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Using the PRISMA approach, we present the first systematic literature review of digital twin (DT) research in healthcare systems (HSs). This endeavor stems from the pressing need for a thorough analysis of this emerging yet fragmented research area, with the goal of consolidating knowledge to catalyze its growth. Our findings are structured around three research questions aimed at identifying: (i) current research trends, (ii) gaps, and (iii) realization challenges. Current trends indicate global interest and interdisciplinary collaborations to address complex HS challenges. However, existing research predominantly focuses on conceptualization; research on integration, verification, and implementation is nascent. Additionally, we document that a substantial body of papers mislabel their work, often disregarding modeling and twinning methods that are necessary elements of a DT. Furthermore, we provide a non-exhaustive classification of the literature based on two axes: the object (i.e., product or process) and the context (i.e., patient’s body, medical procedures, healthcare facilities, and public health). While this is a testament to the diversity of the field, it implies a specific pattern that could be reimagined. We also identify two gaps: (i) considering the human-in-the-loop nature of HSs with a focus on provider decision-making and (ii) implementation research. Lastly, we discuss two challenges for broad-scale implementation of DTs in HSs: improving virtual-to-physical connectivity and data-related issues. In conclusion, this study suggests that DT research could potentially help alleviate the acute shortcomings of HSs that are often manifested in the inability to concurrently improve the quality of care, provider wellbeing, and cost efficiency.

This article introduces the editorial board of the IEEE Technology & Society Magazine. The board members, Simon T. Powers and Pamela Tudge, discuss their work and research in the field of technology and society. Simon focuses on studying human social behaviors and developing sociotechnical systems to address social challenges, while Pamela examines the implications of technology in environmental and sustainability initiatives. They both emphasize the importance of aligning technology with the needs of communities and ensuring trustworthiness. The article also includes book and movie recommendations related to technology and society. [Extracted from the article]

The increasing digitalization of our social systems has led to the development of agentic computational artifacts. If socio-technical systems (STSs) fit for purpose in the digital society are to be designed and operationalized, the theory of polycentric governance (which traditionally considers the interdependency of interactions between the autonomous centers of decision-making within a social system) must be enriched to reflect this digitalization. In this article, we consider the extension of polycentricity to include “the digital” by viewing the concept through four “lenses” (interactional, governmental, architectural, and axiological), which are then synthesized to conclude with a research program for value-sensitive operationalization (VSO). This opens the potential to develop technologies and foster human relationships with these technologies that aim to optimize the human quality of experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I recently had the pleasure of speaking about my work on the literary and cultural history of cybernetics during a workshop on “Sustainable and Scalable Self-Organization” (SaSSO) at the 4th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS 2023), in Toronto, Ontario. Although the venue might seem an odd fit for an English professor who studies experimental early 20th-century (i.e., “modernist”) authors like Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, this workshop, in fact, represented an ideal opportunity. My research focuses on literature’s relationship to emerging technological developments; more specifically, I explore how modernist writers were developing strategies, in their literary texts, to help readers acknowledge and learn how to navigate their increasingly information-saturated world. As I frame it, these modernists aim to cultivate in readers the capacity to “ think cybernetically ”—that is, to develop strategies for responding in creative and generative ways to the 20th century’s complex sociocultural (and socio-technical) environment. These ideas and questions happened to align beautifully with the SaSSO workshop theme, given its emphasis on issues related to sustainability and scalability and its systems-level perspective on understanding the complex networks that shape humans’ relationships with one another, the world, and technological tools. I hope that they will also appeal to and resonate with readers of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Warcraft Evolves by identifying and adapting the technical and functional affordances of technologies to exploit vulnerabilities in adversaries’ defenses and defend against their attacks. Nowhere is this arms race more apparent than cybersecurity wherein zero-day vulnerabilities are identified and exploited at an ever-growing rate. Cybersecurity, however, is not limited to hardware and software. Cyberoperations require an understanding of the larger sociotechnical system that includes individual users and groups, for example, governmental, industry, and nongovernmental organizations. Indeed, the failure to identify the technical and functional affordances that allow for zero-day vulnerabilities illustrates the ambiguous and ill-defined nature of “cyberspace.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers who have worked in computer science or artificial intelligence for more than a few years will have experienced a profound shift in the public perception of their field from being something that people rarely cared about outside of sci-fi or niche academic or “geek” interest to something that is suddenly everywhere all over the world and seems to be permeating every field and every product. How should we respond to this? