The Future of Search - Workshop - 27th January

Internet of Humans Events
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Future of Search

Salon: The Future of Search - January 27 2021

This search engine workshop pursues an ambitious EU scenario in which the NGI open access architecture plays a positive role in opening European opportunities in the search domain.

The aim is to develop better search infrastructure solutions and tools and to support EU innovators and enterprises to deploy them as NGI. Collaboration at scale is necessary to build up European digital leadership.

11:00- 17:00: (online) Workshops The Future of Search

17:00-18:00 (online) Seminar The Future of Search

Seminar Register now!

Speakers:

Register early:

https://app.livestorm.co/made-group/dialogues-on-data-and-search-the-future-of-information-and-search

On January 27th probe the following questions: :

  • What are the key needs for tomorrow’s search and discovery, and how are those algorithms that give ‘top’ results validated?

  • What are users’ unmet needs?

  • What happens to the search data?

  • Whom will profit and who is left behind, and what is the sum effect of that digital exclusion happening repeatedly over time?

  • How will our diverse human languages play a role in this context, as Europe and the world moves to a single language of zeroes and ones?

  • Can today’s digital ecosystem be leveraged to offer citizens a fair data deal that leads to reliable and verifiable information and data trusts?

  • How do individual (eg right to be forgotten) and collective rights (to know) make searching more public, more transparent or more ethical by design?

  • Is there room for a citizens fair data deal that leads to reliable and verifiable information and data trusts?

Currently, there is no other search/intermediary in play, which means society has no collective ability to influence it, beyond an individuals’ ‘right to be forgotten’. There is no collective ability to act, e.g. to make things more transparent or ethical in design. Users move from private property (the commercial search portal) to private property (the corporate website).

In decentralising search and making results machine-processable, there still remains a need to improve discoverability. This can be done through open standards to facilitate open discovery and to foster composability. We can have multiple independent sources of search collaborate without creating a single search authority.

Ethical search means applying ethical filters to search results, adding mechanisms for collective action to feed those filters, so that as a society we make our digital values visible inside search.

Instead of lamenting the amount of trust in commercial providers like Amazon (service to trunk) that delivers this UX, we must provide an equally simple and user-friendly societal governance model, as an app. In ‘The Age of Continuous Connection new technologies make 24/7 customer relationships possible. It may be time to change our business model. As Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch write in HBR May June 2019. “In many cases, what matters most to customers is the amount of energy they have to expend – the less, the better.”

From this event and online conversations following the webinar, a diverse group of experts will give the EC recommendations for creating viable business models with new applications and services.

We invite experts to give their recommendations for NGI. Three EU funded H2020 projects in this domain join this event: NGI FORWARD, NGI0 Discovery, and NGI Assure. We invite others to also join. The expected outcome is to contribute to the next generation EU research funding, a better understanding and cohesive EU efforts to submit innovative ideas for open calls. Meeting organizers include the IoT Council & Edgeryders for NGI FORWARD, NLnet Foundation for NGI Discovery and Assure and ELONTECH.

WE WANT YOUR INPUT AND IDEAS. Please go here and share them with us: Edgeryders Forms

Organizing:

https://www.theinternetofthings.eu
tell.edgeryders.eu

NGI – 19 Feb 20

NGI Policy Lab

Find out about new developments, tools and bold ideas shaping the internet’s future.

https://nlnet.nl
https://nlnet.nl/discovery/
https://nlnet.nl/assure/
https://www.elontech.org

The Salons reflect the views of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission but form part of the project’s overarching recommendations for the NGI and future European internet policy.

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The workshop and your contributions on the platform will be recorded for research purposes. Please read details about that process in this info sheet: Participant Information Sheet. By joining the call you are consenting to the recording as described in the information sheet.

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Future of Search

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In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?
Commercially Dominant Context (and Lack of Algorithmic Agency).

Search Engines are primarily geared towards advertising. Search Amazon and you will get the shop not the rainforest. (even Amazon Fire, you’ll get an ebook ready).

Add into this mix surveillance capitalism which serves me information based on past contexts (ie. what I bought last week, rather than what I’m seeking now).

