Social Science

(a subtopic of Applications)

Scientists to build robot society. BBC News (April 24, 2007). "Scientists in Dundee have announced plans to create a 'robot village' in an effort to learn how different cultures emerge in society. The University of Abertay's four-year study will feature about 60 miniature robots who will be organised into groups and programmed to interact. The project team plans to observe the robots to see how they behave together. The university will undertake the study along with five other institutions across the UK. ... Professor [Alan] Winfield added: 'In a sense we will be using robots like a microscope to study the evolution of culture.'"
Contents Good Places to Start Readings Online Related Web Sites Related Pages More Readings Virtual worlds: Perfect for studying humans? New Scientist Technology Blog by Will Knight, online technology editor (July 30, 2007). "Fortunately, in the real world, it's pretty hard to overthrow a democracy and introduce a totalitarian regime, just to see what happens. Likewise, you can't mess with the rules of kinship or the rate of inflation on a whim. But that's not to say sociologists, anthropologists and economists wouldn't like to try. And that's why the rapid growth of virtual worlds, from Second Life to World of Warcraft, is such an exciting prospect for researchers in these fields. ... This prospect is explored in some detail in an interesting review paper in last week's Science [link]. ... it'll be interesting to see how the field develops. For example, I was intrigued to read, in the Science article, about research being done by Mary Lou Maher [link] and colleagues at The University of Sydney in Australia. They are using virtual worlds as a test platform for different artificial intelligence techniques. I see how virtual worlds would offer nice simple environment for testing AI on 'real people'."

Computers shed light on lives of monkeys. By Roger Highfield and Nic Fleming. Telegraph (September 11, 2007). "The complex behaviour of macaque monkeys can be understood by simulating their actions in a computer with artificial intelligence, according to a new study. Scientists used 'agents' to represent the primates, programmed with simple instructions, to work out why some primate groups are''despotic' whilst others are 'egalitarian' - overturning previous theories. The research, published the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, was presented at the British Association's Festival of Science in York. 'This kind of agent-based modelling is really a new way of doing science,' said Dr Joanna Bryson from the University of Bath."

IST project to grow first computer-based society. CORDIS News (April 15, 2005). "The field of social simulation - which uses computer programmes to experiment on social systems - has grown steadily since its birth in the early 1990s. Due to computing constraints, however, research has until now focused on the development of simple social systems. But an international collaboration funded by the EU's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) is about to change that. The NEW TIES project (new and emergent world models through individual, evolutionary and social learning) aims to grow the worlds first full-blown society based on artificial computer-based individuals. The consortium includes leading researchers in artificial intelligence, language evolution, agent-based simulation and evolutionary computing, drawn from universities in the Netherlands, the UK and Hungary."

• Visit the New Ties Consortium project site: "The main goal of the project is to realize an evolving artificial society capable of exploring the environment and developing its own image of this environment and the society through cooperation and interaction. We will work with virtual grid worlds and will set up environments that are sufficiently complex and demanding that communication and cooperation are necessary to adapt to the given tasks. The population's weaponry to develop advanced skills bottom-up consists of individual learning, evolutionary learning, and social learning."

NSF Next-Generation Cybertools Awards Go to Cornell and U. of Chicago - Social and behavioral research to gain from better computing. NSF News (October 18, 2005). "The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced the first awards in its Next-Generation Cybertools program--an initiative designed to extend the boundaries of social and behavioral research and lead to fundamental advances in cyberinfrastructure--will go to research teams at Cornell University and the University of Chicago. The cybertools initiative will serve two purposes. First, it will help social and behavioral scientists push their research through the use of 'cyberinfrastructure'--vast new webs of computers, networks and data resources that are becoming increasingly important to science as a whole, and to the activities of NSF in particular. Second, the scientists' efforts will guide the development of future computational tools that will advance cyberinfrastructure itself. ... The Cornell project, headed by sociologist Michael Macy, will attempt to create a novel laboratory for social- science research based on the vast Internet Archive. The 40 billion pages of the archive represent snapshots of the Web that have been captured and stored every 2 months for nearly 10 years.... The challenge is to access that record and make sense of it. To meet that challenge, the Cornell team plans to build an intelligent front-end for searching the archive, an effort that will require cutting edge research in natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, as well as next-generation technology in privacy preservation. ... The Chicago project, headed by psychologist Bennett Bertenthal, will develop tools for collecting and analyzing human behavioral data on an unprecedented scale and level of sophistication. ... Most notably, their efforts will contribute to research on how human behavior can be automatically extracted, and even interpreted, from media like audio and video recordings."

