A Storm in an IoT Cup: The Emergence of Cyber-Physical Social Machines
This work identifies emerging systems that could impact IoT and social computing domains, but it is incremental as it builds on existing social machine concepts.
The paper introduces Cyber-Physical Social Machines as new socio-technical systems combining IoT devices with human collectives, highlighting challenges in understanding their evolution and addressing security and privacy issues.
The concept of social machines is increasingly being used to characterise various socio-cognitive spaces on the Web. Social machines are human collectives using networked digital technology which initiate real-world processes and activities including human communication, interactions and knowledge creation. As such, they continuously emerge and fade on the Web. The relationship between humans and machines is made more complex by the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and devices. The scale, automation, continuous sensing, and actuation capabilities of these devices add an extra dimension to the relationship between humans and machines making it difficult to understand their evolution at either the systemic or the conceptual level. This article describes these new socio-technical systems, which we term Cyber-Physical Social Machines, through different exemplars, and considers the associated challenges of security and privacy.