Towards Social Problem-Solving with Human Subjects

Abstract

Recently, the use of social and human computing has witnessed increasing interest in the AI community. However, in order to harness the true potential of social computing, human subjects must play an active role in achieving computation in social networks and related media. Our work proposes an initial desiderata for effective social computing, drawing inspiration from artificial intelligence. Extensive experimentation reveals that several open issues and research questions have to be answered before the true potential of social and human computing is achieved. We, however, take a somewhat novel approach, by implementing a social networks environment where human subjects cooperate towards computational problem solving. In our social environment, human and artificial agents cooperate in their computation tasks, which may lead to a single problem-solving social network that potentially allows seamless cooperation among human and machine agents.