Colloquium - Fischer

The history of the human race is one of increasing intellectual capability. Since our early ancestors, our brain have gotten no bigger but there has been a steady accretion of new tools for intellectual work (including advanced visual interfaces) and an increasing distribution of complex activities among many minds. But despite this transcendence of human cognition beyond what is "inside" a person's head, most studies and frameworks on cognition have disregarded the social, physical, and artifactual surroundings in which cognition and human activity take place.

Distributed intelligence provides an effective theoretical framework for understanding what humans can achieve and how artifacts, tools, and socio technical environments can be designed and evaluated to empower humans beings to change tasks. The talk will present and discuss the conceptual frameworks and systems that we have developed over the last decade to create effective socio-technical environments supporting distributed intelligence.

Sponsored by the Center for Lifelong Learning & Design.