Making big sense of big data: The quest to improve human reasoning
Assoc. Professor Tim van Gelder and colleagues aim to develop a platform that encourages and identifies good reasoning.
Why the US intelligence community is investing in a global effort to boost analytical thinking by tapping the wisdom of crowds
The US intelligence community's research arm, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), has allocated over US$100 million for research into how they can harness the wisdom of crowds to improve intelligence analysis. The four-and-a-half year project has been dubbed CREATE, which stands for Crowdsourcing Evidence, Argumentation, Thinking and Evaluation. Four research teams from around the world have been awarded a share of the funding to develop and road-test solutions.
The University of Melbourne's team, known as SWARM (Smartly-assembled Wiki-style Argument Marshalling) was awarded up to US$19 million for the project and is now in friendly competition with teams led by Monash University, New York's Syracuse University and Virginia's George Mason University...
The SWARM Project is a collaboration between the School of Bioscience, the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies and the School of Engineering. It also includes Imperial College London, where co-leader Professor Mark Burgman, the former head of the School of Bioscience, is now Director of the Centre for Environmental Policy. Also involved in SWARM are collaborating researchers from Stanford in California, as well as Monash.