Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Collective Intelligence 2012: Deadline November 4, 2011


For all those of you interested in crowdsourcing, I would like to bring your attention to a new conference, named Collective Intelligence 2012, being organized at MIT this spring (April 18-20, 2012) by Tom Malone and Luis von Ahn. The conference is expected to have a set of 15-20 invited speakers (disclaimer: I am one of them), and also accepts papers submitted for publication. The deadline is November 4th, 2011, so if you have something that you would be willing to share with a wide audience interested in collective intelligence, this may be a place to consider.

The call for papers follows:

Overview

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

For a more complete description of the scope, please click here. For any questions, please email contact@ci2012.org.

Dates and Location

The conference will be held April 18-20, 2012 on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA.  Accommodations in nearby hotels will be available for conference attendees.

Format

The conference will consist of:

  • invited talks from prominent researchers in different areas related to collective intelligence
  • oral paper presentations
  • poster sessions


Submission

Papers of three types are invited:

  • Reports of original research results
  • Reviews of previous research in one or more fields relevant to collective intelligence
  • Position papers about research agendas for the field of collective intelligence

Some of the papers submitted will be invited for oral presentation, others for presentation as posters.

Papers may be up to 8 pages in length. The deadline for submission is November 4, 2011. Download the submission format. Papers shall be submitted by email to submissions@ci2012.org.

Important Dates

  • Paper submission deadline: November 4, 2011
  • Notification of paper acceptance / rejection: January 15, 2012
  • Camera-ready papers due: February 15, 2012
  • Conference dates: April 18-20, 2012