Cultivating Collective Intelligence in Human-Computer Systems
Abstract
As is true of any large organization, the U.S. armed forces are constantly changing their organization and adapting to new situations. Key missions are increasingly performed by small teams that need to leverage and integrate information from a plethora of sources including enemy and friendly forces, intelligence, and the environment, while operating in a complex, unstructured, ambiguous, and vastly expanded battlespace. As our armed forces become increasingly reliant upon teams, and particularly as those teams become increasingly integrated with technology, improving the effectiveness of such human-computer systems is growing in importance. Even though researchers have been studying the effectiveness of groups for decades, almost all of these studies have focused on a single task performed by humans alone. In our recent research on collective intelligence in teams, we find that with a single metric, we can predict the performance of a team on a wide range of tasks. In the research we propose here, we plan to build on this research and extend these findings to: (a) use individual evaluations of team members to predict the collective intelligence of a team before the team is formed, and, (b) design more effective teams of combined human and machine intelligence. We will pursue the first objective by mining an accumulated database of over 1,000 teams to discern patterns in how individual characteristics combine to predict collective intelligence. We will pursue the second objective through a combination of field-based and laboratory studies in which machine intelligence will be integrated into human teams to experiment on how such tools can enhance team process and ultimately human-computer collective intelligence.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Oct 23, 2018
- Source ID
- W911NF1710104
Entities
People
- Anita Woolley
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Office of the Secretary of Defense