Scaling up analogical innovation with crowds and AI.

Analogy-the ability to find and apply deep structural patterns across domains-has been fundamental to human innovation in science and technology. Today there is a growing opportunity to accelerate innovation by moving analogy out of a single person's mind and distributing it across many information processors, both human and machine. Doing so has the potential to overcome cognitive fixation, scale to large idea repositories, and support complex problems with multiple constraints. Here we lay out a perspective on the future of scalable analogical innovation and first steps using crowds and artificial intelligence (AI) to augment creativity that quantitatively demonstrate the promise of the approach, as well as core challenges critical to realizing this vision.

Effectiveness of shared leadership in Wikipedia.

OBJECTIVE: The objective of the paper is to understand leadership in an online community, specifically, Wikipedia. BACKGROUND: Wikipedia successfully aggregates millions of volunteers' efforts to create the largest encyclopedia in human history. Without formal employment contracts and monetary incentives, one significant question for Wikipedia is how it organizes individual members with differing goals, experience, and commitment to achieve a collective outcome. Rather than focusing on the role of the small set of people occupying a core leadership position, we propose a shared leadership model to explain the leadership in Wikipedia. Members mutually influence one another by exercising leadership behaviors, including rewarding, regulating, directing, and socializing one another. METHOD: We conducted a two-phase study to investigate how distinct types of leadership behaviors (transactional, aversive, directive, and person-focused), the legitimacy of the people who deliver the leadership, and the experience of the people who receive the leadership influence the effectiveness of shared leadership in Wikipedia. RESULTS: Our results highlight the importance of shared leadership in Wikipedia and identify trade-offs in the effectiveness of different types of leadership behaviors. Aversive and directive leadership increased contribution to the focal task, whereas transactional and person-focused leadership increased general motivation. We also found important differences in how newcomers and experienced members responded to leadership behaviors from peers. APPLICATION: These findings extend shared leadership theories, contribute new insight into the important underlying mechanisms in Wikipedia, and have implications for practitioners who wish to design more effective and successful online communities.

The cognitive atlas: toward a knowledge foundation for cognitive neuroscience.

Cognitive neuroscience aims to map mental processes onto brain function, which begs the question of what "mental processes" exist and how they relate to the tasks that are used to manipulate and measure them. This topic has been addressed informally in prior work, but we propose that cumulative progress in cognitive neuroscience requires a more systematic approach to representing the mental entities that are being mapped to brain function and the tasks used to manipulate and measure mental processes. We describe a new open collaborative project that aims to provide a knowledge base for cognitive neuroscience, called the Cognitive Atlas (accessible online at http://www.cognitiveatlas.org), and outline how this project has the potential to drive novel discoveries about both mind and brain.