Contextual Search and Algorithmic Agency would allow me to shape the domains in which I seek information, and also the model that the machine has of me to allow for more relevant information streams.

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In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?
Many questions, all of which could be raised at this moment, just see that the main current search engines are managed by companies that aim to profit, using proprietary algorithms and software, with opaque interests and functioning, that follow the user and, at the same time, that do not provide any tools to audit what they do exactly with the collected data. Last but not least, there is an increasing risk that these companies will only allow the use of their services to previously identified users, already registered and logged in at the time of use - which implies the need to use another company resource, at least one auxiliary system for registration, which hinders user freedom, increases bandwidth consumption, energy waste with a consequent increase in carbon emissions and also increases the chance of this user being further followed and monitored, having their habits increasingly known and cataloged, which will likely result in a decrease of privacy.

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In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?
Privacy. Google.

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In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?
A search/discovery process has many aspects which everyone is reimplementing. To implement those components in an optimal way, we really need groups to specialize on those: transform from monolithic into fragmented solutions.

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In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?
We have no way to search focused on ideas.

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In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?
Decentralize!

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You would like to join this I think and check out SEARX and Yacy:

Salon: Future of Information access for search and discovery in @NGI4eu
15:00 16:00 CET Worksop SEARCH Search and Internet of Things
Kickoff by Michael Christen @yacy_search
Go: https://bbb.tbm.tudelft.nl/b/rob-1zv-mco-ci9
Tell us Edgeryders Forms
Seminar Register now!
https://www.ngi.eu/event/ngi-forward-data-search/?instance_id=434
Org @NGIForward @NgiZero
@NGIassure

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Great idea Nico! Talk soon. I think that was the early idea of Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn https://www.theinternetofthings.eu/robert-e-kahn-and-vinton-g-cerf-digital-library-project-volume-1-world-knowbots-draft
Vint Cerf my briefly mention it, we hope, n in this talk.

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In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?
We lack a strong foundation of independent open source software that can function as the base for a more diverse ecosystem than we have now. So many of the libraries and software we rely on are maintained either by a single person in their spare time or are firmly in the hand of a single company that may terminate it at any time, just as has happened recently with ElasticSearch.

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In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?


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In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?
You’re being tracked, ranked, and profiled, which can affect the objectivity of your research.

I think a decentralized search with many nodes, in a p2p network can offer an alternative to big tech surveillance, and create opportunities for new tech entrepreneurship. Yacy.net comes to mind. With the right leadership we can empower individuals to create their own search nodes and make a better internet.

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In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?


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Welcome, Sarah. What you point out is clearly true, to the point of becoming a joke. I am curious, what do you think should be done to remedy it? Are you thinking of government long term funding for strategic open source projects? Or some form of cooperativism? Or what else?

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In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?
PROBLEM. Scaling Ethical digital service practices, adjusted to a unique person’s need.
SOLUTION.
What if we could SEAMLESSLY acquire millions people to NGI by a personal BENEFIT (& to other Ethical AI best practices) - for all public library book users worldwide,

  • as to members of MyData cooperative, Public-Private-People partnership,
  • with SEAMLESS access to NGI.eu,
  • just by opening a (Global library) book’s Jacket
  • in2taps of a jacket’s image from any website (Amazon, a book store, a library)
    Aurasma AR-app_Er ist wieder da.pdf - Google Drive
  • also in2taps of a physical book’s HYBRID Jacket.

It is a HYBRID Jacket, like Data Jackets in Japan (Ohsawa 2013) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275541563_Data_Jackets_for_Externalizing_Use_Value_of_Hidden_Datasets

Mozilla Fest one-pager.pdf - Google Drive

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In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?
The search engine ecosystem is dominated by Google and other big tech companies that have a business model to influence the results towards their stakeholders interest. The system is not transparent.
The other challenge is that data needs to be curated at the moment of creation to make it FAIRi. I added the very important i, which stands for integrity/incorruptibility. This part and especially its governance is lacking and therefore search will always be limited and cannot be trusted.

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