SoCS: Socio-Computational Approaches to Planetary Exploration

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

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.