All above concerns might be discussed too much and early until there is a useful remote control center is established. In line with ANT, it is possible to configure and reconfigure what is important information for onshore control.
From human-in-the-loop to actor-in-the-loop
Human-in-the-loop (HITL) is discussed for a long-term [54]. For example, people are involved in a virtuous circle where they train, tune, and test a particular algorithm. First, humans label data – this gives a HITL model a high-quality training data. Developers learn to make decisions from the data. Second, humans tune the model – this can happen in several different ways, but commonly, humans will score data to account for overfitting, to teach a classifier (i.e., algorithm) about edge cases, or new categories in the model’s purview. Lastly, people can test and validate a model by scoring its outputs, especially in places where an algorithm is unconfident about judgment or overly confident about an incorrect decision.
However, there are several flaws in such model. Humans here, as we assume, they are people who develop the IoT platform. They are not the people who experience, live and work with the IoT platform in their daily life. Developers are not and will not be experts in the professional working context wherein domain knowledge are strongly required [55], [56]. Therefore, we must acknowledge that the front-line workers who are using IoT technology should be involved in the development process.
To engage with front-line workers, a development space should be established for allowing fieldwork experts to gain domain knowledge with front-line workers in their daily life [57]. As front-line workers are experts in their work contexts, they knowledge much better what is needed and have a good reason to select necessary technology to support their work practices [58].
Of course, there are differences between developers and front-line workers regarding background, expertise, and experiences. The important thing is to convert their different interests in the development process as a common goal with the IoT platform – the automation of collecting sensors. ANT is a method to deal with the translation of different interests in the development process. In ANT perspective, there is no difference between humans and nonhumans [29]. Hence, both of them are actors in the development process (see Figure 2).