This event will take place in the Koninklijke IGC at Dam square 27, which is a short walk away from the IAS. Registration for this event is free, but required, please register here. Due to limited space, your registration is only final after confirmation from the organizers. For questions or remarks, please send an email to info@d-iep.org.
 

Program:

09:00 – 09:30  Coffee on arrival in the library

09:40 – 09:45  Welcome and introduction

09:45 – 10:45  David Krakauer (Santa Fe Institute)

10.45 – 11.30  Susanne Shultz (U. of Manchester)

11:30 – 11:45  Short break

11:45 – 12:30  Thilo Gross (U. of Oldenburg)

12:30 – 13.30  Lunch

13:30 – 14:15  Davide Grossi (U. of Groningen)

14:15 – 15:00  Coffee & something sweet

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David Krakauer (Santa Fe Institute)

Who Cares About Collective Intelligence?

I shall pose four open challenges for collective intelligence: (1) Scaling (what do we seek to capture with the adjective collective?); (2) Emergence (how and when is collective intelligence more than the sum of its intelligent parts?); (3) Problems (what is the function of collective intelligence?); and (4) Learning (why is learning important and collective adaptive evolution insufficient?). I do not have good answers to any of these questions! I look forward to our collective efforts to address them.

 

Susanne Shultz (University of Manchester)

The evolutionary ecology of multi-level societies: how structuring affect bodies, brains and behaviour

The evolution of complex animal societies represents a major evolutionary transition which leads to hierarchical structuring within populations. This multi-level structuring has both evolutionary and ecological impacts on of morphology, behaviour and physiology.  The nature of these impacts vary widely depending on the structure and stability of the social building blocks. The ecological impacts stem from repeated interactions coupled with shared environments and local selection pressures.  The evolutionary impacts are associated with species differences in brain size and behavioural richness. These ecological and evolutionary pattern will be discussed using case studies from primates, cetaceans and equids.

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Thilo Gross (University of Oldenburg)

Critical Thinking: An analysis of phase transitions in information processing

A current hot topic in neuroscience is the so-called critical brain hypothesis. The idea that our brains may be operating in or near a phase transition. A similar concept, swarm criticality exists in collective intelligence. Here I examine the reasons why it is advantageous for information processing systems to be in a critical state and how they could get there from a dynamical systems perspective. Starting with quite fundamental mathematical reasoning we will discover some testable hypothesis regarding collective, social and classical (neuronal) intelligence.  

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Davide Grossi (University of Groningen)

Deliberative Consensus

I will present a model of deliberative processes. The model focuses on a setting in which a community wishes to identify a strongly supported proposal from a large space of alternatives, in order to change a ‘status quo’ alternative. Agents dynamically form coalitions around proposals that they prefer over the status quo. Using this model I will show how the properties of the underlying abstract space of proposals and the ways in which agents can form coalitions affect the success of deliberation in identifying consensus positions. We show that, as the complexity of the proposal space increases, more complex forms of coalition formation are required in order to guarantee success. Intuitively, this seems to suggest that complex deliberative spaces require more sophisticated coalition formation abilities on the side of the agents. The model aims at providing theoretical foundations for the analysis of deliberative processes in platforms for democratic deliberation support.

This is joint work with Edit Elkind (University of Oxford), Ehud Shapiro (Weizmann Institute) and Nimrod Talmon (Ben-Gurion University).

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