This morning millions of us piled into our vehicles to head into the office. We probably pulled out our phones and opened Google Maps or Waze to choose the best route to work. We have begun to take everyday crowdsourced data for granted, but we shouldn’t. Instead, we should be asking: How can we best leverage “collective intelligence” — the combination of human and machine intelligence — for social impact?
The Cloudera Foundation is excited to join Nesta, Wellcome, and Omidyar Network to help do just that. Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence Design (CCID) has launched a new round of grants totaling £500,000 to fund 16 experiments at up to £30,000 each to generate new knowledge and evidence on how to design for and apply collective intelligence to solve social problems.
The Cloudera Foundation is eager to see what new doors will open when we encourage human and AI collaboration for social good.
“Addressing today’s global challenges requires developing new tools and approaches beyond what we previously thought possible,” said Claudia Juech, CEO of Cloudera Foundation. “The foundation is therefore thrilled to partner with Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence Design program to seed ambitious experiments exploring how to combine human wisdom and computational insights in bold new ways.”
Last year, 12 projects each received up to £20,000 in seed funding. Check out the creativity and ambition of the first-year grant recipients. Several are seeking to improve collective decision-making, such as Unanimous AI, a San Francisco technology company that is testing whether algorithms modeled on swarm behavior in bees and fish can enable groups with conflicting political views to find collectively acceptable solutions. A few are aiming to use collective intelligence insights better. The Alan Turing Institute is testing whether natural language processing is useful for clustering similar proposals from like-minded citizens on a digital democracy platform so that citizens with shared interests can work together more effectively.
These and 10 other inspiring experiments are in high gear, and their findings will be shared early next year.
The call for new applicants is now open. Let’s collectively share this news with our networks — or submit an idea yourself!
