ACM Collective Intelligence Conference 2019
Abstract
The Collective Intelligence conference was launched in 2012 to help catalyze the creation of a new, interdisciplinary research field on the topic of collective intelligence. Collective intelligence has existed at least as long as humans have, because families, armies, countries, and companies have all--at least sometimes--acted collectively in ways that seem intelligent. In fact, by this definition, we could say that a form of collective intelligence exists in many other kinds of systems, such as individual brains, ant colonies, and bacteria, because in all these cases, individual elements (neurons, insects, molecules) acttogether in ways that can be viewed as intelligent. But in the last decade or so a new kind of collective intelligence has emerged: groups of people and computers, connected by the Internet, collectively doing intelligent things. For example, the Google technology harvests knowledge generated by millions of people creating and linking web pages and then uses this knowledge to answer queries in ways that often seem amazingly intelligent. Or in Wikipedia,thousands of people around the world have collectively created a very large and high quality intellectual product with almost no centralized control, and almost all as volunteers! We believe that these early examples of Internet-enabled collective intelligence are not the end of the story but just the beginning. And in order to understand the possibilities and constraints of these new kinds of intelligence, we need a new interdisciplinary field. Forming such a field is the goal of this conference. One analogy to illustrate the need for an interdisciplinary field in the area of collective intelligence comes from the emergence of a related interdisciplinary field: cognitive science. In the first half of the twentieth century, disciplines like psychology, linguistics, and computer science proceededmostly independently of each other. But by the 1950s and 1960s, people began to recognize deep commonalities in the problems being tackled by (a) artificial intelligence researchers trying to design computers to act intelligently and (b) other researchers trying to understand how human brains act intelligently. The broad recognition of these commonalities led to the emergence in the 1970s of the bridging discipline of cognitive science. While this field has still not been institutionalized to the same degree as older disciplines like psychology, many people would agree that the cross-disciplinary fertilization encouraged by cognitive science has been extremely valuable. In the case of collective intelligence, many computer scientists, organization theorists, social psychologists, economists, biologists and others all try to understand or design groups of individuals that--collectively--produce intelligent behavior. And there are certainly deep commonalities in the problems faced by researchers in these different fields. But--unlike in the case of individual intelligence--an equivalent bridging discipline focused on collective intelligence has not yet emerged.We believe that the time is now ripe for the emergence of such a bridging discipline, and we hope that by continuing this conference we can help accelerate its development. Some of the topics we plan to discuss include: how to define and measure collective intelligence, how to motivate participants to form part of an intelligent collective, what is the effect of different patterns of connection among the participants (i.e., network science), what problems are well-fitted to be attacked by a collective intelligence approach, and what are common design patterns among successful systems.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jun 13, 2019
- Source ID
- N000141912414
Entities
People
- Aniket Kittur
Organizations
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy