Thursday, April 20, 2023, 12 – 1pm
The environment surrounding organizations is becoming more complex and dynamic, and the increased use of AI-based technology both contributes to complexity (by enabling us to do more, faster) but can also enhance the functioning of human systems if designed and integrated effectively. Doing so requires moving beyond structuring teams and organizations for performance, but instead designing them for collective intelligence. Research on intelligence has focused on the capabilities that enable a system to adapt and accomplish goals in changing environments for over a century. Building on that work, my collaborators and I have examined collective intelligence in human and human-computer systems, identifying the memory, attention, and reasoning functions that need to be fulfilled for intelligence to emerge. We apply these insights in our current research where we teach AI agents how to recognize collaboration in human systems in order to develop new ways to intervene to increase collective intelligence.
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Anita Williams Woolley is a Professor of Organizational Behavior and the Associate Dean of Research at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business. Dr. Woolley received her doctorate in organizational behavior at Harvard University. Her research focuses on collective intelligence in human teams and human-computer collaboration, with current projects funded by DARPA and the National Science Foundation focusing on how artificial intelligence can enhance the quality of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration in co-located and remote teams. Dr. Woolley's research has been published in Science and PNAS as well as many top journals in management, applied psychology, and computer science. She has served as a Senior Editor at Organization Science and is a founding Associate Editor of the ACM Journal Collective Intelligence.