LANS Seminar

Seminar Title: AI2: Artificial Intelligence for Augmented Innovation
Speaker: James Evans
Title: Professor, The University of Chicago

Date/Time: November 30, 2022 / 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM
Location: See meeting URL on the cels-seminars website (requires Argonne login)

Host: Prasanna Balaprakash

Description: How do we design AI to augment collective innovation?  The wisdom of crowds hinges on the independence and diversity of their members’ information and approach. Here I explore how the wisdom of scientific and technological crowds for sustained discovery and invention operate through a process of collective abduction—the collision of deduction and induction—wherein unexpected findings stimulate innovators to forge new insights to make the surprising unsurprising. Drawing on tens of millions of research papers and patents across the life sciences, physical sciences and patented inventions, here I show that surprising designs and discoveries are the best predictor of outsized success and that surprising advances systematically emerge across, rather than within researchers or teams; most commonly when innovators from one field surprisingly publish problem-solving results to an audience in a distant and diverse other. This relates to other research I describe that shows how across innovators, teams and fields, connection and conformity is associated with both reduced replication and impeded innovation. Using these principles, I simulate processes of scientific and technological search to demonstrate the relationship between crowded fields and constrained collective inferences, and I demonstrate how inverting the traditional artificial intelligence approach to avoid rather than mimic human search enables the design of diversity that systematically violates established field boundaries and is associated with marked success of innovation predictions. I conclude with a discussion of prospects and challenges in a connected age for sustainable innovation through the design and preservation of difference.

Bio: James Evans is Max Palevsky Professor of Sociology, Director of Knowledge Lab and the Computational Social Science program at the University of Chicago and the Santa Fe Institute. His research focuses on the collective system of thinking and knowing, ranging from the distribution of attention and intuition, the origin of ideas and shared habits of reasoning to processes of agreement, accumulation of certainty, and the charatercter of human understanding. He is especially interested in innovation–how new ideas and technologies emerge–and the role that social and technical institutions (e.g., the Internet, markets, collaborations) play in collective cognition and discovery. Much of his work has focused on areas of modern science and technology, but he is also interested in public and privation communication of information and misinformation. He supports the creation of novel observatories for human understanding and action through crowd-sourcing, information extraction from text and images, and the use of distributed sensors. He uses machine learning, generative modeling, social and semantic network representations to explore knowledge processes, scale up interpretive and field-methods, and create alternatives to current discovery regimes. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, DARPA, Facebook, IBM, the Sloan Foundation, Jump! Trading and other sources, and has been published in Science, Nature, PNAS, and top social and computer science outlets. His work has been featured widely in the popular press.

Please note that the meeting URL for this event can be seen on the cels-seminars website, which requires an Argonne login.