Collective adaptation in very large scale ubicomp: towards a superorganism of wearables

Personalized wearable ICT systems presented in fashionable and appealing lifestyle-designs have gained critical user acceptance, and comprise momentum to bring wearable computing to a socio-technical mass phenomenon within the next few years. Early indicators for this expected wearable systems 'tsunami' are the 'spring tide' of 7.3 billion mobile connected platforms (i.e. mobile subscribers) as of the end of 2014, 300 mio. shipped smart watches in 2014 with an expected annually growth of 35% till 2020, and a possible market for more than 200 million smart eyewear systems in 2015 [1]. Following the great success of the 1st Superorganism of Wearables Workshop at Ubicomp 2014 with roughly 50 participants from 15 different countries, we build on the immense interest of the research community in the proposed topic. The structuring of the workshop in slots initiated by a keynote presentation accompanied by technical paper presentations and position statements resulted in lively and vibrant discussions. Collected material for the dissemination of the Workshop ideas can be found at the Workshop Website (https://www.pervasive.jku.at/ubicomp14/) The 2nd instantiation of the workshop will reattach to last years agenda and ask the questions on the potentials and opportunities of turning these massively deployed wearable systems to a globe spanning superorganism of socially interactive personal digital assistants. While the individual wearables are of heterogeneous provenance and typically act autonomously, we can assume that they can (and will) self-organize into large scale cooperative collectives, with humans being mostly out-of-the-loop [2]. We may not assume a common objective or central controller, but rather volatile network topologies, co-dependence and internal competition, non-linear and non-continuous dynamics, and sub-ideal, failure prone operation. We could refer to these emerging massive collectives of wearables as a "superorganism" [3], since it exhibits properties of a living organism (like e.g. 'collective intelligence') on its own. In order to properly exploit such superorganisms, we need to develop a deeper scientific understanding of the foundational principles by which they operate.