Schedule

Topics covered

Class dates and times: Every Monday and Wednesday from 17:45 to 19:00 in I107.

• Aug 24, 26: Syllabus & Introduction
• Aug 31, Sep 2: Intelligence and collective Intelligence
• Sep 7, 9: Biological collective intelligence - I
• Sep 14, 16: Biological collective intelligence - II
• Sep 21, 23: Biological collective intelligence - III
• Sep 28, 30: Humans I: Collective decision-making
• Oct 5,7: Human II: Markets
• Oct 12,14: The web I: graphs and crowds
• Oct 19,21: The web II:knowledge discovery from the crowd
• Oct 26, 28: Social Media I: from crowds to networks
• Nov 2, 4: Social Media II: meme propagation
• Nov 9, 11: Social Media III: feelings, nothing more than feelings...
• Nov 16, 18: Science of Science I: bibliometrics
• Thanksgiving Break
• Nov 30, Dec 2: Science of Science II: Innovations and future trends
• Dec 10, 12: Free week
• Dec 12: Due date for all assignments

This is intended as a non-exhaustive general overview.

1. Intelligence and collective Intelligence
• What is intelligence?
• What is Collective Intelligence?
• Where can we find instances of CI?
• Who cares?
2. Biological Collective Intelligence - I
• Flocking, herding, schooling
• Computational models and simulation
• Maps and territory
3. Biological Collective Intelligence - II
• Complex Adaptive Systems
• Hive societies
• Stygmergy: ants, people, walking paths
• The role of information and communication
4. Biological Collective Intelligence - III
• Evolution and Genetic algorithms
• Symbolic regression
• Evolving brains and minds
5. Humans: Collective decision-making
• Elections and voting procedures
• Mobs and crowds
• Group-think and wisdom of the crowd
6. Humans: Markets
• Markets and trade
• Financial markets
• Prediction markets
• Cryptocurrencies
7. The web I:
• Graph models of the web
• Adaptive hyperlink graphs
• Content + link growth

8. The web II:
• Indexing, Search engines
• Random Walk models
• Recommender systems
9. The Web III
• Taxonomies & Folksonomies
• Collective knowledge discovery and generation
10. Social Media I: semantics
• Semantic web and linked data
• Knowledge extraction
• Automated inference
11. Social Media II: analytics
• Memes and Online memes
• Propagation
• Topic extraction and evolution
12. Social Media III: analytics
• Sentiment and mood
• Prediction of socio-economic indicators
• Knowledge extraction and modeling
13. Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding
• Amazon's Mechanical Turk (background)
• Collective allocation of resources
• Computational Complexity
14. Thanksgiving Break
15. Science of Science
• Bibliometrics and informetrics
• Tracking scientific communication
• Knowledge extraction from the scientific literature