Handbook of Collective Intelligence

by Thomas W. Malone (Editor), Michael S. Bernstein (Editor)

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 groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent. In recent years, a new kind of collective intelligence has 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

232 pages, Hardcover

First published November 13, 2015

Reviews

[Michael Huang · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book contains some academic articles about the wisdom of the crowd and collaborative projects. There’s some interesting anecdotes that are fascinating and/or shocking. For example, while the investigation of the Challenger shuttle disaster took 4 months by the Rogers commission, it took the stock market 13minute to lay the blame on (and only on) Morton Thiokol. Later investigation found no evidence of insider trading. Moreover, the market capitalization drop was almost exactly equal to the damages.

In early experiments on the formation of a V by a flock of geese, the investigator shot the goose at the front of the V. Another goose immediately took its place. Of course, the shocking fact is not that leadership does not depend on the personal (goosenal?) quality, but rather at the nonchalance of the investigator.

[Douglas Summers-Stay · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was looking for a handbook on collective intelligence-- a summary of useful techniques, easy to implement examples, and insights. This book isn't really like that. It's essentially a collection of survey papers. I guess the field is too new and diverse for something like I was looking for to exist yet. I thought the comparison of ant food harvesting strategies and internet TCP packets (which try to find the fastest route to deliver data) were interesting. The discussion of how markets found who to blame in the Challenger disaster, and Soylent, which uses untrained workers to edit texts, were also bright spots. The coverage, anyway, was perfect: markets, businesses, swarms of insects, Wikipedia, Mechanical Turk, guessing marbles in a jar, Expectation Maximization, political polling, and so on.

[Zhaodan Kong · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read to anyone who is interested in network science and collective intelligence. The books offers a quite comprehensive but also concise survey of collective intelligence across a wide range of fields including biology, economy, computer science, psychology and sociology. I particularly love the recommended readings at the end of each chapter. Cannot wait to read more on the exciting topic!

[Bastian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eine grandiose Essaysammlung zum Thema "Collective Intelligence" aus verschiedenen wiss. Perspektiven. 5*+.