Collective intelligence system engineering

ABSTRACT

Collective intelligence (CI) is an emerging research field which aims at combining human and machine intelligence, to improve community processes usually performed by large groups. CI systems may be collaborative, like Wikipedia, or competitive, like a number of recently established problem-solving companies that attempt to find solutions to difficult R&D or marketing problems drawing on the competition among web users. The benefits that CI systems earn user communities, combined with the fact that they share a number of basic common characteristics, open up the prospect for the design of a general methodology that will allow the efficient development and evaluation of CI. In the present work, an attempt is made to establish the analytical foundations and main challenges for the design and construction of a generic collective intelligence system. First, collective intelligence systems are categorized into active and passive and specific examples of each category are provided. Then, the basic modeling framework of CI systems is described. This includes concepts such as the set of possible user actions, the CI system state and the individual and community objectives. Additional functions, which estimate the expected user actions, the future state of the system, as well as the level of objective fulfillment, are also established. In addition, certain key issues that need to be considered prior to system launch are also described. The proposed framework is expected to promote efficient CI design, so that the benefit gained by the community and the individuals through the use of CI systems, will be maximized.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES

General Terms:
Design, Standardization

Keywords:
collective intelligence, system engineering