Photos from Tutorials from Dynamic Network Analysis to Crowd Sourcing and Public Health

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of introducing the outstanding tutorial presenters at the Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction Conference (SBP 2012) at the University of Maryland College Park.

The tutorials were given by Dr. Kathleen Carley (Dynamic Network Analysis), by Dr. Hyam Hirsh (Crowdsourcing, Human Computation, and Collective Intelligence) and by Dr. Patty Mabry and Dr. Nate Osgood (Public Health Concepts: An Introduction to Modelers).

The audience learned so much from these truly informative tutorials and, as the tutorial chair, I would like to thank the tutorial presenters for the breadth and depth of fascinating information that they delivered yesterday. I am hoping that we can post the slides from the tutorials on the conference website and will let you know if/when this is done.

The day flew by much too soon, and all those in the audience were treated to an intellectual feast on some of the most timely research topics today.

Above are some photos taken yesterday at the SBP 2012 conference.

I had to return early, since I was committed to doing a TV interview today for a PBS Channel and the program Connecting Point.

I will let you know when the interview airs. It was motivated by the upcoming PBS production America Revealed, for which I was interviewed by Yul Kwon, for an educational segment on transportation and the Braess paradox.

Collective Intelligence, Successful Teams, and the Female Factor

Does collective intelligence exist?

This was the question that a group of researchers from MIT and Carnegie Mellon set out to answer and the results of their study have been published in the article, "Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups," in the October 29, 2010 volume of Science.

Clearly, the "design" of groups and teams has implications not only for management and a spectrum of organizations but also for engineering and even military operations (and I would even add educational institutions, including universities).

I came upon a reference to this study in yesterday's Boston Globe, in an article written by Carolyn Y. Johnson, entitled: "Group IQ." The article contains an interview with one of the co-authors, Thomas Malone of MIT's Sloan School, and it also included comments from Iain Couzin of Princeton (who was a fellow panelist with me at the World Science Festival's Traffic panel in NYC in June 2009).

The Science article was co-authored by Anita Williams Woolley, Christopher F. Chabris, Alex Pentland, Nada Hashmi, and Thomas W. Malone.

Pentland is the author of the truly fascinating book, Honest Signals, and we had the pleasure of hosting him in our Speaker Series at the Isenberg School.

He will be presenting a tutorial at the SBP 2011 conference on March 28, 2011 at the University of Maryland.

I was sufficiently intrigued by the Globe article to go and read the Science article.

In the article, the authors define a group's collective intelligence, c, as the general ability to perform a wide variety of tasks. Interestingly, they found that:

The "c factor" is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group!

The moral from this research study and "bosses" should listen up: do not dominate the conversation and include females (may I even say "diversity" matters) in the group if you wish to enhance collective intelligence and problem-solving, since social sensitivity makes a quantifiable difference.

Interestingly, recently, I published a paper on the wisdom of crowds in transportation networks and the disappearance of the Braess paradox, which received a lot of media attention. I expect the intriguing issues being raised by such studies will stimulate further research. In the meantime, I am enjoying very much working with my fantastic and diverse team at the Virtual Center for Supernetworks!