New Challenges in Computational Collective Intelligence

Collective intelligence has become one of major research issues studied by today’s and future computer science. Computational collective intelligence is understood as this form of group intellectual activity that emerges from collaboration and compe- tion of many artificial individuals. Robotics, artificial intelligence, artificial cognition and group working try to create efficient models for collective intelligence in which it emerges from sets of actions carried out by more or less intelligent individuals. The major methodological, theoretical and practical aspects underlying computational collective intelligence are group decision making, collective action coordination, collective competition and knowledge description, transfer and integration. Obviously, the application of multiple computational technologies such as fuzzy systems, evo- tionary computation, neural systems, consensus theory, knowledge representation etc. is necessary to create new forms of computational collective intelligence and support existing ones. Three subfields of application of computational technologies to support forms of collective intelligence are of special attention to us. The first one is semantic web treated as an advanced tool that increases the collective intelligence in networking environments. The second one covers social networks modeling and analysis, where social networks are this area of in which various forms of computational collective intelligence emerges in a natural way. The third subfield relates us to agent and mul- agent systems understood as this computational and modeling paradigm which is especially tailored to capture the nature of computational collective intelligence in populations of autonomous individuals.

The book consists of 29 chapters which have been selected and invited from the submissions to the 1^st International Conference on Collective Intelligence - Semantic Web, Social Networks & Multiagent Systems (ICCCI 2009). All chapters in the book discuss various examples of applications of computational collective intelligence and related technologies to such fields as semantic web, information systems ontologies, social networks, agent and multiagent systems.

The editors hope that the book can be useful for graduate and Ph.D. students in Computer Science, in particular participants to courses on Soft Computing, Multi-Agent Systems and Robotics. This book can also be useful for researchers working on the concept of computational collective intelligence in artificial populations. It is the hope of the editors that readers of this volume can find many inspiring ideas and use them to create new cases intelligent collectives. Many such challenges are suggested by particular approaches and models presented in particular chapters of this book.