Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SoBigData (SoBigData Research Infrastructure)

Teaser

One of the most pressing and fascinating challenges scientists face today, is understanding the complexity of our globally interconnected society. The big data arising from the digital breadcrumbs of human activities promise to let us scrutinize the ground truth of individual...

Summary

One of the most pressing and fascinating challenges scientists face today, is understanding the complexity of our globally interconnected society. The big data arising from the digital breadcrumbs of human activities promise to let us scrutinize the ground truth of individual and collective behaviour at an unprecedented detail and scale. Sensing big data at a societal scale, and the transparent interlinking of digital and physical reality, has the potential of providing a powerful social microscope, which can help us understand many complex and hidden socio-economic phenomena. It is clear that such challenge requires high-level analytics, modeling and reasoning across all the social dimensions above.

There is an urgent need to harness these opportunities for scientific advancement and for the social good, compared to the currently prevalent exploitation of big data for commercial purposes (e.g. user profiling and behavioural advertising) or, worse, social control and surveillance. The main obstacle to this accomplishment, besides the scarcity of data scientists, is the lack of a large-scale open ecosystem where big data and social mining research can be carried out.

SoBigData proposes is creating the Social Mining & Big Data Ecosystem: a research infrastructure (RI) providing an integrated ecosystem for ethic-sensitive scientific discoveries and advanced applications of social data mining on the various dimensions of social life, as recorded by “big data”.

The research community will use the SoBigData RI facilities as a “secure digital wind-tunnel” for large-scale social data analysis and simulation experiments.

SoBigData will serve the wide cross-disciplinary community of data scientists, i.e., researchers studying all aspects of societal complexity from a data- and model-driven perspective, including data and text miners, visual analytics researchers. It can support policy making, offer novel ways to produce high-quality and high-precision statistical information, empower citizens with self-awareness tools, promote ethical uses of big data. SoBigData may empower citizens, NGOs and policy makers with the means to gain a better understanding of complex socio-economic systems, methods for introspection of complex global processes, tools for assessing the implications of decisions beforehand, and hence to improve our capacity to sustainably manage our society on the basis of well-founded knowledge and inclusive participation. In particular, SoBigData may provide policy-makers with a much deeper understanding of behavior and interactions between global systems and will yield tools to develop and test policies in silico.

To this aim, SoBigData promotes repeatable and open data science on the inter-disciplinary field of large-scale social data mining on the base on three pillars establishing the overall goals of the RI:
an ever-growing, distributed data ecosystem for procurement, access and curation of big social data, within an ethic-sensitive context, based on innovative strategies for acquiring social big data for research purposes, using both opportunistic means offered by social sensing technologies and participatory means based on user involvement as prosumers of social data and knowledge.
an ever-growing, distributed platform of interoperable, social data mining methods and associated skills: tools, methodologies and services for mining, analysing, and visualising complex and massive datasets, harnessing the techno-legal barriers to the ethically safe deployment of big data for social mining.

Building the “Social Mining” community of scientific, industrial, and other stakeholders (e.g. policy makers), supported by joint research, transnational and virtual access activities, and brought together by extensive networking and innovation actions (e.g. workshops, summer schools, datathons, training resources in social data mining, knowledge transfer, industrial partnerships). In particular, the training events

Work performed

Summary of major achievements in the reporting period
1. SoBigData e-infra: a software platform providing functionalities for exploring the integrated social mining resources of the national infrastructures and for executing experiments (through web-services or hosted) and a common working space. The integration of national infrastructures is now at 70% of the work to be done (WP7, 8, 9, 10).
2. 4 Exploratories on the following domains: City of Citizens, Societal Debate, Well Being and Economic Performance, Migration Studies (WP11).
3. Web site: for the external communication and dissemination and for driving the visitors to access the e-infra through exploratories and the various communication channel activated (WP3).
4. Legal and ethical framework operational for the data management part. Ready to provide tutorial for First-aid for responsible data-scientists(WP2).
5. A wide outreach to a diversity of stakeholders (336 trainees, 85 companies, 367 registred users to the e-infra, 22 transnational, more than 3000 contacted with SoBigData keynotes)(WP3, 4, 5).
6. A well consolidated community of researcher in Social Mining (82 scientific peer-to-peer international papers and 73 speeches) (WP8,9)
7. Clear plan of next steps (WP1).

Final results

Scientific impact is represented by the more than 64 scientific publications in journal and international conferences and 74 oral presentations of SoBigData objectives to the community (see deliverable D3.4). A number of open source software tools described in deliverable D5.1 are already offered by consortium partners and they have formed the core seed for commercial exploitation, knowledge transfer, and consultancy services offered in this first part of the project.

Another measure of the impact on society is the number of users (more than 400) that access to SoBigData RI through virtual and transnational access and an outreach estimated more than 4000, and more than 350 trainees. towards a new generation of responsible data scientists Furthermore, the project promotes a responsible data science in executing social mining experiments, given by a solid Ethical and Legal framework inside the project.

Social impact considers the exploratory on Migration Studies that take part to a national initiative for a research program currently under evaluation by Italian Ministry of Research, and it has been involved in other project proposal under evaluation.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.sobigdata.eu/.