Collective Intelligence

COGS 223 (Winter 2025)

Instructor:  Prof. Steven Dow

Wed 9-11:50am in CSB 272

Collective intelligence, broadly defined, is the emergent behavior achieved by groups through the interactions of their members, often involving phenomena such as consensus building, cooperation, and competition. Research in this community covers basic science on emergent collective phenomena, as well as, designing and engineering systems for combining computational and human intelligence. This class focuses on exploring perspectives on human-machine ecosystems that achieve outcomes greater than any single agent alone. Students will read and discuss foundational papers in the field and write a novel research proposal that could lead to an academic publication.

Learning Objectives

Students will learn different definitions, applications, theories, incentives, task designs, and quality mechanisms for collective intelligence. Students will read, discuss, and present key papers in the field (each student will present ~one paper per week). 

Students will propose new research in collective intelligence and/or apply crowdsourcing to a novel research problem.  Students will write a research proposal for novel systems or studies that implement or evaluate crowdsourcing techniques that could contribute to the literature.

Course Topics

• History and examples of collective intelligence

• Crowd demographics

• Ethics, labor laws, worker rights

• Task/workflow design

• Creative crowds, design processes

• Learner-sourcing, community-sourcing, gamer-sourcing

• Collective intelligence, crowd sensemaking

• Citizen science, crisis informatics

• Crowd-powered applications

• Crowds and machine learning

• Quality mechanisms

Instructor

Steven Dow is a Professor of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego where he researches human-computer interaction, social computing, collective intelligence and creativity.  Steven will be the Chair for Collective Intelligence 2025 and was previously the co-Chair of HCOMP (Human Computation and Crowdsourcing). Steven received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2015 for research on "advancing collective innovation." He was co-PI on five other National Science Foundation grants, a Google Faculty Grant, Stanford's Postdoctoral Research Award, and the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Grant. He holds an MS and PhD in Human-Centered Computing from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a BS in Industrial Engineering from University of Iowa.