• Professor Bennett I. Bertenthal, The University of Chicago
• Professor Michael Macy, Cornell University

Constructing new architectural designs is a game to one U graduate student - Benjamin Lindau uses video games to create interactive buildings and structure plans. By Jenna Ross. The Minnesota Daily (February 12, 2004). "'Basically, my work explores the possibility of using games as a tool for design,' he said. 'It’s about taking an already-existing technology and innovatively using it for our purposes.' ... The game environment, besides allowing the architect to evaluate and redesign structures, makes the design process more accessible to the public, Lindau said. ... Lindau worked with the Game Research and Virtual Environment Lab and its partner, the University’s Institute for New Media Studies, in his research. The gaming research lab, created about a year ago, explores the academic utilities of computer and video games in many dissimilar departments at the University. ... To promote academic study, the game research lab awarded $2,500 grants to five pairs of researchers using digital games in their research. Computer science and engineering professor Maria Gini, one grant recipient, will study games’ artificial intelligence -- their ability to interact, appear independent and make choices. The research addresses the broader issues of decision making and social interactions."

Agents of creation - Artificial "agents" can model complex systems. The Economist (October 9, 2003). "They certainly cannot be faulted for a lack of ambition. The scientists and engineers who gathered this week in Oxford for the first International Workshop on Complex Agent-Based Dynamic Networks are seeking to explain much of the world's behaviour through the use of 'agents'. In this context, an agent is a program that acts in a self-interested manner in its dealings with numerous other agents inside a computer. This arrangement can mimic almost any interactive system: a stockmarket; a habitat; even a business supply-chain. If the constituent parts can be understood, the reasoning goes, some insight into the whole will follow. ... Neil Johnson, a physicist from Oxford University, told the workshop of his latest research on the so-called minority game. This is a stylised version of a classic problem: a big crowd enters a bar where there are fewer seats than people (or agents). Each individual decides independently whether to stay in the bar or leave. The process is then repeated indefinitely. ... Not, you might think, that useful. But he is already working with a group at NASA , America's aeronautics and space agency, which uses like methods to deal with futuristic aeroplane wings. Rather than having just one aileron to control their pitch, these wings have hundreds of little ones. Each is, in effect, an agent. It must decide, based on what it perceives the other ailerons are doing, whether to stay up (ie, stay at the bar) or turn down (leave the bar). The mathematics of the two processes are surprisingly similar."

Agentmodel yields leadership. By Kimberly Patch. Technology ResearchNews (September 22/29, 2004). "Complicated systems that involvemany agents making independent decisions -- like the stock market-- aredifficulttopredict. ...One way to gain at least a moderate ability to predict is to startin the middle -- construct a system using quantitative representationsfor agent-level behavior and interactions observed from real life,let the simulation evolve according to a set of rules, then comparethe system to qualitative observations from real life to see howclose the model has come to representing the behavior of a real system.Researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University ofHouston, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a quantitativemodel of software agents competing for limited resources that isrepresentative of more complex systems. The model is a simple, expandableframework that accounts for social behavior in agent-based markets,said Marion Anghel, a technical research staff member at Los AlamosNational Laboratory. It could eventually be used to study financialmarkets, behavioral economics, and quantitative sociology, and tooptimize agent communications networks, including robot collectives,said Anghel. The researchers based their system on an existing multi-agent-competitionmodel dubbed the minority game.... The researchers added a networkof acquaintances that give advice to each other based on the agents'predictions about the best move in the game at any given moment.... The researchers are aiming to eventually produce artificial agentsystems that perform optimally as a collective, said [Zoltan] Toroczkai."

Terror Games - Can computer games be devised to model the thinking and predict the actions of allies, enemies and even terrorists? Some in the U.S. government think so. Are they playing God? By Jeffrey Rothfeder. Popular Science (February 2004). "Virtual Pakistan is part of an emerging programming discipline called agent-based modeling...."

