Big Thinker Wendy Kellogg at Yahoo Labs

NEWS
Dec 6, 2011

Wendy Kellogg, one of the founders of the Social Computing Group at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center, recently visited Yahoo’s Sunnyvale campus to give a talk entitled “Social Intelligence for a Smarter Planet.” Kellogg opened by describing how social computing is evolving -- that it is essentially the “third wave of human computer interaction (HCI)” and its new focus is centered around social characteristics: the relationships between people, and building trust and reputation. Social intelligence contains some known bugs largely due to heuristics (exemplified by the Wason card test and Monty Hall problem of picking a door for a prize) that ultimately produce cognitive biases. “So how do we make people smarter?” asked Kellogg. Group intelligence, i.e. “the wisdom of crowds,” performs surprisingly well but has constraints such as biases, social pressures, and other influences on information. Prediction markets and other Internet-based crowd-sourcing methods are interesting because they “incent people with knowledge to share it and those without to refrain from participating.” The synergy created when effectively integrating computation with human cognition and action as long as constraints are mitigated can lead to a significant amount of opportunities-- enterprise solutions that let businesses and other organizations “achieve revenue growth, discover opportunities, enhance customer and partner relationships, improve resiliency and efficiency and achieve improved outcomes,” according to Kellogg. The three approaches include: people partnering with intelligent technology, such as IBM’s invention of Watson; passive participation and analysis of behavior and data, as exemplified by Nathan Eagle’s research on predicting cholera outbreaks in Rwanda using only cell phone records; and people actively participating through technology, as seen in projects such as Cyclopath, Ushahidi, Tweak the Tweet, and IBM’s Smarter Cities initiative. The Smarter Cities initiative tackles challenges such as water management, traffic congestion, pollution, and energy conservation in major cities around the globe. The objective is to transform these cities for greater sustainability, growth and social progress. One example Kellogg cited is the use of smart manhole covers outfitted with sensors that monitor water flow and pollutants and actuators that can be used to re-route flows and avoid sewer overflows. The same smart technology can be used to help manage traffic congestion and air pollution by monitoring density and flow. People are an active part of these smart systems because of what they can contribute. “Rather than treating people as passive subjects of smart systems, can we harness human intelligence to make the city smarter?” asked Kellogg. An example she used is participation was recruited rather than forced to tackle a water management issue at an apartment building in China. The building was starting to discolor due to the overuse of water. Residents demanded an analysis to determine leaks or usage of individual residents, which seemed to correct the problem. In this example, peer pressure was used to change water conservation as none of the residents wanted to take the blame for the problem. Kellogg made one final point – that smarter systems only work when there is active participation by people. Watch the entire talk here: