Biblio

Many species reach group decisions by deliberating in real-time systems. This natural process, known as Swarm Intelligence (SI), has been studied extensively in a range of social organisms, from schools of fish to swarms of bees. A new technique called Artificial Swarm Intelligence (ASI) has enabled networked human groups to reach decisions in systems modeled after natural swarms. The present research seeks to understand the behavioral dynamics of such “human swarms.” Data was collected from ten human groups, each having between 21 and 25 members. The groups were tasked with answering a set of 25 ordered ranking questions on a 1-5 scale, first independently by survey and then collaboratively as a real-time swarm. We found that groups reached significantly different answers, on average, by swarm versus survey ( p=0.02). Initially, the distribution of individual responses in each swarm was little different than the distribution of survey responses, but through the process of real-time deliberation, the swarm's average answer changed significantly ( ). We discuss possible interpretations of this dynamic behavior. Importantly, the we find that swarm's answer is not simply the arithmetic mean of initial individual “votes” ( ) as in a survey, suggesting a more complex mechanism is at play-one that relies on the time-varying behaviors of the participants in swarms. Finally, we publish a set of data that enables other researchers to analyze human behaviors in real-time swarms.

Nowadays we are witnessing an unprecedented evolution in how we gather and process information. Technological advances in mobile devices as well as ubiquitous wireless connectivity have brought about new information processing paradigms and opportunities for virtually all kinds of scientific and business activity. These new paradigms rest on three pillars: i) numerous powerful portable devices operated by human intelligence, ubiquitous in space and available, most of the time, ii) unlimited environment sensing capabilities of the devices, and iii) fast networks connecting the devices to Internet information processing platforms and services. These pillars implement the concepts of crowdsourcing and collective intelligence. These concepts describe online services that are based on the massive participation of users and the capabilities of their devices.in order to produce results and information which are "more than the sum of the part". The EU project Privacy Flag relies exactly on these two concepts in order to mobilize roaming citizens to contribute, through crowdsourcing, information about risky applications and dangerous web sites whose processing may produce emergent threat patterns, not evident in the contributed information alone, reelecting a collective intelligence action. Crowdsourcing and collective intelligence, in this context, has numerous advantages, such as raising privacy-awareness among people. In this paper we summarize our work in this project and describe the capabilities and functionalities of the Privacy Flag Platform.