Augmenting human cognition in collaborative knowledge collections

From International Center for Computational Logic

Augmenting human cognition in collaborative knowledge collections

Talk by Claudia Müller-Birn
Over the past decade, a wide range of collaborative knowledge collections has emerged on the Web that are the direct product of cognitive user activities. These activities include editing an article on Wikipedia, providing a patch to open source software, or tagging pictures on Flickr. Collaborative knowledge collections provide a unique research environment for studying existing interdependencies between people's participation processes (the social system), the employed software (the technical system) and the collectively created artifact (the knowledge system). By unfolding existing design parameters of these systems, we can design more effective collaborative knowledge creation and learning processes and build new software that augment human cognition by computation. In this talk, I intend to (i) introduce three perspectives whose linkage disclose various research challenges for building social computing systems, (ii) present selected results of my research in which I looked at social computing systems from multiple vantage points, and (iii) illustrate how we can augment knowledge creation processes by building software that combines human and machine intelligence.