Mind-Expanding Machines - Artificial intelligence meets good old-fashioned human thought. By Bruce Bower. Science News Online (Week of August 30, 2003; Vol. 164, No. 9). "In the workplace, computers are virtuosos of information storage. However, a computer system known as Brahms sings a different tune. It discerns revealing patterns in people's work behaviors and simulates ways to get their jobs done more effectively. ... The system builds on social science theories that regard each person's behaviors as being structured by broad pursuits, which researchers often call activities. In an office, common activities include coffee meetings with a supervisor, reading mail, taking a break, and answering phone messages. Activities provide a forum for addressing specific job tasks. A morning coffee meeting, for example, may determine who will make an important sales call later in the day. Brahms creates a computerized cartoon of how a work group's members perform their activities and tasks. The system's software is based on simulations of interactions among virtual individuals."

Who Loves Ya, Baby? Pass your e-mail through some new software and the answer will become obvious. By Steven Johnson. Discover (April 2003; Vol. 24 No. 4). "In his classic novel Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut explains how the world is divided into two types of social organizations: the karass and the granfalloon. ... For most of the past 50 years, computers have been on the side of the granfalloons, good at maintaining bureaucratic structures and blind to more nuanced social interactions. But a new kind of software called social-network mapping promises to change all that. ... Mapping social networks turns out to be one of those computational problems -- like factoring pi out to a hundred decimal points or rendering complex light patterns on a 3-D shape -- that computers can do effortlessly if you give them the right data. Until software designer Valdis Krebs came along, however, there wasn't an easy way to translate social interactions into a machine-readable language.... Social mapping is not just for corporate sociologists. Krebs has used his software to analyze the social networks visible in book-buying patterns on Amazon.com, by tracking the 'people who bought this book bought these other books' feature. ... Not surprisingly, social-network software is ripe for political analysis."

I, Decision Science, and Psychological Theory in Decisions about People: A Case Study in Jury Selection. By Roy Lachman (1998). AI Magazine, 19(1): 111-129. "AI theory and its technology is rarely consulted in attempted resolutions of social problems. Solutions often require that decision-analytic techniques be combined with expert systems. The emerging literature on combined systems is directed at domains where the prediction of human behavior is not required. A foundational shift in AI presuppositions to intelligent agents working in collaboration provides an opportunity to explore efforts to improve the performance of social institutions that depend on accurate prediction of human behavior. ... The system presented demonstrates the challenges and opportunities inherent in developing and using AI-collaborative technology to solve social problems."

Artificial worlds used to unlock secrets of real human interaction. Cornell News (February 14, 2003). "What do flocks of birds, traffic jams, fads, drinking games, forest fires and residential segregation have in common? The answer could come from a new computational research method called agent-based modeling. Michael Macy, a sociologist at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., is using this powerful new tool to look for elementary principles of self-organization that might shed new light on long-standing puzzles about how humans interact. ... He credits Craig Reynolds, a pioneer of agent modeling and three-dimensional computer animation, for the 1987 discovery that the complex choreography of a flock requires that each bird (or 'boid,' as Reynolds called them) follow just three simple rules: head toward the center of your neighbors, match their speed and trajectory and avoid collisions. ... Traditionally, sociologists have tried to understand social life as a structured system of institutions and norms that shape individual behavior from the top down, Macy notes. In contrast, agent modelers suspect that much of social life emerges from the bottom up, more like improvisational jazz than a symphony."

Seeing Around Corners. By Jonathan Rauch. The Atlantic (April 2002). "The new science of artificial societies suggests that real ones are both more predictable and more surprising than we thought. Growing long-vanished civilizations and modern-day genocides on computers will probably never enable us to foresee the future in detail -- but we might learn to anticipate the kinds of events that lie ahead, and where to look for interventions that might work."

Institute of Computer Applications in the Social Sciences at Universitat Koblenz-Landau, Germany. "Computer Applications in the Social Sciences is an application field of computer science and is especially concerned with the application of computer science to social science problems."

• Data Collection and Data Analysis Methods: "These especially include the education in modern data gathering methods applied via Internet (e.g. E-Mail, WWW) as well as the development and application of Data Mining algorithms based on the artificial intelligence research (e.g. decision trees, neural networks, genetic algorithms)."
• Modelling and Simulation: "[T]he design and development of modelling and simulation tools based on concepts of agents and multi agent systems are of main interest."

