Many heads are better than one.
That notion underlies a new project by Psychology Professor Ofer Tchernichovski.
Tchernichovski, an expert on vocal learning and cultural evolution, just received a $106,000 National Science Foundation grant to investigate how we can stimulate collective learning, creativity, and smart decision-making in online communities, study groups, and business environments.
“The primary ways that humans augment their intelligence and creativity are through interactions with each other, either directly or through technology,” Tchernichovski said. “What can we do to design and influence our world so that it promotes collective decision-making, learning, and creativity? We will use theoretical, computational, and experimental approaches to design such ‘smart environments.’”
The grant will enable the team at Hunter’s Laboratory of Social Learning & Cultural Evolution to conduct experiments with human participants, Artificial Intelligence bots, and virtual-reality games. The goal is to design smart technological environments to augment collective learning.
Many everyday decisions, from online shopping to picking a movie and choosing a restaurant and even selecting a college, are now guided by online reviews, which are often unreliable. The project aims at developing algorithms for making the crowd smarter by improving the quality of collective evaluations.
Achieving a better quality of evaluations has many implications, including designing smarter crowd-sourced feedback systems that can help communities govern themselves and manage public spaces and community services through bottom-up initiatives rather than top-down direction.
The project is a collaboration among Hunter College, Cornell, Princeton University, and U.C. Davis.
Tchernichovski’s primary research focuses on social learning and culture in humans and songbirds. With humans, his lab performs large-scale experiments in virtual worlds to study how groups of people learn to improve their collective action. In songbirds, his lab studies how birds learn their songs from their peers and how they establish a culture of singing that allows them to evaluate the quality of potential mates.
