Crowdsourcing
The Center on Human Frontiers (CHF) explores massively parallel collaboration and emergent knowledge generation via the rapidly advancing field of ‘crowdsourcing’.  CHF researchers have harnessed crowdsourcing over the Internet as a means to socially mobilize human attention at the scale of the crowd.  Previous applications pioneered by research scientist Albert Lin have involved archaeological discovery, humanitarian response, as well as search-and-rescue efforts, including the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. In the latter case, over eight million people searched through ultra-high-resolution satellite imagery for any visual evidence of the plane’s wreckage across one million square kilometers of ocean. The sheer volume of the response to that crowdsourcing effort provided a glimpse into the future and potential of our networked society. Crowdsourcing itself now represents a fundamentally new construct for how we interact with information as a digitally connected society, both as a crowd, and as an individual within the crowd.

Collective Reasoning
The ability to focus and route networks of human attention at such massive scales – coupled with the functional ability to make meaningful contributions at the scale of a single person – represent a major evolutionary step in the growth of our “collective synapse.” Another project led by CHF’s Lin – the search for the lost tomb of Genghis Khan – used satellite imagery and crowdsourcing to pool human perception of out-of-the-ordinary topological features across a vast, 6,000-square-foot expanse of Mongolian landscape.  Over 10,000 people volunteered 30,000 hours of their time to detect anomalies that might indicate historic artifacts under the ground. The result: a feedback loop between the crowd and the individual volunteer that produced a collective reasoning engine for detecting anomalies – which in turn led to the discovery of 55 previously unknown archaeological sites. According to scientists on the National Geographic-funded project, participants in the search effort were exposed to the peer feedback loop, which improved individual accuracy over time. In other words, collective reasoning can emerge within the networked crowd to outperform the aggregate independent ability of individuals to define the unknown.

The Networked Mind
CHF will explore new approaches to crowdsourcing and enabling the crowd to take on important new challenges that will allow us to push past existing barriers to collective reasoning – using the ‘networked mind’ to engage the crowd and collective reasoning of the networked mind.