The grants of up to £20,000 will fund investigations of what is known as ‘collective intelligence’ - the combination of human and machine knowledge to solve challenges ranging from prosecuting possible war criminals, to enabling citizens to participate in policy-making and tackling humanitarian crises following natural disasters.

Among the projects funded are experiments from the Alan Turing Institute in the UK and CitizenLab in Belgium to test how machine-learning can be used to group unstructured human discussions online into meaningful policy proposals.This could help people use digital democracy platforms to greater effect and increase the uptake of public ideas by policy makers.

Similarly, San Francisco-based Unanimous AI will test whether algorithms modelled on the swarm behaviour of bees and fish can help find consensus among conflicting groups. These new forms of decision-making could one day replace our tradition forms of voting, and aid the search for solutions to divisive debates like Brexit

Other projects will look at conflict and natural disaster, with researchers at Swansea University using collective intelligence to process citizen-generated footage of airstrikes for use in court, and others at the University of Southampton will look at ways to sustain crowdsourced analysis of drone images in the aftermath of humanitarian emergencies, when initial interest has passed.

The projects will receive up to £20,000 to run their experiments over the coming year and Nesta hopes that they reveal some of the breadth of potential uses for this emerging technique.

Kathy Peach, Head of Nesta’s Centre of Collective Intelligence Design, said:

“If correctly orchestrated the wisdom of crowds can do things that no individual, even an expert could do, and in recent years we’ve also begun to see the incredible power of AI and other digital technologies. By bringing together the power of machines to help us analyse, predict and learn, with the tacit knowledge of crowds we can mobilise collective intelligence at scale.

“Making progress in how we understand, think and act together is critical to solving some of the most complex challenges of our times – from climate change to prosperity and wellbeing. As the experiments funded by these grants show, collective intelligence design has huge potential for societal benefits. If a tiny percentage of the resources dedicated to artificial intelligence were redirected to this emerging field it could radically improve our democracies, bring human rights abusers to justice, strengthen disaster relief and help us to overcome our differences.”

Professor Yvonne McDermott Rees of Swansea University, whose experiment to process crowd-sourced images of airstrikes is a collaboration with two NGOs, GLAN Law and Syrian Archive, said:

“Technological advances have heralded a new era of human rights investigations, where witnesses can capture and share media of human rights violations in real time”, said “However, getting that evidence into court processes is challenging, not least because of the huge volumes of content that lawyers have to sift through. Our experiment will ask whether a collective intelligence approach can combine human expertise with machine learning to identify and manage evidence that can be used in accountability processes. We are so grateful to Nesta for funding this cutting-edge research.”

Ends

Nesta press office - Will Hoyles [email protected] 07812 362714

More information about the projects and links to spokespeople are available on request.

More information about Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence Design is available at https://www.nesta.org.uk/project/centre-collective-intelligence-design/

About Nesta

Nesta is an innovation foundation. For us, innovation means turning bold ideas into reality and changing lives for the better.

We use our expertise, skills and funding in areas where there are big challenges facing society. We've spent over 20 years working out the best ways to make change happen through research and experimenting, and we've applied that to our work in innovation policy, health, education, government innovation and the creative economy and arts.

Nesta is based in the UK and supported by a financial endowment. We work with partners around the globe to bring bold ideas to life to change the world for good. www.nesta.org.uk

Full list of grantees

• Unanimous AI, a technology company based in San Francisco, will test whether algorithms modelled on ‘swarm’ behaviour in bees and fish can enable groups with conflicting political views to find collectively acceptable solutions.
• fanSHEN, a Newcastle-based theatre company, will investigate the importance of empathy and metacognition skills for group decision-making, and will test how such social skills can be fostered through immersive storytelling.
• ISTC-CNR, the Italian National Research Council’s Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, will test whether machine intelligence can mitigate the bias of social influence in collective decision-making.
• The Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel will look into whether introducing artificial ‘agents’ will change people’s behaviour in discussions about collective risks, such as climate change.
• The Alan Turing Institute will test whether natural language processing is a useful technique to cluster similar proposals from ‘like minded citizens’ on a digital democracy platform, so that citizens on the platform with shared interests can work together more effectively.
• HURIDOCS, a human rights organisation based in Switzerland, will look into whether machine learning can increase the efficiency of human rights defenders in curating large collections of documents.
• Belgium-based company CitizenLab will use machine learning technologies to translate unstructured citizen-generated ideas and insights on digital democracy platforms into actionable policy recommendations for public authorities.
• Swansea University will test whether a collective intelligence approach to processing crowdsourced footage of airstrike images increases the uptake of such open-source digital evidence by legal practitioners in court.
• The University of Southampton will test different strategies to sustain crowd engagement in emergency response activities (such as coordinating recovery efforts) beyond the immediate aftermath of a disaster.
• The University of Edinburgh will compare two types of intelligent recommendation algorithms on a citizen science platform to make it easier for citizen scientists to discover the projects that best match their interests and capabilities.
• The Hong Kong Baptist University will test whether using a crowdsourcing platform can support the coordination of food rescue activities by volunteers in Hong Kong.
• The Behavioural Insights Team, a social purpose company based in London, aims find out whether a collective intelligence approach can uncover the type of feedback from teachers that leads to the greatest improvement in students understanding and performance in maths tests.