Entertaining Agents: A Sociological Case Study. By Leonard N. Foner, MIT Media Lab. Abstract: "Traditional AI has not concerned itself extensively with sociology nor with what emotional reactions might be produced in its users. On the other hand, entertainment is very concerned indeed with these issues. AI and ALife programs which are to be used in entertainment must therefore be viewed both as AI/ALife endeavors and as psychological and sociological endeavors. This paper presents a brief description of Julia [Mauldin 94], an implemented software agent, and then examines the sociology of those who encounter her, using both transcripts of interactions with Julia, and direct interviews with users. Julia is designed to pass as human in restricted environments while being both entertaining and informative, and often elicits surprisingly intense emotional reactions in those who encounter her."

• The article also provides an overview of a MUD experience. ("A MUD is a text-only, multiperson, virtual reality.")
• Also available is a version as published at Agents '97: PostScript or PDF

Several publications about Social Simulation are available from Stacy Marsella's collection at The University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (ISI). Also be sure to check out her research projects.

Dynamics of Multiagent Systems. From the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. "Multiagent systems arise in human societies, biological ecosystems, the immune system and distributed computation. While very different in detail they all face the issue of producing complex global behavior through the local interactions of their constituent parts. This is particularly problematic since the individual parts have only a limited view of the system as a whole." Topics include Dynamics of Cooperation in Societies, Computational Societies and Economies, and Agent-Based Control of Smart Matter, and they offer lots of papers for those who want to explore these areas in depth.

"Social Science Computer Review is an interdisciplinary journal covering social science instructional and research applications of computing, as well as societal impacts of information technology. Topics include: áartificial intelligence...."

Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, "an inter-disciplinary journal for the exploration and understanding of social proceses by means of computer simulation."

International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA)

"Social Informatics (SI) refers to the body of research and study that examines social aspects of computerization -- including the roles of information technology in social and organizational change and the ways that the social organization of information technologies are influenced by social forces and social practices. [fn] SI includes studies and other analyses that are labelled as social impacts of computing, social analysis of computing, studies of computer-mediate communication (CMC), information policy, "computers and society," organizational informatics, interpretive informatics, and so on." From the Center for Social Informatics, School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University - Bloomington.

"CommunityViz is a suite of software tools being developed by The Orton Family Foundation designed to assist communities with spatial decision-making and analysis of land-use scenarios. ... Policy Simulator allows users to predict and examine the possible long-term outcomes of proposed land-use alternatives or policy actions by utilizing 'adaptive agent-based modeling' to simulate the behavior and interactions of many individuals or agents."

The Semantic Web. A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities. By Tim Berners-Less, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila. Scientific American (May 2001). "Human endeavor is caught in an eternal tension between the effectiveness of small groups acting independently and the need to mesh with the wider community. A small group can innovate rapidly and efficiently, but this produces a subculture whose concepts are not understood by others. Coordinating actions across a large group, however, is painfully slow and takes an enormous amount of communication. The world works across the spectrum between these extremes, with a tendency to start small - from the personal idea - and move toward a wider understanding over time. An essential process is the joining together of subcultures when a wider common language is needed."

Related AI Topics Pages

• Artificial Life
• Multi-Agent Systems

More Readings

An Intelligent System for Case Review and Risk Assessment in Social Services. By James R. Nolan. AI Magazine 19(1): Spring 1998, 39-46. "This article reports on the development and implementation of DISXPERT, an intelligent rule-based system tool for referral of social security disability recipients to vocational rehabilitation services. The growing use of paraprofessionals as caseworkers responsible for assessment in the social services area provides fertile domain areas for new and innovative application of intelligent system technology. The main function of DISXPERT is to provide support to paraprofessional caseworkers in reaching unbiased and consistent assessment decisions regarding referral of clients to vocational rehabilitation services. The results after four years of use demonstrate that paraprofessionals using DISXPERT can make assessments in less time and with a level of accuracy superior to the vocational rehabilitation domain professionals using manual methods. This article discusses the problem domain, the design and development of the system, uses of AI technology, payoffs, and deployment and maintenance of the system."

Artificial Social Intelligence: "A conference on the potential connections between sociology and work in artificial intelligence was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and held at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in May 1993." The report was published in the Annual Review of Sociology 20:407-436 (1994).