Workshop on Collective Intelligence

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

The rise of Web 2.0 and large-scale distributed contributor systems is generating opportunities for a new interdisciplinary field on the topic of collective intelligence. Like cognitive science did beginning in the 1970's, this new field may help share perspectives and results from a variety of different fields. In the case of collective intelligence, potentially relevant disciplines include computer science, organization theory, social psychology, economics, and others. This workshop will frame a research agenda covering important aspects of collective intelligence such as: 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-suited to be attacked by a collective intelligence approach, and what are common design patterns among successful systems. The workshop on collective intelligence will facilitate broader impacts in: (a) coalescing a community of people from different disciplines and perspectives, (b) initiating consensus on how to define collective intelligence as a field and the topics that should be central within it, (c) establish a preliminary research agenda for the field, and (d) catalyze publications about the prospects for this field in one or more high quality journals.