This book introduces and reviews recent advances in
the field in a comprehensive and non-technical way by focusing on the potential
of emerging citizen-science and social-computation frameworks, coupled with the
latest theoretical and modeling tools developed by physicists, mathematicians,
computer and social scientists to analyse, interpret and visualize complex data
sets.

There is overwhelming evidence that the current
organisation of our economies and societies is seriously damaging biological
ecosystems and human living conditions in the short term, with potentially
catastrophic effects in the long term. The need to re-organise the daily
activities with the greatest impact – energy consumption, transport, housing –
towards a more efficient and sustainable development model has recently been
raised in the public debate on several global, environmental issues. Above all,
this requires the mismatch between global, societal and individual needs to be
addressed. Recent advancesin Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)
can trigger important transitions at the individual and collective level to
achieve this aim.

Based on the findings of the collaborative research
network EveryAware the following developments among the emerging ICT
technologies are discussed in depth in this volume:

• Participatory sensing – where ICT development is
pushed to the level where it can support
informed action at the hyperlocal scale, providing capabilities for
environmental monitoring, data aggregation and mining, as well as information
presentation and sharing.

• Web gaming, social computing and internet-mediated
collaboration – where the Web will continue to acquire the status of an
infrastructure for social computing, allowing users’ cognitive abilities to be
coordinated in online communities, and steering the collective action towards
predefined goals.

• Collective awareness and decision-making – where the
access to both personal and community data, collected by users, processed with
suitable analysis tools, and re-presented in an appropriate format by usable
communication interfaces leads to a bottom-up development of collective social
strategies.