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is often said that every generation has to learn from its own mistakes, there is still insight to draw from the stories of those who have ventured before us. Stories connect us to ourselves and to one another. As part of an autoethnographic practice, they serve as sensemaking tools, shedding light on phenomena from a deeply personal perspective. Seeing ourselves in the story may help us to unlock meaningful tools for transdisciplinary sensemaking to take into our futures. Seeing securitization as a complex sociotechnical system draws us deeper into the perpetual nature of the pursuit of security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security and securitization can be defined in numerous ways. For example, an all-hazards approach to (national) security has been considered in the literature whereby we may refer to economic, environmental, and energy security , in addition to other nonmilitary facets inclusive of food-, health-, demographic-, informational-, and resource-related aspects. Furthermore, the literature points to various sectors of securitization , which collectively denote a broad-ranging perspective. Securitization, based on this wider view, implies “survival across a number of dimensions” , and as a necessary offshoot, across numerous academic disciplines. As such, there is the need to turn our attention to transdisciplinary perspectives of securitization to explore the nature of such perspectives and the various streams or tracks that are encompassed within, particularly within the context of complex socio-technical systems, and when considering the implications of technology, in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The future deployment of single pilot operations must be supported by new cockpit computer services. Such services require an adaptive context-aware integration of technical functionalities with the concurrent tasks that a pilot must deal with. Advanced artificial intelligence supporting services and improved communication capabilities are the key enabling technologies that will render future cockpits more integrated with the present digitalized air traffic management system. However, an issue in the integration of such technologies is the lack of socio-technical analysis in the design of these teaming mechanisms. A key factor in determining how and when a service support should be provided is the dynamic evolution of pilot workload. This paper investigates how the socio-technical model-based systems engineering approach paves the way for the design of a digital assistant framework by formalizing this workload. The model was validated in an Airbus A-320 cockpit simulator, and the results confirmed the degraded pilot behavioral model and the performance impact according to different contextual flight deck information. This study contributes to practical knowledge for designing human-machine task-sharing systems.

Trust is necessary for any kind of complex social organization. Whether trust is the result of past exchanges with a specific individual (e.g., direct reciprocity) or the result of norms and conventions within a social network (e.g., indirect reciprocity), understanding the basis for trust is a prerequisite for successful coordination between agents. Nowhere is this more evident than in the healthcare setting. Traditionally, exchanges in healthcare occur between healthcare professionals (HCPs, e.g., doctors, nurses) and patients or parents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book describes how innovations can produce unintended effects that may take years to appear. The author is a well-known scientist and policy analyst whose interdisciplinary research interests encompass energy, food, population, economic, historical, and public policy studies. The author offers a few words to distinguish between the notions of invention and innovation. "The meanings have a large overlap, but innovation is perhaps best understood as the process of introducing, adopting, and mastering new materials, products, processes, and ideas." The book presents detailed descriptions of inventions that fall into three categories: 1) ones that delivered the advertised performance, but with undesirable follow-on consequences; 2) ones that were expected to dominate their markets, but never did; and 3) ones we would like to see succeed, but have not yet achieved their objectives. A final chapter examines current optimistic predictions of what technology could achieve and how fast these advances are likely to happen. It ends with a discussion of what types of innovation are really most needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The modern world is evolving rapidly, especially with respect to the development and proliferation of increasingly intelligent, artificial intelligence (AI) and AI-related technologies. Nevertheless, in many ways, what this class of technologies has offered as return on investment remains less impressive than what has been promised. In the present paper, we argue that the continued failure to realize the potential in modern AI and AI-related technologies is largely attributable to the oversimplified, yet pervasive ways that our global society treats the relationship between these technologies and humans. Oversimplified concepts, once conveyed, tend to perpetuate myths that in turn limit the impact of such technologies in human society. To counter these oversimplifications, we offer a theoretical construct, which we call the landscape of human-AI partnership. This construct characterizes individual capability for real-world task performance as a dynamic function of information certainty, available time to respond, and task complexity. With this, our goal is to encourage more nuanced discourse about novel ways to solve challenges to modern and future sociotechnical societies, but without defaulting to notions that remain rooted in today’s technologies-as-tools ways of thinking. The core of our argument is that society at large must recognize that intelligent technologies are evolving well beyond being mere tools for human use and are instead becoming capable of operating as interdependent teammates. This means that how we think about interactions between humans and AI needs to go beyond a “Human–or–AI” conversation about task assignments to more contextualized “Human–and–AI” way of thinking about how best to capitalize on the strengths hidden within emergent capabilities of unique human-AI partnerships that have yet to be fully realized.

