SCC-IRG Track 1: Socially Informed Services Conflict Governance through Specification, Detection, Resolution and Prevention

智能服务深入现代城市，旨在提高市民生活的方方面面，包括安全、健康和生活质量。例如智能交通控制和空气质量控制。鉴于这些服务，集体监控城市的安全和性能至关重要，但也具有挑战性，因为部署的服务数量不断增加之间存在许多潜在冲突。研究人员在如何独立设计这些服务方面积累了丰富的知识。然而，由于社会和物理活动的复杂交互，服务之间潜在的预期或意想不到的耦合没有得到充分的探索，这导致了潜在的服务冲突。制定减少冲突的办法对于确保城市服务的社会包容性和公平性至关重要，因为当冲突发生时，其影响可能集中在一些分社区(例如，特定的地理位置、特定的用户群体，如呼吸道疾病患者等)。这意味着由于多样性，一些公民将体验到比其他人更低质量的服务。换句话说，服务冲突导致了服务提供中的数字鸿沟。拟议项目的关键智力优势是发展了一种社会意识的冲突管理理论，并将其应用于智能城市，包括以下5个顺序的组成部分。(1)一种新颖的、基于模板的需求说明组件/工具，其集成了社会和技术需求以正式地定义冲突；(2)一种社会多样性感知检测方法，其利用机器学习和冲突相关性来检测实践中的冲突；(3)一种多目标但以公平为中心的解决方法，其考虑了社会可接受的权衡、行为模型和控制理论来解决现有冲突；(4)一种基于参与者的冲突预防解决方案，其以可扩展的、分散的方式使用博弈论和强化学习来预防未来的冲突；(5)以教育外展和专业培训为基础的社会干预方法，传播拟议的技术，以增强社区的能力。通过与新泽西州纽瓦克的城市合作伙伴合作，这一理论在现实世界中的实施将展示其有效性和对冲突管理的不同利益相关者的更广泛影响，从城市运营商到服务提供商，再到普通公民。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Smart services are deeply embedded in modern cities aiming to enhance various aspects of citizens' lives, including safety, wellness, and quality of life. Examples include intelligent traffic control and air quality control. Given these services, monitoring a city's safety and performance collectively is crucial, yet also challenging due to many potential conflicts among the number increasing of services deployed. Researchers have accumulated abundant knowledge on how to design these services independently. However, underlying expected or unexpected couplings among services due to complex interactions of social and physical activities are under-explored, which leads to potential service conflicts. Developing approaches of reducing conflicts is essential for ensuring social inclusion and equity of city services because when conflicts occur, their impacts are likely to be concentrated in some sub-communities (e.g., specific geographic locations, specific user groups like patients with respiratory illness, etc.) meaning that some citizens will experience lower quality services than others due to the diversity. Put differently, service conflicts contribute to a digital divide in service provision.The key intellectual merit of the proposed project is the development of a socially aware conflict management theory and its deployment for smart cities, consisting of 5 sequential components as follows. (1) a novel, template-based requirements specification component/tool that integrates social and technical requirements to formally define a conflict; (2) a social diversity aware detection approach that utilizes machine learning and conflict correlations to detect conflicts in practice; (3) a multi-objective yet equity-centric resolution method that accounts for socially acceptable trade-offs, behavioral models, and control theory to resolve existing conflicts; (4) a participant-based conflict prevention solution that employs Game Theory and Reinforcement Learning in a scalable, decentralize fashion to prevent future conflicts; (5) a social intervention approach based on education outreach and professional training to disseminate the proposed technology to empower the community. The real-world implementation of this theory by working with the city partners in Newark NJ will show its effectiveness and broader impacts on a diverse set of stakeholders of conflict management from city operators, to service providers, to average citizens.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.