Collective Intelligence
COGS 223, Winter 2025
Instructor: Prof. Steven Dow
How can people and computers work together intelligently to solve complex problems? Collective intelligence is the study of how individual coordinate, collaborate, and deliberate to produce outcomes greater than any single agent do can alone. In this course, students will explore different crowdsourcing platforms and mechanisms, read and discuss foundational papers in the field, and write a novel research proposal that could lead to publication.
Learning Objectives
Students will learn different definitions, applications, workflows, 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
Crowdsourcing history and examples
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
Course Origins
This course draws on reading lists and syllabi from prior crowd course. The most direct inspiration comes from a seminar course I led at Stanford University in winter 2011, and a similar course taught at Berkeley by Bjoern Hartmann. The course also borrows from Jeffrey Bigham's course on Crowd Programming, and Haoqi Zhang's course on Social and Crowd Computing, and Kurt Luther's seminar on Crowdsourcing and Human Computation.
Instructor
Steven Dow is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego where he researches human-computer interaction, social computing, and creativity. Steven was co-chair of the 2017 conference on 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. Before UCSD, Steven was an Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. 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.