Collective Intelligence

Collective intelligence existed from the antiquity, for at least that humans have. The tribes of hunter-gatherers, the nations and modern societies; all work collectively with a certain degree of intelligence. Collective intelligence is witnessed particularly within insect societies such as ants, termites, bees, wasps or pre-social like cockroaches or in animals like baboons. And from some perspectives, even bacteria collections are also viewed as collectively intelligent.

According to Aristotle, human, like bees, termites or ants is a political animal. His intelligence doesn't solely depend on his individual abilities, but also on the society in which he lives. In other words, intelligence doesn't result from just the abilities of our brain or our psyche, but also from the collectivity in which we fit.

Nevertheless, this ancient phenomenon take today other forms. -With the new communication technologies- people can now work together in a way that was never possible in history of mankind, e.g. Computer networks.

Collective intelligence can be defined as follows:
"Group of individuals doing collectively things that seems intelligent."

'Olivier Zara', in his book "Le management de l'intelligence collective: Vers une nouvelle gouvernance" defined collective intelligence as the capacity to unite our intelligences and our knowledge to attend a goal, as well as the capacity of a group to ask questions and look for answers altogether.

Another pioneer of Collective Intelligence, George Pór , author of "The Quest for Collective Intelligence(1995)" defined this phenomenon in his blog for "Collective Intelligenceas": "The capacity of a human community to produce a higher order complexity thought, problem-solving and integration through collaboration and innovation."

Principle of Collective Intelligence:

CI is based on a simple principle; the cooperation of multiple entities resulting in the formation of a higher intelligence by some sort of natural alchemy called "emergence". If we believe Steven Johnson, author of a recent best-seller, Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software, the principle of emergence could apply equally to ants, to brains, human communities as well as computer networks.

A group of human experts solving a problem, or an insect society, could become sources of inspiration to design a computing system whose intelligence from a set of entities (interacting agents)

In the first case, when using the metaphor of a collective of humans, each entity is supposedly gifted with Intelligence. Agents communicate directly by sending messages, they possess a representation of the problem to solve and are capable of elaborate reasoning.
The complexity of the models used allow the use of advanced cognitive abilities: explicit representation and reasoning on others, reasoning on the progress of the resolution, persistence of intentions notion of commitments, etc.

 In the second case, on the contrary, the metaphor is of biological order: agents are equipped with limited capacities of representation and reasoning; they are located in an environment through which they interact indirectly by depositing marks. While in the first case, the environment is often absent, here, it plays a vital role since it serves as a support of interactions between individuals.

Application Examples:

(I) Business Organizations:         
        – InnoCentive
        – NineSigma
InnoCentive and NineSigma are  open innovation services providers that help companies assess their commercial products in development to consumers.
        – Sermo
 Sermo is an online community for physicians founded in 2006 by Daniel Palestrant. Open only to licensed M.D.s and D.O.s in the United States, Sermo is a place for physicians to post observations and questions about clinical issues and hear other doctors' opinions.
        – LiveOps
LiveOps is a California company specializing in telecommunications.

(II) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence:
        – ClickWorkers
ClickWorkers is a small NASA experimental project that uses public volunteers (clickworkers) for scientific tasks requiring human perception and common sense, but not many scientific training.
        –  P2P technology.
        –  Collaborative filtering:
                    – Spamnet
                    – Razor
             Razor and SpamNet use human votes to determine if a message is a source of spam or not.
Razor is a distributed, collaborative, spam detection and filtering network. 
        –  IRC
IRC Internet RElay Chat, project created by Roger Eaton, in 1988, introducing the idea of collective communication, where people can discuss through writing messages.