On the 10-12 of February 2013, Simon Buckingham Shum and Anna De Liddo were invited from Xerox Research Centre Europe (XRCE) to present KMi’s cutting edge technologies on Contested Collective Intelligence.
In the talk Simon and Anna described the theory and technologies for Contested Collective Intelligence.
Contested Collective Intelligence (CCI) is a distinctive subset of the broader Collective Intelligence design space that is relevant to the many organizational contexts in which it is important to work with contested knowledge.
Due to different intellectual traditions, competing organizational objectives, information overload or ambiguous environmental signals, knowledge cannot always be univocally defined and represented. This motivates the need for specifically designed tool in which contested knowledge can be shared, collaboratively constructed and debated.
KMi’s Cohere and The Evidence Hub are two Social Web tools which aim to achieve this goal: specifically to help Online Communities of Practice to collaboratively debate issues, share evidence and build knowledge in contested domains.
In the talk Simon and Anna described the theoretical underpinnings and demonstrated practical applications of Cohere and the Evidence Hub.
Between those Simon and Anna also showed results of the collaborative work with Ágnes Sándor at XRCE, using XIP to provide combined human and machine annotation of Web documents.
Xerox Research Centre Europe (XRCE)
Xerox Research Centre Europe (XRCE) is the European branch of Xerox global research group. It is located in the heart of the French Alps near Grenoble, France. XRCE is a multidisciplinary research centre with scientists in computer science, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, machine learning applied to information, data and documents. Its mission is to be a centre of excellence for the understanding and design of technology that enables innovative business processes and empowering IT services for knowledge workers in industry.
XRCE is part of the global Xerox Innovation Group made up of 800 researchers and engineers in four world-renowned research and technology centres. While drawing on the strength of the Xerox Corporation around the world, XRCE’s focus is Europe. The centre cooperates with the scientific community, and forms partnerships, collaborates with a wide range of European research organizations.
The centre participates in a variety of regional, national and European Union networks and projects. As part of its Open Innovation program, XRCE is currently part of 9 European projects and 6 French national projects. The centre welcomes scholars from across the world. It runs an extensive annual intern program and partners with universities through the Xerox Foundation, which each year funds around 40 projects at 30 colleges and universities worldwide.
Key KMi’s Contacts at XEROX
At present KMi collaborates with two research scientists at XEROX: Dr. Ágnes Sándor and Dr. Gregorio Convertino.
Dr. Ágnes Sándor is a project leader and has been working at XRCE since 1996 as a computational linguistics researcher. Her activities have included the construction of morphological analyzers and part-of-speech taggers for English, French and Hungarian. In the past years, she has been focusing on discourse analysis and content extraction based on meta-discourse. She has published papers on all these fields.
Dr. Gregorio Convertino is a senior research scientist and he recently joined XRCE, after working for three years (2008-2011) doing research in social computing at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). His research on collaborative and social computing at XRCE and PARC focuses on analyzing requirements, prototyping, and systematically evaluating collaborative software tools for knowledge workers in the enterprise.
Simon and Anna are grateful to Agnes and Gregorio for the invitation and for the beautiful time spent in “snowy” Grenoble!
Anna & Simon
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