the fundamental problem is to identify people’s need in a given situation, location of appropriate resources to meet those needs, and finding actions to connect them optimally.
This system uses data sources that are connected to the cloud and are managed to interpret and route data and information to right place where this may be used. There are two parallel processing sequences. The first sequence of processing is to determine environmental state while the second sequence is to determine individual’s situations. The overall state of the system is the combination of the environmental situation as well as all affected individual situations. By comparing this to ideal goal, the system uses recommendation engine like techniques to identify and connect each individual’s need to resources that will satisfy him.
Future
Computer and information scientists have been addressing important problems in cyber space. Usually, in cyber space location and time are treated as second-class citizen. Increasingly, the challenging problems for computer and information scientists are in real physical space and must consider both location and time as important elements. To solve these emerging problems we have to go back to fundamental principles of cybernetics from our cyber space. This transition back from cyber to cybernetics will result in major disruption in technology trajectory.
By adopting societal cybernetic systems perspective, we can solve complex problems that were not possible to address until recently. In mechanical systems, one can see revolutionary changes in the type of systems that became possible in the last 70 years. I am sure that the progress in societal cybernetic systems will be far more rapid and more revolutionary than in the mechanical system.