Collective Intelligence – Department of Informatics – DDIS

Dagstuhl Seminar “Challenges and Opportunities of Democracy in the Digital Society”

cristina_sarasua — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 15:41:29 +0000

Earlier this month, DDIS members Fynn Bachmann, Miklovana Tuci, Cristina Sarasua and Prof. Abraham Bernstein joined a seminar on “Challenges and Opportunities of Democracy in the Digital Society” at Dagstuhl. The seminar was co-organized by Prof. Bernstein, Anita Gohdes, Steffen Staab, and Beth Noveck.

For five days, scholars in computer science, political science, law, and communication sciences discussed current challenges and future opportunities of online participation, political communication, and online deliberation.

Crowdsourcing Research at DDIS shown on Swiss TV

Abraham Bernstein — Sat, 15 Mar 2014 08:35:15 +0000

In the context of the Crowdsorucing effort to find the Malaysia Airlines Flight 239 airplane Swiss national television SRF interviewed Professor Abraham Bernstein. The interview was partially aired in the evening news shows 10vor10 and published in an article on their website.

Due to its relationship with DDIS research on CrowdLang Prof. Bernstein was asked to comment on why it could be advantageous to scan the large amount of satellite images relying on a crowd. He also commented on other uses of Crowdsourcing in disaster relief.

Abraham Bernstein interviewed by Swiss Radio DRS 1 on Collective Intelligence

Patrick Minder — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 17:47:23 +0000

Abraham Bernstein, Professor at IFI, was interviewed on Collective Intelligence by the Swiss Radio DRS radio show Wissen aktuell in their June 5 edition. The show is available as a podcast or as a download (in German!).

The Interview touches on DDIS initiatives on how to coordinate large crowds to achieve intelligent outcomes as witnessed by their Communications of the ACM paper and the CrowdLang effort.

Programming the Global Brain published in the Communications of the ACM

Patrick Minder — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 17:40:36 +0000

The paper Programming the Global Brain by Abraham Bernstein (UZH), Mark Klein (MIT), and Thomas W. Malone (MIT) was published in the May 2012issue of the Communications of the ACM.

The paper discusses the how we can improve our understanding and utilization of the emerging human-computer network constituting the global brain. It argues that the differences between humans and computers require to make advances in Operating Systems, Programming Languages, and Software Engineeering Research.

A film describing the content of the paper can be found below:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgP1NVdxbR4&w=560&h=315]

Abraham Bernstein in 20 Minuten Science Pages

Patrick Minder — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:17:12 +0000

The Swiss daily newspaper “20 Minuten” published an article (second page;local copy) today (13.1.2012) about Abraham Bernstein’s work on Crowdsourcing. The article (in German only) discusses how the wisdom of crowds has been leveraged for centuries and that the Internet offers new opportunities to bring Crowdsourcing to new levels.

The article was published in the context of Abraham Bernstein’s and Patrick Minder’s research project CrowdLang, which was recently discussed in the University’s Magazin and Home-page.

Text of 20 Minuten article:

In der Menge liegt das Glück

Schon Aristoteles sagte: «Das Ganze ist mehr als die Summe seiner Teile.» Das gilt auch für grosse Gruppen von Menschen. Denn wenn verschiedene Meinungen und Talente zusammenkommen, lassen sich viele Herausforderungen besser und schneller bewältigen. Koordiniert man diesen schier unerschöpflichen Pool von «Mitarbeitern» und Computern, spricht man von Crowd Computing. Die Teilnehmer kennen sich oft nicht und sprechen verschiedene Sprachen. Aber ein gemeinsames Ziel eint sie.
Schon heute lässt die Nasa mit Crowd Computing fremde Galaxien finden, Google liest mit dieser Methode schwer erkennbare Schriften, und wir an der Universität Zürich lassen beispielsweise ganze Artikel in minutenschnelle vom Deutschen ins Englische übersetzen – alles Aufgaben, die den Einzelnen wie auch den Computer oft überfordern, aber mit Crowd Computing bewältigt werden können. Deshalb gilt zukünftig für viele komplizierte Tätigkeiten: In der Menge liegt das Glück!

Abraham Bernstein ist Professor für Informatik an der Universität Zürich.

Local copy of the article:

20_Minuten_13_1_2012 (PDF, 280 KB)

Abraham Bernstein

CrowdLang Project highlighted in UZH Magazin

Patrick Minder — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 20:19:28 +0000

The Current Edition of the UZH Magazin, the University of Zurich’s premier publication, highlights DDIS project CrowdLang with a two page article (PDF can be found at page 18 of the PDF). The article explains how CrowdLang can be used to accomplish non-trivial tasks with a large number of crowdworkers.

The specific example chosen illustrates CrowdLang’s capabilities by explaining how it can be used to translate textst within minutes from one langueg to another using monolingual crowdworkers only. As our experiments show the result is a good-quality translation that even spacielists say is 90% of the way to a professional translation.

CrowdLang Logo

Abraham Bernstein & Patrick Minder

Abraham Bernstein Interviewed on Crowdsourcing for the UZH Homepage

Patrick Minder — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 20:21:46 +0000

On October 10, 2011, the UZH News protion of the UZH home page featured the article “Schwarmintelligenz: «Crowdsourcing» statt «Outsourcing»” based on an interview with Abraham Bernstein. The article touches on how we can harness human intelligence within computational processes.

The work descibed is the result of a coopration between Patrick Minder andAbraham Bernstein at DDIS with Tom Malone and Mark Klein at MIT.

In a forthcoming article in the Communications of the ACM, Abraham Bernstein, Mark Klein, and Tom Malone describe the challenge computer scientists face when trying to include humans in computational processes. One of the challnges is the development of a suitable programming language for crowd computing. For that prupose Patrick Minder and Abraham Bernstein developed CrowdLang – a programming language that includes Human Computation features.

For more information on the subject please contact Abraham Bernstein

Abraham Bernstein