Complex Systems and Collective Intelligence

A CCS’24 Satellite Workshop held on September 2nd 2024, Exeter, UK

The Complex Systems and Collective Intelligence Satellite Workshop was held on Monday 2nd September in Exeter. It was well attended by those working in the Complex Systems and Collective Intelligence sphere, alongside researchers, academics and those simply wanting to learn more about the topic.

We would like to thank all those who joined us, presented papers, provided posters, gave talks and participated in discussions. It was a great day and we hope you enjoyed yourselves as much as we did.

As part of the wider 2024 Conference on Complex Systems this workshop brought together researchers interested in leveraging complexity science for achieving collective intelligence in real world domains such as healthcare, finance, smart cities, pandemics and the environment.

Alongside a variety of research talks and discussion sessions there were two exciting keynote addresses from Susan Banducci, Professor and Director of the Exeter Q-Step Centre, University of Exeter and Aleks Berditchevskaia, Principal Researcher, Centre for Collective Intelligence Design at Nesta.

This event was also an opportunity for attendees to learn more about AI4CI, the UK’s National AI Research Hub on AI for Collective Intelligence, and its future funding plans to support research into complex systems and collective intelligence.

Workshop vision

To address society’s most pressing challenges (climate change, epidemiology, financial stability, sustainability, healthcare, etc.) we must be able to reliably engineer important new kinds of Collective Intelligence:

Connected communities of people, devices, data and software collaboratively sensing and interacting in real-time to achieve positive outcomes at multiple scales.

Whether we are attempting to minimise the impact of the next global pandemic, prevent financial instability, encourage sustainable and liveable cities, combat social polarisation and climate disinformation on social media, or integrate clinical care and social support for patients with chronic illnesses, enabling smart behaviour at the level of the individual to inform and be informed by intelligence gathered from the collective is key.

Complex systems approaches are central to meeting this challenge.

This workshop brought together researchers from the fields of complex systems, collective intelligence, AI, human-computer interaction and key application domains such as smart cities, the environment, epidemics, finance, healthcare, etc., to present and discuss work that advances our understanding of how better to achieve collective intelligence in the real-world.