1.7: Social Intelligence
Pioneering Socially Intelligent Systems Other Information:
Pioneering Socially Intelligent Systems -- Emerging types of collaboration, communication, and cooperation -- from open source
software development, crowdsourcing, and clickworking -- illustrate the potential for a new form of "social intelligence"
that melds human and computer abilities. Socially intelligent systems can range in scale from one person and one machine to
many people and many machines distributed over the globe. WeCompute envisions enhanced environments and tools for large-scale
collaborative problemsolving in which the intelligence of large numbers of people, operating in real-time computational environments,
can accelerate solutions to the most complex problems by simultaneously letting humans do what they do best (e.g., deriving
meanings from sensory inputs, synthesizing disparate experiences, drawing inferences) and machines do what they do best (e.g.,
fast, complex computation). Such environments would include the far more powerful analytical tools described above to enable
people to make effective decisions. The "intelligence" exhibited in these systems will mimic human capability to reason, perceive
the environment, and collaborate with humans and other machines. An intelligent system will learn from all past experience
and adapt over time as well as understand people's cognitive and social abilities. The "social" aspects of the system will
result from optimizing human actions, interactions, knowledge, and skills in relation to overall goals. Socially intelligent
systems may be designed to act autonomously so that humans can remain "out of the loop," as in dynamic allocation of bandwidth
or recovery of transportation systems during emergencies. But human-computer partnerships, allowing for new forms of complementary
engagement, may be the most effective of all. Where we are now -- online commerce and communication have been revolutionized
through innovations such as micro-blogging, security, video, recommender and reputation systems, and science has been advanced
through cyber-enabled discovery and virtual organizations. Even so, today's systems are merely suggestive of the powerful
versions of social intelligence that may be developed in the future. The goal is to advance knowledge at the frontiers of
computationally mediated human-machine interactions that would reframe the meaning of intelligence. Research needs -- new
findings about how the mind perceives, evaluates, categorizes, synthesizes, analyzes, retains, and makes decisions about inputs
-- both internal and from the outside world -- will provide researchers with models for engineering intelligence into the
capabilities of networking and computing technologies. Research needs to focus on computers as intelligent participants whose
perception, computational capabilities, and learning may be unique and able to scale at rates difficult for humans to grasp.
At the same time, we also need a better understanding of how people best coordinate, collaborate, and participate in collective
action at such large scales and in real time. One goal is to better understand the types of problems that are best suited
for these types of humancomputer partnerships. Key areas of research include: machine learning and artificial intelligence;
immersive environments and 4-D touch displays; understanding, modeling, and managing complex systems; computational photography;
graphics and visualization; social and humanoid robotics; speech recognition, natural language understanding and dialogue
systems; and mechanization of economic theories (e.g., n-way kidney exchanges). Some research questions to be answered: What
is the nature of this collective intelligence? Can we build computational models of political discourse to better understand
each other's point of view and resolve disputes? Can a distributed collection of machines and people learn to collect data,
analyze them, and ask good research questions, ultimately changing the way science is conducted? How do we best understand
the human capabilities that outperform computers and then harness those assets in new human-computer partnerships? How are
value systems (i.e., cultural, ethical, legal, etc.) embedded in algorithms and collective enterprises and how should they
be evaluated? What new design techniques and methods would result in a broad array of behaviors and achievements that could
effectively address current social issues (e.g., emergency response)? How can human needs and values be strengthened through
socially intelligent systems? What new theories could explain the behaviors of these complex, dynamic systems?
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