Workshops on Augmenting Individual Intelligence by Collaborating with People and Technologies

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

Most impactful innovations involve people interacting with each other and with the tools that they build explicitly to help them think and/or perform better. The investigators will organize two workshops to explore the ways in which an individual’s thinking is augmented and shaped by other people as well as by tools. Coordination among people, artificial intelligence systems, decision algorithms, and learning technologies can give rise to adaptive problem solving far beyond the capabilities of single individuals. Workshop topics will include how to: facilitate the spread of useful information while reducing misinformation, combine judgments from many individuals (humans and other animals) for improved decision making, create policies and infrastructures that allow groups to effectively solve their shared problems, best combine the strengths of human and computer problem solving to create systems more advanced than either component on their own, and use computers to make human learning more efficient and flexible. The workshops will feature panelist presentations organized into themes and monthly group discussions. A broader impact of the workshop is to provide a venue for students anywhere in the world to learn about exciting developments in augmented intelligence. For students coming from smaller universities with few resources for research, the workshop would provide exposure to state-of-the-art research and opportunities to interact with leading researchers in this emerging field. The topic of augmented intelligence represents an exciting area of research that can inform many applications including: the optimization of team coordination, the design of intelligent tutoring systems, computer support for human decision making, and the organization of social media platforms. This two-part, temporally and geographically distributed workshop will integrate perspectives from cognitive scientists, computer scientists, education researchers, neuroscientists, and biologists to lay the foundations of a shared conceptual framework for a new science of augmented intelligence, premised on the observation that people very rarely solve problems or develop understandings on their own. Instead, people recruit other people and technologies to help them, and to such a large extent that the apt unit for understanding cognition is typically not an individual person, but rather a larger system that incorporates multiple people and the tools that they created to enhance their capabilities. The workshop participants will grapple with theoretical and applied questions involving the nature of minds, how adaptive systems come into existence that can robustly solve a wide range of problems, and how humans and machines can complement each other’s strengths during learning and knowledge creation. The workshop seeks to stimulate new research directions at the confluence of theoretical, empirical, and technological advances that hold promise of developing an integrative science of augmented intelligence, drawling from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Deliverable products from the workshop will include online public videos of participants’ lectures, archives of conversations, and special issues of journals devoted to augmented intelligence. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.