Experts describe the latest research in a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field, the study of groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent. Intelligence does not arise only in individual brains; it also arises in groups of individuals. This is collective intelligence: groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent. In recent years, a new kind of collective intelligence has emerged: interconnected groups of people and computers, collectively doing intelligent things. Today these groups are engaged in tasks that range from writing software to predicting the results of presidential elections. This volume reports on the latest research in the study of collective intelligence, laying out a shared set of research challenges from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. Taken together, these essays—by leading researchers from such fields as computer science, biology, economics, and psychology—lay the foundation for a new multidisciplinary field. Each essay describes the work on collective intelligence in a particular discipline—for example, economics and the study of markets; biology and research on emergent behavior in ant colonies; human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence; and cognitive psychology and the “wisdom of crowds” effect. Other areas in social science covered include social psychology, organizational theory, law, and communications. Contributors Eytan Adar, Ishani Aggarwal, Yochai Benkler, Michael S. Bernstein, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Jonathan Bragg, Deborah M. Gordon, Benjamin Mako Hill, Christopher H. Lin, Andrew W. Lo, Thomas W. Malone, Mausam, Brent Miller, Aaron Shaw, Mark Steyvers, Daniel S. Weld, Anita Williams Woolley

The book focuses on Social Collective Intelligence, a term used to denote a class of socio-technical systems that combine, in a coordinated way, the strengths of humans, machines and collectives in terms of competences, knowledge and problem solving capabilities with the communication, computing and storage capabilities of advanced ICT. Social Collective Intelligence opens a number of challenges for researchers in both computer science and social sciences; at the same time it provides an innovative approach to solve challenges in diverse application domains, ranging from health to education and organization of work. The book will provide a cohesive and holistic treatment of Social Collective Intelligence, including challenges emerging in various disciplines (computer science, sociology, ethics) and opportunities for innovating in various application areas. By going through the book the reader will gauge insight and knowledge into the challenges and opportunities provided by this new, exciting, field of investigation. Benefits for scientists will be in terms of accessing a comprehensive treatment of the open research challenges in a multidisciplinary perspective. Benefits for practitioners and applied researchers will be in terms of access to novel approaches to tackle relevant problems in their field. Benefits for policy-makers and public bodies representatives will be in terms of understanding how technological advances can support them in supporting the progress of society and economy.

Want to tap the power behind search rankings, product recommendations, social bookmarking, and online matchmaking? This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build Web 2.0 applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by people on the Internet. With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze and understand the data once you've found it. Programming Collective Intelligence takes you into the world of machine learning and statistics, and explains how to draw conclusions about user experience, marketing, personal tastes, and human behavior in general -- all from information that you and others collect every day. Each algorithm is described clearly and concisely with code that can immediately be used on your web site, blog, Wiki, or specialized application. This book explains: Collaborative filtering techniques that enable online retailers to recommend products or media Methods of clustering to detect groups of similar items in a large dataset Search engine features -- crawlers, indexers, query engines, and the PageRank algorithm Optimization algorithms that search millions of possible solutions to a problem and choose the best one Bayesian filtering, used in spam filters for classifying documents based on word types and other features Using decision trees not only to make predictions, but to model the way decisions are made Predicting numerical values rather than classifications to build price models Support vector machines to match people in online dating sites Non-negative matrix factorization to find the independent features in a dataset Evolving intelligence for problem solving -- how a computer develops its skill by improving its own code the more it plays a game Each chapter includes exercises for extending the algorithms to make them more powerful. Go beyond simple database-backed applications and put the wealth of Internet data to work for you. "Bravo! I cannot think of a better way for a developer to first learn these algorithms and methods, nor can I think of a better way for me (an old AI dog) to reinvigorate my knowledge of the details." -- Dan Russell, Google "Toby's book does a great job of breaking down the complex subject matter of machine-learning algorithms into practical, easy-to-understand examples that can be directly applied to analysis of social interaction across the Web today. If I had this book two years ago, it would have saved precious time going down some fruitless paths." -- Tim Wolters, CTO, Collective Intellect

The number of travelers along the information superhighway is increasing at a rate of 10 percent a month. How will this communications revolution affect our culture and society? Pierre Lévy shows how the unfettered exchange of ideas in cyberspace has the potential to liberate us from the social and political hierarchies that have stood in the way of mankind's advancement.Anthropologist, historian, sociologist, and philosopher, Lévy writes with a depth of scholarship and imaginative insight rare among media critics. At once a profound historical analysis of the development of human culture and a blueprint for the future, Collective Intelligence is a visionary work.

This book shows how collective intelligence combined with new technologies can help us solve the world's biggest problems.

"A new field of collective intelligence has emerged in the last few years, prompted by a wave of digital technologies that make it possible for organizations and societies to think at large scale. This "bigger mind"--human and machine capabilities working together--has the potential to solve the great challenges of our time. So why do smart technologies not automatically lead to smart results? Gathering insights from diverse fields, including philosophy, computer science, and biology, Big Mind reveals how collective intelligence can guide corporations, governments, universities, and societies to make the most of human brains and digital technologies"--Amazon.com.

Computational collective intelligence (CCI) is most often understood as a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) dealing with soft computing methods that enable group decisions to be made or knowledge to be processed among autonomous units acting in distributed environments. The needs for CCI techniques and tools have grown signi- cantly recently as many information systems work in distributed environments and use distributed resources. Web-based systems, social networks and multi-agent systems very often need these tools for working out consistent knowledge states, resolving conflicts and making decisions. Therefore, CCI is of great importance for today’s and future distributed systems. Methodological, theoretical and practical aspects of computational collective int- ligence, such as group decision making, collective action coordination, and knowledge integration, are considered as the form of intelligence that emerges from the collabo- tion and competition of many individuals (artificial and/or natural). The application of multiple computational intelligence technologies such as fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation, neural systems, consensus theory, etc. , can support human and other collective intelligence and create new forms of CCI in natural and/or artificial s- tems.