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Collective Intelligence

Moderator: David Thorburn
Thomas W. Malone Alex (Sandy) Pentland PhD '82 Dr. Karim R. Lakhani SM '99, PhD '06: October 4, 2007; Running Time: 2:00:40

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Can human beings, with the help of smart machines, not merely avoid “collective idiocy” (in Sandy Pentland’s words), but actually achieve a degree of intelligence previously unattainable by either humans or machines alone? These three panelists study the possibilities from different angles.

Thomas Malone’s Center for Collective Intelligence examines such evolving intelligent systems as Wikipedia, which relies on a veritable army of volunteers to “create a high quality product with almost no centralized control,” and Google, with its technology “harvesting knowledge” and serving up answers to a vast audience of seekers. While a crowd doesn’t guarantee the best solution to a problem, Malone sees opportunities in “prediction markets,” where humans, with the computational help of computers, predict things with greater accuracy than single experts, whether in electoral politics, or in medical diagnostics. Malone’s research is also attempting to set up metrics to measure the intelligence of these new human group-machine hybrids, and ways of applying collective decision making to climate change policy.

Alex (Sandy) Pentland performed a unique experiment in a large German bank, tagging its employees with special badges that tracked individuals’ interactions, down to head nodding, body language, and tone of voice. His research, conducted over a month, looked at how face to face interactions played into the overall organizational flow. The patterns he uncovered in the data collected from his name badges and from email and more traditional documentation, demonstrated the significance of social dynamics in workplace productivity. Certain individuals acted as information bottlenecks; others as polarizers, group thinkers, or gossip mongers. Pentland shared information about these patterns of communication with individuals. “Rather than think of this as big brother,” says Pentland, “think of this as a personal intelligence tool that collectively produces better results.” Related technology might be able to detect depression by examining a person’s patterns of socialization.

Karim R. Lakhani says he “stumbled into collective intelligence and distributed information systems as a puzzle.” While trying to market his large corporation’s medical imaging system, he discovered that a small Canadian group had “leapfrogged” his R&D team. A community of radiologists and physicists pooled their expertise to improve imaging technology, and beat a large, centralized lab. Since that time, Lakhani has pursued other examples of decentralized groups of people with a wide range of motivations, efficiently cracking complex problems-- from the open source software community, to biotech labs and entrepreneurial ventures. A T-shirt company, Threadless, asks its online community of a half million to submit T-shirt designs, and vote on them. The best scoring designs go into production. Sales are closing in on 1.5 million shirts at $20 a pop. Says Lakhani, “One hope of collective intelligence is that it takes the distributed and sticky pockets of knowledge that exist in the world and finds ways to aggregate them for us.”

Lecture Details

Location: Bartos Theater

About the Speakers

Moderator: David Thorburn

MIT Professor of Literature
MacVicar Faculty Fellow Director, MIT Communications Forum

David Thorburn has published widely on literary and cultural subjects and is currently completing a cultural history of American television, called Story Machine. He received his A.B. degree from Princeton, his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford and taught at Yale for 10 years before joining MIT in 1976. He has edited collections of essays on romanticism, and on John Updike, as well as a widely used anthology of fiction, Initiation. He is a former Director of the Film and Media Studies Program and of the Cultural Studies Project.

Thomas W. Malone

Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management, MIT Sloan School of Management Founder and Director, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

Thomas W. Malone was one of the two founding co-directors of the MIT Initiative on "Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century". His research focuses on how new organizations can be designed to take advantage of the possibilities provided by information technology.

The past two decades of Malone’s research are summarized in his book, The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life (Harvard Business School Press, 2004). Malone is the co-editor of three other books, as well. Malone has been a co-founder of three software companies and has consulted and served as a board member for a number of other organizations. Before joining the MIT faculty in 1983, Malone was a research scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where his research involved designing educational software and office information systems. He earned a Ph.D. and two master’s degrees from Stanford University, a B.A. from Rice University, and degrees in applied mathematics, engineering-economic systems, and psychology.

Alex (Sandy) Pentland PhD '82

Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Director of Human Dynamics Research, MIT Media Lab Co-founder and Faculty Director, Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship

Alex (Sandy) Pentland is a pioneer in wearable computers, health systems, smart environments, and technology for developing countries.

He is a co-founder of the Wearable Computing research community, the Autonomous Mental Development research community, the Center for Future Health, and was the founding director of the Media Lab Asia. He was formerly the Academic Head of the MIT Media Laboratory. Pentland was chosen by Newsweek as one of the 100 Americans most likely to shape the next century.

Dr. Karim R. Lakhani SM '99, PhD '06

Assistant Professor, Technology and Operations Management Unit, Harvard Business School

Karim R. Lakhani specializes in the management of technological innovation and product development in firms and communities. His research is on distributed innovation systems and the movement of innovative activity to the edges of organizations and into communities. He has also investigated how critical knowledge from outside of the organization can be found and put to use inside for innovation in the biotechnology, life sciences and industrial chemicals industries. He is co-editor of Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software (MIT Press, 2005) and co-founder of the MIT-based Open Source research community and web portal.

Lakhani has worked for General Electric Medical Systems, Canada, where he was a member of GE's Technical Leadership Program. He has also worked as a consultant for The Boston Consulting Group and was a founding member of BCG’s Strategy Practice Leadership team.

Lakhani was awarded his Ph.D. in management from MIT in 2006. He also holds an M.S. degree in Technology and Policy from MIT (1999), and a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and Management from McMaster University in Canada (1993). He was a recipient of the Aga Khan Foundation International Scholarship and a four year doctoral fellowship from Canada's Social Science and Humanities Research Council. Prior to coming to HBS he served as a Lecturer in the Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship group at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.