Security of (semi)-autonomous vehicles is a growing concern, first, due to the increased exposure of the functionality to potential attackers; second, due to the reliance of functionalities on diverse (semi)-autonomous systems; third, due to the interaction of a single-vehicle with myriads of other smart systems in urban traffic infrastructure. Beyond these technical issues, we argue that the security-by-design principle for smart and complex autonomous systems, such as an Autonomous Vehicle (AV) is poorly understood and rarely practiced. Unlike traditional IT systems, where the risk mitigation techniques and adversarial models are well studied and developed with security design principles such as security perimeter and defense-in-depth, the lack of such a framework for connected autonomous systems is plaguing the design and implementation of a secure AV. We attempt to identify the core issues of securing an AV. This is done methodically by developing a security-by-design framework for AV from the first principles. Subsequently, the technical challenges for AV security are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering management has been historically focused on integrating scientific, engineering, and management know-how to contribute effectively to the functioning of organizations and industries. Today, an array of disruptive socio-technological transformations is bringing new challenges for education and research institutions engaged to advance the knowledge needed to design more performing socio-technical systems. Framed within the larger industrial engineering domain, management engineering has emerged as a new perspective to integrate technological and managerial knowledge, although a shared understanding of the field is yet to be introduced. In particular, the meaning and building blocks of management engineering can be discussed in the light of the evolving nature of engineering management. This article presents an extensive work of search and analysis of academic and practitioner evidence about management engineering, which allowed to derive a taxonomy of 467 concepts and 32 aggregating topics. The proposed framework can support academic discussion on the relevance of integrating management and engineering knowledge in the current socio-technical scenario. For practitioners, the identification of management engineering topics can be used to design global education initiatives as well as competence development and professional certification processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The successful management of crowdsourcing risk has gained considerable attention because of the challenges involved in obtaining the satisfactory performance from crowdsourcing activities. However, the mechanism of how various critical risk factors affect crowdsourcing performance has been poorly investigated. Empirical evidence based on a dataset of 169 samples from China shows that three technical (i.e., complexity, requirement, and task) and three social (i.e., seeker, solver, and relationship) subsystem risks not only directly but also interactively influence the crowdsourcing task performance. Technical subsystem risk factors, while worsen performance, diminish the negative effects of social subsystem risk factors on the crowdsourcing task performance. The diminishing effects of three technical subsystem risk factors are also differentiated. High requirement and task risks lessen the negative effects of seeker, solver, and relationship risks on the task performance, whereas the high complexity risk only weakens the negative effect of the solver risk. Therefore, various crowdsourcing risk factors affect the performance in different ways and directions (either negatively or positively). Risk can perform dual roles in influencing the performance. Hybrid strategies that integrate social and technical subsystem elements may be effective in achieving a superior task performance for the crowdsourcing risk management. Managers of crowdsourcing platforms can also optimize social and technical environments to improve the fit between social and technical systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the widespread digitalization of scholarship, software has become essential for research, but the current sociotechnical system of citation does not reflect this sufficiently. Citation provides context for research, but the current model for the respective research citation graphs does not integrate software. In this article, I develop a directed graph model to alleviate this, describe challenges for its instantiation, and give an outlook of useful applications of research citation graphs, including transitive credit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the continuous increment in complexity of the socio-technical systems, decision makers call for new methods which are able to support timely as well as accurate decision-making related to resilience management. The current methods tend to be polarized on: efficiency-thoroughness forcing decision makers in making decisions on the base of resource availability instead of the problem to be solved. This paper presents a new fast-forward, cost-effective, and thorough enough framework to quantify resilience of a complex socio-technical system. The approach extends the functional resonance analysis method (FRAM) with a numerical method for the quantification of the analysis (Q-FRAM). In particular, it has been extended and operationalized the qualitative concepts of functional variability and dumping capacities into a method in which key performance indicators are derived from the model and aggregated into four indicators representing the FRAM resilience cornerstones (anticipate, respond, monitor, learn) through a bottom-up hierarchical approach. Finally, the four indicators are composed in a unique system resilience index that expresses the total variability present in the system at instant t. A numerical example of the use of the framework is provided together with a validation based on a comparison of the proposed approach with the current landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many people across Latin America still do not have access to reliable electricity. Although Chile exhibits a comparatively high electricity coverage, many barriers are