PETRI – Planet Earth Teaching & Research Initiative @ ICCS2018

As I was preparing this presentation, I realized that taking a higher level overview would explain better why this problem demands the skills of the complex systems community – your analytical tools, frameworks and understanding of Dynamic Social Networks applied to the Global Grand Challenge of PLASTIC on Earth today.

In this conference we’ve heard talks about analytical methods that can provide valuable insight for case study applications. The global challenge of plastic pollution is a deserving application, a petri dish for complex systems analysts. Though our first theme is PLASTIC, we aim in the future to translate what we learn from this petri dish to other complex systems problems.

One argument to focus on plastic as a complex systems problem: the World Economic Forum prediction that by 2050 our oceans will have more plastic than fish raised global awareness, triggering massive mobilization to address a challenge with no simple solution.

Supply chain management professionals sourcing materials for products and packaging, environmentalists tracking plastic as it travels along waterways to the ocean, marine biologists studying its impact on marine life and ecosystems – all need to understand each other’s findings. Plastic in the ocean comes from land, from plastic production, consumption and disposal.

The PLASTIC supply chain can be impacted by interventions at any stage in this chain. We aim to raise awareness of the large window for innovation. Many plastic substitutes are being developed.

Leo McCarthy, born without fingers, now feels cool because of a father-son DIY project that produced for him a 3D printed plastic hand.

Critical analysis of the plastics problem is complex because plastic has many constructive uses, such as for medical devices, 3D printing, industrial and machine parts, lenses, and greenhouses. The ocean plastics problem crosses disciplines, institutions, regions, conflicting economic interests, and requires participation of people with diverse expertise and objectives, who do not normally work together – from innovators developing plastic substitutes to entrepreneurs developing plastic upcycling systems for applications, from road-building to housing and 3D printing for medical applications.

At the top of our stack is PETRI, our mobile and web app with its media portal to a back end knowledge platform. In the middle is the growing social network where we’ll study strong ties, weak ties, dissemination and contagion, experimenting with interventions and measuring impact. This seahorse carrying a Q-tip went viral on twitter.

At the bottom of this stack is our AI-driven back end, CIRIS, a Collaborative Intelligence Reasoning & Inference System. Our recommender system can track usage, perceive emergent social network patterns, and conduct experiments via a range of interventions.

earthDECKS’ flagship media experience, PLASTIC, tackles a problem widely acknowledged and documented. Participants join the experience via a media portal that captures the unique profile of each user entering the system and, based on that user’s profile, matches each user to resources, challenges, and other users with related interests.

Users start by watching our short 5 minute film PLASTIC – our media portal to our backend knowledge platform and social network, which downstream can have other points of entry – other media portals focusing on other problems. Our interest is in studying how to optimize the performance of this platform to support dynamic social networks converging toward consilience about how to address complex systems problems.

When you click on a topic of interest, the film doesn’t pause. The globe flashes neon to show that your click was recorded.

Before you watch the film, you’re prompted to log in or sign up. Our five minute film portal PLASTIC presents a rapid collage of content.

Citing the memorable clip from the movie The Graduate, in which a young Dustin Hoffman was advised to go into PLASTIC, reminds us of media power to influence.

Plastic is now the third largest industry sector in the US. Global production has increased twentyfold in the 50 years since Dustin Hoffman heard that advice.

After the film, if you didn’t log in or sign up, you see this screen.

You’re asked to sign up now to see your customized earthDECK, a wordcloud with tags pointing to stories selected by your clicks as you watched the film.

We aim to drive a new paradigm in MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), enabling students to navigate their own learning paths and to translate that learning into action in the world.

PETRI – Five Core Objectives

Our first objective is enable a large network of people concerned about the plastic challenge to contribute skills and resources more effectively. The first step is to raise awareness, to make a broad public audience aware that there is a social network tackling global problem solving challenges, starting with our first theme, PLASTIC.

The evidence is compelling, although most facts are guestimates.

Our second objective is to improve critical thinking skills so that everyone can judge better how to work effectively on this hard problem.

This Chinese family needs another way to make a living in order to stop selling plastic toys.

These Philippine residents need another way to dump their trash.

These fishermen need water that produces safe food to eat.

And industrial nations need to realize that blaming the top eight plastic polluters is passing the buck rather than taking the blame. With the exception of China, which is Number One for both plastic production and plastic pollution, the list of top producers and top polluters is not the same. China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Viet Nam, India, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Thailand are blamed for ocean plastic as the top eight polluters. But the top eight producers are producing most of the plastic that these polluter countries receive and dispose of.

One policy change can have cascading complex system implications. China’s Number One Polluter title comes in part from the fact that from the 1990s China made a policy decision to take in plastic for recycling from many industrial countries. When China’s ban on importing waste plastic took effect January 1, 2018, Britain, Canada, Ireland, Germany, and several other European nations experienced a crisis, because they lacked the capacity to recycle their own plastic. Norway responded with a new state-of-the-art bottle recycling plant that has just opened.

Our third objective is to support game-changing innovation.

PETRI is a testbed to attract diverse expertise and enable talent more effectively to contribute to the grand challenges we face.

Two impressive examples of innovation are rising to meet the PLASTIC challenge:

Plastic Roads – a global network, locally driven

The top two photos show plastic road building in India. Bottom left is the London suburb of Enfield. Bottom right is a joint venture in the Netherlands called Plastic Road, which includes technology for modular production and floodwater drainage.

Plastic Roads are now driving a global innovation ecosystem. The original idea in India was to bury plastic trash beneath roads. Later it was discovered that substituting plastic for the petroleum-based bitumen in asphalt would produce stronger, better, more durable roads and simultaneously allow local upcycling of plastic trash near its point of origin. This innovation has early adopters in the Netherlands, India, the UK and the state of Texas.

