What is Collective Intelligence?

How do sardines escape the attacks of marlins – and how do marlins adapt their hunting strategies in return? What guides groups of hobby ice fishers in Finland as they decide where to drill the best fishing holes? And what can these real-world strategies teach us about building smarter artificial agents, like swarm robots? 

In this exciting event, SCIoI computer scientist Palina Bartashevich will introduce the topic of collective intelligence, sharing drone footage and stories from her team’s expedition to the Mexican Atlantic, where they observed hunting marlins in action. Following her introduction, ethicist Marten Kaas will lead a lively discussion with scientists Valerii Chirkov, Yunus Sevinchan, and Yating Zheng on the most fascinating aspects of swarm intelligence in humans, animals and robots. It turns out that when groups share information and make decisions together, they can act much like a distributed brain, and that tells us a lot about collective minds in nature and technology — who would have thought?