still present for the development of sustainable energy supply solutions exploiting local renewable energy sources. To face this challenge, a coconstruction methodology is proposed, which considers a flexible and participatory design with continuous communication between the technical team of the project and the community, thus ensuring informed decision making around the project design. In this context, microgrid-based solutions offer an ideal opportunity to exploit the integration of energy sources adapted to the specific local characteristics. The coconstruction methodology allows the identification of local requirements, less often considered for design procedures based on a traditional approach, in a joint work with the communities so that the technological solution is tailored for it. Consequently, different technical solutions (design adaptations and innovations) have been proposed and developed under this framework, such as: energy management systems, demand response strategies, microgrid applications for Mapuche communities, microformers, a monitoring system that includes social aspects, and vehicle to grid for microgrids. This paper summarizes the experience of several microgrid projects in Chile, identifies risks, impacts, control actions, and discusses their replicability to the Latin American and the Caribbean region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insider threats refer to actions by trusted individuals that directly or indirectly bring harm to the organization or expose the organization to external risks. Insider threat detection research and mitigation approaches have over-relied on technical solutions that tend to miss the human behavioral aspects of the problem. This paper focuses on approaches to assemble knowledge about insider threats and to apply this knowledge in support of insider threat assessment. This information can help organizations set up or improve existing insider threat mitigation programs by promoting a greater understanding of insider threat variables of concern; facilitating sharing of the knowledge base of insider threat indicators across organizations; raising awareness of the need to examine behavioral factors in addition to the more traditional focus on technical indicators; and discussing methods and challenges in acquiring and applying expert knowledge of insider threat indicators to facilitate decisions about responding to threat assessment alerts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been growing interest in harnessing Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve situational awareness for disaster management. However, to the authors' best knowledge, few studies have focused on socio-economic recovery. Here, as a first step toward investigating the possibility of developing an AI-based method for detecting socio-economic recovery, this study provides fundamental insights about the correlations between public sentiment on social media and socio-economic recovery activities as reflected in market data. Our result shows multiple correlations between sentiment on social media and the socio-economic recovery activities involved in restarting daily routines. Conventional socio-economic recovery indicators, such as governmental statistical data, have a significant time lag before publishing. Therefore, by taking advantages of the real timeliness and the effectiveness of seizing communication trends of massive social media data, using public sentiment on social media can improve situational awareness in recovery operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue on learning complex couplings and interactions aims to encourage deep research in the above areas and beyond, with a focus on the latest advancements in modeling complex couplings and interactions in big data, complex behaviors, and systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eleven to twelve thousand years ago, early humans lived in small communities with no discernible hierarchy. The "agrarian revolution" resulted in communities growing on such a scale that mechanisms of self-organization - e.g., for monitoring, keeping order, and ensuring a "satisfactory" allocation of resources - were no longer efficient or effective. However, the concurrent "cognitive" revolution resulted in the faculty of imagination, in particular, the imagination of rules, to solve such problems [1]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization increasingly demands multilingual communication on the Internet, as well as in local communities. To create customized collaboration tools to support multilingual communities, the authors’ Language Grid, established ten years ago, has been improving Web-based services to communities throughout the world by providing highly adaptable infrastructure and access to a wide variety of language resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and a rapid deployment of smart devices and wireless sensor networks (WSNs), humans interact extensively with machine data. These human decision makers use sensors that provide information through a sociotechnical network. The sensors can be other human users or they can be IoT devices. The decision makers themselves are also part of the network, and there is a need to understand how they will behave. In this paper, the decision fusion behavior of humans is analyzed on the basis of behavioral experiments. The data collected from these experiments demonstrate that people perform decision fusion in a stochastic manner dependent on various factors, unlike machines that perform this task in a deterministic manner. A Bayesian hierarchical model is developed to characterize the observed stochastic human behavior. This hierarchical model captures the differences observed in people at individual, crowd, and population levels. The implications of such a model on designing large-scale inference systems are presented by developing optimal decision fusion trees with both human and machine agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the mainstream urban governance approaches are built upon the legacy of reductionist doctrine and public administration tools which are not fully compatible with the complex nature of urban infrastructure systems. However, recent technological innovations associated with the notion of