SoCS: Socio-Computational Approaches to Planetary Exploration

该项目研究正在进行的NASA-ESA-ASI卡西尼号前往土星的任务，以更好地了解包裹着复杂社会计算系统的问题，例如人类和机器的相互依存，以提出对更广泛的复杂人机系统设计的更广泛影响。在机器人出名的同时，机器人太空探索任务还需要控制航天器移动的网络和远程硬件，协调工作活动的大量自主开发的软件套件，以及数百名人类科学家和工程师，他们必须协商科学优先事项并做出指导机器人的决定。研究人员将利用民族志、口述历史访谈和档案工作，探索在现有的、复杂的、高风险的国际社会计算环境中社会技术组织、分布式操作、数据共享和社区维护的实践。这项研究解决了这样的问题：社会对技术的限制是什么，反之亦然？此外，一个群体的政治和决策结构如何与他们的技术基础设施保持一致或发生冲突，以及对社会互动和科学生产都会产生什么后果？该项目的智力价值在于它融合了五个学科领域的调查--科学与技术研究、计算机支持的协同工作、组织科学、人机交互和人与机器人交互--以在一个极端分散的背景下生成大规模技术科学的机构和工作场所现实的整体图景。这项工作的更广泛影响包括对行星探索内外的下一代社交智能计算系统的设计影响。

This project studies the ongoing NASA-ESA-ASI Cassini Mission to Saturn to better understand the issues that envelop complex socio-computation systems, such as the mutual interdependence of humans and machines, to present broader implications for the design of complex human-computer systems more generally. While the robots become famous, robotic space exploration missions also require networked and distant hardware to control spacecraft movement, extensive home-grown software suites that coordinate work activity, and several hundred human scientists and engineers who must negotiate scientific priorities and make decisions that guide the robot.Using ethnography, oral history interviews, and archival work, researchers will probe the practices of sociotechnical organization, distributed operations, data sharing, and community maintenance in an existing, complex, high-stakes and international sociocomputational environment. The research addresses the questions: what constraints does the social place on the technological, and vice versa? Also, how does the political and decision-making structure of a group align or clash with their technical infrastructure, and with what consequences for both social interaction and scientific production?The intellectual merit of the project lies in its melding of five disciplinary areas of investigation - Science & Technology Studies, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Organization Sciences, Human-Computer Interaction, and Human-Robot Interaction - to generate a holistic picture of the institutional and workplace realities of large-scale technoscience in a radically distributed context. The broader impacts of this work include design implications for the next generation of socially-intelligent computational systems both within and outside of planetary exploration.