The overview talk — Thinking Big with Collective Intelligence
In nine hours, a team successfully scoured the entire United States to find a set of red balloons worth forty thousand dollars. In three weeks, citizen scientists playing a game uncovered the structure of an enzyme that had eluded scientists for over fifteen years. In ten years, millions of people authored the most expansive encyclopedia in human history. If interconnected people and computers can accomplish these goals in hours, days, and years, what might be possible in the next years or decade?
Intelligence is not just something that arises inside individual brains--it also arises in groups of individuals, known as collective intelligence. Disciplines from neuroscience to economics to biology are making fundamental breakthroughs in understanding how groups of individuals can collectively do intelligent things. And reciprocally, these disciplines have begun contributing to each other: computer science concepts such as internet protocol algorithms accurately model ant colony food foraging behavior4, and social computing blogging platforms became the site of a massive distributed math proof led by two Fields medalists and over forty other mathematicians. Could collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds transform us into more effective scientists, citizens and decision-makers than any group of experts are today? Or are we doomed to groupthink and statistically popular but uninventive ideas?
Tutorial: How to Use Amazon Mechanical Turk
n this tutorial, I'll introduce the basics of using Amazon Mechanical Turk to run crowdsourcing experiments. Bring your laptops! Sign up for a Mechanical Turk requester account in advance — it takes a few days to get approved.