smart cities and the emerging sociopolitical trends are opening up new opportunities to develop governance approaches that can overcome such incompatibilities in urban systems. On the other hand, successful introduction of innovations in urban infrastructures, which we understand as complex sociotechnical systems, requires smarter governance approaches that are compatible with systems paradigm. The pace of change in social and technological landscapes of cities is fast. This conceptual paper brings together insights from sociotechnical systems, systems theory, and governance literature to shed light on why city administrations should closely follow these changes and adapt the governance approaches accordingly; or governance may become a main hindrance for utilizing the benefits of technology to deal with increasingly complex urban challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is motivated by the concept that the successful, effective, and sustainable implementation of the smart city paradigm requires a close cooperation among researchers with different, complementary interests and, in most cases, a multidisciplinary approach. It first briefly discusses how such a multidisciplinary methodology, transversal to various disciplines such as architecture, computer science, civil engineering, electrical, electronic and telecommunication engineering, social science and behavioral science, etc., can be successfully employed for the development of suitable modeling tools and real solutions of such sociotechnical systems. Then, the paper presents some pilot projects accomplished by the authors within the framework of some major European Union (EU) and national research programs, also involving the Bologna municipality and some of the key players of the smart city industry. Each project, characterized by different and complementary approaches/modeling tools, is illustrated along with the relevant contextualization and the advancements with respect to the state of the art. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multimodeling has become an increasingly popular way to analyze sociotechnical systems for decision support. Just as with physics-based multimodels, one would like to be able to quantify and manage uncertainty associated with the model to support decision making. However, when we consider multimodels of sociotechnical systems, epistemic uncertainty with regard to the structure of the model itself erodes their effectiveness. In this paper, we characterize these uncertainties as consequences of bifurcations that result from the complexity of sociotechnical systems. One could try to compensate by increasing the fidelity of the model, but this may come at the cost of actually increasing both the epistemic uncertainty and the computational burden. In short, building an extremely detailed model of a complex system may not be worth the effort. We conclude that in many cases, it may be better to build a low-fidelity multimodel of a sociotechnical system and use it to identify the existence of bifurcation points that can be managed through adaptive and hedging strategies. This is in contrast to building a very detailed model that endogenizes the epistemic uncertainties to support optimization. The latter approach is likely to be effective for physics-based systems but not for sociotechnical systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social commerce, a powerful combination of customer-oriented social computing technologies and new commercial features, is having an increasing impact on e-commerce, potentially generating substantial economic benefits. Drawing on socio-technical theory, this study establishes a research framework to help understand the social and technical factors affecting consumers’ intention to purchase on social commerce sites. Our results demonstrate that familiarity, user experience, learning and training, and social commerce constructs all have a positive effect on consumers’ perceptions of ease of use and usefulness, thereby enhancing their trust and intention to purchase. For systems designers and engineers, our results highlight the importance of social commerce features for building consumers’ trust of social commerce sites and supporting their intention to purchase. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Socio-technical systems are here to stay. They are going to become more important and more engrained in our daily lives. Even the relatively mundane examples we see these days have transformed the way we communicate, look up, and share knowledge, and the ways we choose our restaurants, our rides, and our vacations. Computersupported cooperative work is already transforming the workplace. Personal health and fitness applications allow us to observe our bodies and share this information within a social network that provides both praise and control. Larger-scale solutions are right around the corner. The technical feasibility of such systems is no longer under debate. Users seem to be willing to give up their data and at least some control for the benefits these socio-technical systems undoubtedly bring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communities and societies are known to achieve key benefits, such as trade growth, risk mitigation and resource sustainability [1], by following and observing conventionally-agreed and mutable rules (e.g., norms and laws). We focus on "democratic" societies-where citizens can contribute to changes in these governing regulations (directly or indirectly), which then apply equally to all [2], [3]. However, the unrestricted self-interested, or power-seeking behavior of some members may progressively deform such society; for example the iron law of oligarchy [4]. Consequently, scholars of socio-political sciences have identified "defense mechanisms" that help protect societies against such phenomena [3], [5]. These include comprehensible1 transparency, responsible engagement, and the perceptible impact of pro-social contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) have fueled the rise of the peer production community, a type of socio-technical system that self-organizes to deliver products or services created in a distributed manner. These novel modes of production, examples of which include such successful projects as