Social Informatics and Global Development

Chris Barrett
Network Dynamics & Simulation Science Laboratory, Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech

Mobile and pervasive computational and communication networks are changing everything where socially coupled systems and many stakeholders are involved. There is unprecedented access to information about personal activities, detailed functional locations, transactions, point of view video and other heretofore relatively unavailable information. This is transforming approaches to business, engineering, politics, government and governance and the social sciences. Moreover, various kinds of social computing ranging from crowd sourcing and fads to distributed human computing are altering understanding of computing environments themselves and creating exciting ideas regarding the interplay of social and cognitive processes. In addition, these technologies and concepts impact the traditional uses of computational analysis in design, planning or operations. The interplay of all of this is especially apparent in the problems of explosive worldwide urbanization. The emerging enormous settlements are large, highly interdependent, economic, bio-social and socio-technical environments involving huge numbers of individuals and organizations. They offer prospects of great human opportunity or cataclysm, depending in large part on how they are managed. This talk will overview related developments in decision and policy informatics and will describe several new directions in basic research.

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