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Ted Szuba: Chaos and collective intelligence

Tadeusz (Ted) Szuba is a pioneer of the formal study of the concept of collective intelligence (CI). Collective intelligence is group intelligence that emerges from the competition or collaboration of many individuals. It may involve Biology, Sociology, Computation or Business. In 2001, Dr. Skuba proposed a mathematical model for the phenomenon assuming to be a random, distributed and unconscious process. Recently, Professor Skuba has studied Chaos as one of the basic properties for CI. For instance, in bacterial colonies emerges CI based on mutual observation of metabolism products and the exchange of DNA. This phenomenon may vanish if a form of Chaos is not maintained. Professor Szuba asks himself what should the measure and form of Chaos be in the social structure. In case of society, Szuba speaks in terms of parallel Chaos. When individual intelligence of a being is poor, e.g., ants, bees, etc., it must be massive parallelism. It is obvious that increasing the organization of a social structure reduces chaotic behavior of individuals but reduces ability to solve unexpected problems, which a social structure can confront. In fact, panic behavior has a chaotic nature. In case of bacteria, for instance, this is some kind of mutation, while in case of human beings it can take any form of escape. According to Szuba, societies frequently add a chaotic element in an artificial way. For example, the concept of lottery giving an illusory chance to people, to change their life. Szuba concludes that the ability of the societies to solve specific class of problems, expressed through CI becomes non-Chaotic, despite a lot of individual Chaos inside the society.

Cynthia Breazeal and the Personal Robots Group

Cynthia Breazeal directs the Personal Robots Group at the MIT, being a pioneer of social robotics. She develops socially intelligent robots interacting and communicating with people. She wishes to help people of all ages contributing to their quality of life, in aspects such as health or learning and education. 

Socially aware robots require a broad range of capabilities in order to work together with human beings. These robots must be able to recognize intent and action supposing a challenge to the robotics community. It is a very difficult task to examine highly complex environments in the number of states, transitions and interactions. Machine learning methods like Reinforcement Learning or POMDPs do not scale to high-dimensional state-action spaces. Breazeal and her group think to endow the robots with human-like behaviour through generating functionally capable data-driven behaviours sourced from human behaviour. For it, they use of plan networks and case-based planning simulating crowdsourcing behaviour. So it is harnessed the wisdom of the crowd. They evaluate the resulting autonomous robot behaviours using a real-world reproduction of an online game environment and obtaining interesting results which optimize the results  about social interaction between humans and robots, obtained by traditional methods

My-Pet-Our-Pet

My-Pet-Our-Pet (see the article by Chen et al., 2007-http://www.petpartners.org/document.doc?id=289-) is an animal companion system based on open learner models as animal companions. The learners are grouped into several teams, in which each learner is surrounded by two kinds of animal companions, an individual animal or My-Pet, and a team animal companion or Our-Pet. My-Pet encourages users to learn individually online subjects through nurturing the pet character. The repertoire of activities in the system consists of four modes: pet nurturing, individual learning, game competition and group discussion. In an experiment in a classroom of one elementary school in Taiwan, 31 students were motivated and engaged in the process of raising their pets, and most of them (29 students) increased effort to improve their learning. Open learner models as animal companions benefit student´s learning.

Social Cognition and Collective Intelligence

Collective intelligence is the capacity of human collectives to engage in intellectual cooperation. There exists an interesting correlation between collective intelligence and the degree of the human development. Some months ago it was held a dialogue in MIT TV between Andrew Lo (MIT), Martin Nowak (Harvard), Alexander Pentland (MIT) and Rebecca Saxe (MIT). Thomas Malone moderated the dialogue. The interested reader may find the link here: http://video.mit.edu/watch/social-cognition-and-collective-intelligence-7792/

Living Technology and Artificial Intelligence

Life has always been a source of inspiration for technology. Nowadays protocells are being created including artificial plasmids that produce functional proteins. In fact, electronic chemical cells present information processing between the chemistry and electronics. Digital organisms combine self-assembly with genetic descriptions providing a basis for using evolvable technology.

What living technologies will be like in the future? We can imagine organisms with synthetic genomes to produce hydrogen in fuel cells. Also we can imagine self-assembling, self-correcting, and adaptive software solving many problems of lack of robustness in software. Autonomous and adaptive robots  will enable the elderly to live independently and with greater security.

The emergence of living technology will create new social processes. We can expect purely artificial technology to acquire life´s properties and outperform the current technology. This process will be a singular event in human history.