Wikipedia, GNU/Linux, or Project Gutenberg, defy the expectations of standard organizations - they open rather than enclose knowledge and they motivate contribution through social rather than monetary incentives. Optimists reveling in these new possibilities for collaboration forecast that peer production will take over standard companies and reduce existing inequalities thanks to its ability to unleash the innovative potential of individuals and social groups in an unprecedented manner [1]. Yet, what is called "peer production" often entails a variety of social structures and activities that do not have much in common. Some of these - crowd labor for example - have little potential to change the existing patterns of hierarchical, closed organizations. We argue here that what distinguishes those peer production systems that have the potential to revolutionize economies from other ICT mediated collaborations are the values that such systems embody, pursue, and promote (such as openness, equality, or freedom). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the information overload regime, human communication tasks such as responding to email are well-modeled as priority queues, where priority is determined by a mix of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation corresponding to the task’s importance to the sender. We view priority queuing from a principal-agent perspective, and characterize the effect of priority-misalignment and information asymmetry between task senders and task receivers in both single-agent and multi-agent settings. In the single-agent setting, we find that discipline can override misalignment. Although variation in human interests leads to performance loss in the single-agent setting, the same variability is useful to the principal with optimal routing of tasks, if the principal has suitable information about agents’ priorities. Our approach starts to quantitatively address the effect of human dynamics in routine communication tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this book, more than 50 academics from various disciplines investigate the place of humans in the technological society of the future; it includes over 30 thought-provoking questions and concludes with 10 recommendations for an inclusive robot agenda. It places technology at the service of humans and society. The authors show how the principles of freedom, equality, and solidarity can be upheld and consolidated. These recommendations are designed to establish a path for policy and as well as a path for participants in our society, so that, together, we can derive the maximum benefit from technology while keeping its negative aspects to a minimum. Our future is in our own hands. This initiative is a call for action and evolution—a call to the homo roboticus. Raise Awareness About Technology and Encourage Open Innovation There is considerable fear surrounding technology. As in the history of every disruptive innovation, people are concerned about the consequences of the changes they are seeing around them. Moreover, the innovations are coming at us quickly. This shows that what we need is technological awareness and a public debate about the part we want robots to play in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the arrival of the Internet in India a little over two decades ago, numerous academics and practitioners have written about the promises afforded by the digitization of one of the world's largest economies. As a result, there has also been a widespread informational turn, which has included the generation of volumes of data on various aspects of everyday life and has seen the rise of several infrastructural frameworks that support data governance. The book pays close attention to the sociotechnical relationalities of data, people, and phenomena (social and mathematical) in India. This edited volume is noteworthy for the ways in which it offers a wide-ranging cross-disciplinary engagement with topics of interest to historians, anthropologists, data scientists, media studies and STS scholars. Each of the essays in this volume engages carefully with both theoretical and methodological questions that are common to studies of big data and data infrastructures in India. Altogether, the essays also engage with the question of how this informational turn has impacted broader questions of biopolitics and governmentality. The book's focus on both the speculative and the material affordances of data allow for a sustained engagement with the numerous specific imaginaries and practices that come to be grouped under the realm of the digital. Most usefully, the volume remains continually attentive to the many pluralities and fragmentations within Indian digital infrastructures, as well as the ways in which they intersect with stark social hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privacy remains a major challenge today, partly because it brings together social and technical considerations. Yet, current software engineering focuses only on the technical aspects. In contrast, the authors' approach, Revani, understands privacy from the standpoint of sociotechnical systems (STSs), with particular attention on the social elements of STSs. They specify STSs via a combination of technical mechanisms and social norms founded on accountability. Revani provides a way to formally represent mechanisms and norms and applies model checking to verify whether specified mechanisms and norms would satisfy stakeholder requirements. Additionally, Revani provides a set of design patterns and a revision tool to update an STS specification as necessary. The authors demonstrate the work of Revani on a healthcare emergency use case pertaining to patient privacy during disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When computer security incidents occur, it's critical that organizations be able to handle them in a timely manner. The speed with which an organization can recognize, analyze, and respond to an incident will affect the damage and lower recovery costs. Organized incident management requires defined, repeatable processes and the ability to learn from incidents that threaten the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of critical systems and data. Some organizations assign responsibility for incident management to a defined group of people or a designated unit, such as a computer security incident response team. This article looks at the development, purpose, and evolution of such specialized teams; the evolving nature of attacks they must deal with; and methods to evaluate the performance of such teams as well as the emergence of information sharing as a core service. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The United Kingdom has twice suffered major disruptions as a result of fuel panics, first in September 2000, coincident with a wave of fuel protests, and, more recently, in March 2012, following political warnings of a possible future supply chain disruption. In each case, the disruption and economic consequences were serious. In this paper, we demonstrate that agent-based techniques offer a powerful framework for simulation of supply chains and consumers under conditions of transient demand. In the case of fuel panic crisis, we show that even a highly abstract model can reproduce a range of transient phenomena seen in the real world and present a set of practical recommendations for policymakers faced with panic buying. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mobility information services (MIS), associated with intelligent transport systems (ITS), are expected to provide valuable contributions toward sustainable and smart mobility. MIS inherit from ITS the characteristic of being a collaborative system of systems (SoS) where no centralized management can actually be enforced and where heterogeneous types of independent actors are involved. Therefore, innovation in MIS cannot be conceived, represented, and consequently promoted merely as a matter of advancements in specific technological fields. In this paper, we propose a sociotechnical framework for promoting continuous innovation in MIS. Focus is made on a cooperative approach, which leverages SoS principles, to foster service and product innovation in the mobility information domain on a regional scale. We describe how this approach has been put into practice by architecting an open working environment. This is a sociotechnical environment made by: 1) a cooperative network of stakeholders (e.g., regional and national public administrations, enterprises, and research bodies) and 2) an architectural framework, which is the reference technological baseline enabling the rapid configuration, deployment, and integration of different technological capabilities. The latter is also made to support demonstration and validation activities of applied research results. Finally, we discuss obtained results, as well as future research directions and exploitation activities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the guest editors discuss self-service system design.

Security policy alignment concerns the matching of security policies specified at different levels in socio-technical systems, and delegated to different agents, technical and human. For example, the policy that sales data should not leave an organization is refined into policies on door locks, firewalls and employee behavior, and this refinement should be correct with respect to the original policy. Although alignment of security policies in socio-technical systems has been discussed in the literature, especially in relation to business goals, there has been no formal treatment of this topic so far in terms of consistency and completeness of policies. Wherever formal approaches are used in policy alignment, these are applied to well-defined technical access control scenarios instead. Therefore, we aim at formalizing security policy alignment for complex socio-technical systems in this paper, and our formalization is based on predicates over sequences of actions. We discuss how this formalization provides the foundations for existing and future methods for finding security weaknesses induced by misalignment of policies in socio-technical systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The social implications of a wide variety of technologies are the subject matter of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT). This paper reviews the SSIT's contributions since the Society's founding in 1982, and surveys the outlook for certain key technologies that may have significant social impacts in the future. Military and security technologies, always of significant interest to SSIT, may become more autonomous with less human intervention, and this may have both good and bad consequences. We examine some current trends such as mobile, wearable, and pervasive computing, and find both dangers and opportunities in these trends. We foresee major social implications in the increasing variety and sophistication of implant technologies, leading to cyborgs and human–machine hybrids. The possibility that the human mind may be simulated in and transferred to hardware may lead to a transhumanist future in which humanity redesigns itself: technology would become society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As the nature of human interaction with modernized socio-technical systems is increasingly cognitive and complex, many studies have been devoted to examine a range of complexity factors influencing human cognitive performance. However, there is a lack of theoretical basis of discerning and categorizing those factors. It is thus inevitable to establish a conceptual framework that can be used to identify and organize the complexity factors in an analytical way. In this paper, we regard the world of complexity factors as an abstract system and propose a new framework consisting of five views, each of which is concerned with certain aspects of the abstract system. To develop the framework more systematically, we conducted a comprehensive literature review and applied a system thinking approach to deriving a set of requirements to be satisfied by the framework. Of those five views, we particularly emphasize the roles of knowledge view. Thus a complexity factor model based on the knowledge view is also proposed. We describe two possible uses of the framework and the complexity factor model, which are the analytical identification of the complexity factors and the systematic assessment of the complexity factors identified by earlier studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]