Tom Malone and Luis von Ahn — with funding from the NSF’s CISE Directorate — are organizing an interdisciplinary conference that seeks to bring together researchers from a variety of fields relevant to understanding and designing collective intelligence of many types. This first-ever conference — Collective Intelligence 2012 — will take place in Cambridge, MA, on April 18-20, 2012, and comprise invited talks, oral paper presentations, and poster sessions.
From the official call for papers:
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. 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, 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!
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 one of the goals of this conference.
We seek papers about behavior that is both collective and intelligent. By collective, we mean groups of individual actors, including, for example, people, computational agents, and organizations. By intelligent, we mean that the collective behavior of the group exhibits characteristics such as, for example, perception, learning, judgment, or problem solving.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
- human computation
- social computing
- crowdsourcing
- wisdom of crowds (e.g., prediction markets)
- group memory and problem-solving
- deliberative democracy
- animal collective behavior
- organizational design
- public policy design (e.g., regulatory reform)
- ethics of collective intelligence (e.g., “digital sweatshops”)
- computational models of group search and optimization
- emergence and evolution of intelligence
- new technologies for making groups smarter
Collective Intelligence 2012 is seeking reports of original research results; reviews of previous research in one or more fields relevant to collective intelligence; and position papers about research agendas for the field of collective intelligence.
The deadline for submission is November 4, 2011. Authors of accepted submissions will be required to provide camera-ready papers by mid-February 2012.
Much more detail is available here. And if you have questions, e-mail contact@ci2012.org.
(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)
