Towards a Ubiquitous Model of an Individual in Social Machines

It is the activities of individuals that lead to formation and changes within any social system. Hence, the "social" component in a social machine (socio-technical machine) can be understood constructively from the conception of an individual as a machine. In this work, we present a stochastic finite state machine model of an individual based on Abhidhamma tradition of Buddhism. The machine models moment to moment states of consciousness of an individual in terms of the Buddhist formal ontology that constitutes an individual. Thus, the key contribution of our research is a ubiquitous framework of an individual which unifies the idea of a human agent across all possible social machines. It is shown that from web data of a particular individual this machine can be populated. We expound how our model solves issues pertaining to varied temporal granules and sparsity of data. We further illustrate through an example as to how our approach can unify the conceptualizations of an individual from the numerous ideologies and definitions of a social machine. As a part of our future work, we hope to align this proposed stochastic machine with social observatories on internet.