QLectives
QLectives is a project bringing together top social modelers, peer-to-peer engineers and physicists to design and deploy next generation self-organising socially intelligent information systems. The project aims to combine three recent trends within information systems:
Social networks - in which people link to others over the Internet to gain value and facilitate collaboration (think of Facebook)
Peer production - in which people collectively produce informational products and experiences without traditional hierarchies or market incentives (think Wikipedia)
Peer-to-Peer systems - in which software clients running on user machines distribute media and other information without a central server or administrative control (think of BitTorrent)
QLectves aims to bring these together to form Quality Collectives, i.e. functional decentralised communities that self-organise and self-maintain for the benefit of the people who comprise them. We aim to generate theory at the social level, design algorithms and deploy prototypes targeted towards two application domains:
QMedia - an interactive peer-to-peer media distribution system (including live streaming), providing fully distributed social filtering and recommendation for quality (think of social television 2.0)
QScience - a distributed platform for scientists allowing them to locate or form new communities and quality reviewing mechanisms, which are transparent and promote quality (think of Slashdot for any particular discipline or sub-discipline)
The approach of the QLectives project is unique in that it brings together a highly inter-disciplinary team applied to specific real world problems. We aim to apply a scientific approach to our designs by formulating theories, applying them to real systems and then performing detailed measurements of system and user behaviour to validate or modify our theories if necessary. Our two applications will be based on two existing user communities comprising several thousand people - so-called "Living Labs". For QMedia we will work with the tribler.org media sharing community. For QScience we will work with the EconoPhysics community.
Latest entries From Qlectives blog
QLectives features in PerAda Magazine
I wrote an piece about QLlectives (and the P2P mentality) that has been included in the PerAda Magazine. I promised this months ago and kept putting it off but finally I wrote it. Anyhow, it can be found at:
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Report back on the PerAda-ASSYST summer school Budapest
The PerAda-ASSYST summer school took place from the 21st-27th of September in Budapest, co-located and overlapping with the SASO conference. T
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Report back on the [k]NO(w)BODY workshop @ ECCS2010
I had the privilege of attending the [k]NO(w)BODY workshop @ ECCS2010 in Lisbon.You can see details about it here. Why did I go? Because a number of people told me I might find it interesting
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Report back from European Conference on Complex Systems (ECCS2010)
The European Conference on Complex Systems (ECCS2010) took place last month in Lisbon. A number of QLectives people attended including myself. This conference brings together major European researcher
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Towards a Science of Socially Intelligent ICT - Videos of talks now online
The videos of the presentations from the August COS-ICT workshop "Towards a Science of Socially Intelligent ICT" are now availible on the ASSYST website. I described the workshop previously like this:
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