The University of Melbourne is one of four teams worldwide awarded a share of more than US$100 million in funding from the US Government’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), in what may be one of the largest-ever research efforts aimed at improving human reasoning.
The University of Melbourne’s multidisciplinary team, SWARM (Smartly-assembled Wiki-style Argument Marshalling), has been allocated up to US$19 million to develop and road-test research into crowdsourcing intelligence analysis to leverage people’s ability to produce and evaluate reasoning.
Critical thinking and reasoning expert, Melbourne Enterprise Fellow Timothy van Gelder from the School of BioSciences (Faculty of Science), says the initiative is primarily focused on developing a system to help intelligence analysis, but team’s platform could also help improve reasoning in the public arena.
“We believe we can build a better tool for intelligence analysts if we can find something that would work even in the public domain, dealing with hotly contested issues such as climate change,” he says.
The University of Melbourne and Monash University are the only Australian awardees with the remaining two teams coming from New York’s Syracuse University and Virginia’s George Mason University.
SWARM project co-lead, Associate Professor Fiona Fidler, a joint appointment from the School of Historical and Philosophical Sciences (Faculty of Arts) and BioSciences, says our thinking is easily hampered by our own biases, such as the tendency to only believe or seek out evidence that support our views.
Dr Richard de Rozario from the School of BioSciences, who is responsible for the technical side of the platform development and is also co-leader, says while the Internet has made information more accessible, people still need to be able to make sense of it. We have Big Data, but we don’t have Big Sense. That is what we are trying to find, a way to move towards Big Sense, and one way of doing that it to find the ingredients for helping us reason as a crowd,” he says.
SWARM is currently recruiting volunteers to participate in the project, which would involve participation in prototype forums and face-to-face workshops to help in the design. SWARM is a research collaboration between the Faculties of Arts, Science and the Melbourne School of Engineering.
UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE WINS $US19M
FOR US INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH