Post Tagged with: "complexity"

Aggregation mechanisms, Collaboration Culture, Examples/Cases

Lévy vs. Surowiecki: Collective Intelligence with no Collaboration?

Musical group_Stoney Lane

One of the things I have had trouble explaining when defining the concept of Collective Intelligence is the preceding headline. That is, there are situations that can lead to Collective Intelligence (CI) in which individuals do not interact directly or are even conscious of the fact they form part of the collective.

The MIT Centre for Collective Intelligence and many well-known authors in the field admit both the results of non-conscious aggregations and the consequences of active collaboration as manifestations of CI. In James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”, the book that popularized CI, there are plenty of examples based on pure statistical aggregation, that is, without any direct interaction among participants.

To make the differences between modalities clearer I use the terms “Collected” and “Collaborative” Collective Intelligence. Let me explain both. Read more ›

by × May 26, 2015 × 2 comments

Complexity, Decision Making/Problem Solving, Emergence/Self-organization, Governance/Leadership, Interdisciplinary approaches, Politics/Democracy, Social Networks

Biomimetics and Collective Intelligence

antsNature can inspire us to explore emerging models of interaction that will help to better understand patterns of collective intelligence in human groups. Steven Johnson, in his book “Emerging Systems” (2001), masterfully demonstrates how that connection (called Biomimicry or biomimetics) is full of metaphors. The Web Ask Nature, the Biomimicry Institute, brings together hundreds of examples of such associations.

In a previous post I mentioned that one of the things I liked about the Collective Intelligence Conference held at MIT in April 2012 was to listen to Deborah Gordon (Stanford) and Ian Couzin (Princeton), two behavioral biologists, who focused on the study of the patterns of behavior of animals in their natural habitats. They are not “biologists” in its classical sense but work as multidisciplinary groups that are making increasing use of mathematics and computer science as well as tracking and geolocation devices to investigate the collective behavior of swarms or “Swarm Intelligence“, a branch of artificial intelligence based on the collective behavior of decentralized and self-organized systems. Read more ›

by × May 5, 2014 × 1 comment