The Plastic Bank – turning trash into tokens

The Plastic Bank is an out-of-the box solution, providing employment to the poor so that they can gather plastic trash in their local communities and bring it to Plastic Bank popup stores to exchange for food, electrical phone-charging and tokens they can use to pay for other goods and services. Now powered by blockchain and supported by IBM, the Plastic Bank is expanding its reach from Haiti to other locations

Our fourth objective is to create a petri dish in which to study how best to apply complex systems findings in dynamic social networks motivated and incentivized address global challenges.

Rather than asking, How do we analyze plastic as a complex systems problem?  we ask

How do we analyze what people are doing about plastic as a complex systems problem?

PETRI is a learning ecosystem where we conduct experiments that we can analyze. By tracking actions in PETRI, we create an evolving, self-improving learning system. Both the human learners and the AI system learn and enable each other’s learning. Human pattern recognition capacities work in tandem as an integrated system.

The eON Network is our testbed of users, who are also teachers for the system, enabling our AI back end to learn from its users, and users to learn, both from each other and from recommendations from our AI system.

Our fifth objective is to drive game-changing innovation in education, harnessing the power of new media and pioneering a next  generation social network, linked to existing social networks to demonstrate a new paradigm for MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) – dynamic active learning.

earthDECKS launched PETRI (Planet Earth Teaching and Research Initiative) as a way to explore how MOOCs can better support “citizen science” and learning through action. To augment the collaborative intelligence of diverse participants requires capacity to cluster and link related concepts, tag user profiles, and credit individual contributions. The focus is not on predicting the future, but on pattern recognition — measuring impact in the present, harnessing the unique capacity of online systems to capture user paths and time spent.

In our MOOCs every Story Contributor has the role of “Reporter” in an environmental news agency network. Every story reader is a “News Analyst,” learning critical thinking skills by writing comments about the story. Players earn tokens by reading and writing stories, which receive critique and ratings from other students and teachers (determining token awards). The best stories are posted and become part of PETRI’s growing story collection. The backend analytics allow us to see which topics attract most interest and how interest grows.

earthDECKS, inspired by Wikipedia, is developing new generation of MOOCs with

• meta-tagging to network and cluster tags to similar and complementary tags (a hard problem that demands crowd-sourcing human pattern recognition);
• a rating, assessment, and filtering system, so that more useful lessons rise to the top;
• time-stamping, so that expiry and critical path dates and timeliness can be noted;
• authoring, such that Contributors are credited with a back-end system to track who contributed what;
• a system of search using not only key words but also parameter ranges; expertise and location of responders; date of incident and follow-up, clustering key words and other search criteria to filter results, not only by topic but according to other criteria.;
• geo-tagging, so that where incidents occurred, and which responder networks were activated, is known to the system;
• incentives to motivate responders to report incidents, meta-tag and rate results, both their own contributions and those of others, particularly those that most relate to their own;
• capacity for Embedded Continual Assessment (ECA) to trace and report updates;
• next generation social networks, transformed into problem-solving networks, with potential to scale and translate across varied requirements.

This new type of MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) offers a unique way for students to navigate their own learning paths.

In our initial prototype there are three roles:

1. Story Reporters
2. Story Analysts
3. Story Editors (teachers only)

Both students and teachers can be Reporters & Analysts.

Beyond measuring passive impact,

• How long do users stay in PETRI?
• Which stories do they read?
• What paths do they follow?

We aim to measure active onsite impact.

• What stories do users share?
• Do they write their own stories?
• Do they analyze/ critique stories of others?
• Do they extend a story thread?

How can learning on our knowledge platform motivate action in the world?

• Do users follow up on recommendations PETRI gives?
• Do they attend events, contact mentors, engage in projects?

 Social Network Clusters

• Whom do users connect with in PETRI? For what reasons?

We seek collaborators to help us develop and test validation metrics.

Developing Gamified Components for PETRI

If we find the right collaborators to gamify PETRI we aspire to develop PEG [Plastic Earth Game] as a social network component of PETRI. In the meantime, we aim to make several components more creative and fun.

• Profile Questions could instead be some form of puzzle that helps us understand the profiles of users without having them feel as if they’re taking a survey;
• earthDECKS Tokens can serve as Incentive Awards for those whose gameplay contributes to PETRI’s growth and evolution.

earthDECKS Tokens

How can tokens be used in PETRI? Initially they can be introduced as “Monopoly play money.” Tokens can be rewards for

• a ‘bit’ of information re_____;
• providing media to for the PETRI library (picture, video, chart, map, etc.);
• providing data to populate the PETRI database;
• being Story Reporters (level of reward dependent on how the story is rated by readers  – a sort of DIGG rating system);
• being story analysts/ critics;
• sharing stories with social networks;
• bringing friends into the PETRI network;
• other gamified elements of the system [TBD].

These same tokens, which contributors receive as a “thank you” for contributing to the good cause non-profit work of earthDECKS could be tied to an ICO where downstream they can be translated into fiat money and awarded back to the donors as Incentive Awards.

PETRI is a petri dish for an experiment inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s concept for “World Game” (1961), a learning game to address systemic environmental challenges. World Game preceded the global internet, distributed computing, mobile apps, and was fifty years ahead of the “deep game movement” where players score high points for doing good in the world.

Our media portal PLASTIC is just one puzzle piece in earthDECKS’ planned cluster of portals focusing on cross-disciplinary grand challenges. Each portal will have its own viability, augmented by crosslinks to other portals.