2006-2007 Seminar Series

The history of the human race is one of increasing intellectual capability. Since our early ancestors, our brain have gotten no bigger but there has been a steady accretion of new tools for intellectual work (including advanced visual interfaces) and an increasing distribution of complex activities among many minds. But despite this transcendence of human cognition beyond what is 'inside' a person's head, most studies and frameworks on cognition have disregarded the social, physical, and artifactual surroundings in which cognition and human activity take place. Distributed intelligence provides an effective theoretical framework for understanding what humans can achieve and how artifacts, tools, and socio-technical environments can be designed and evaluated to empower human beings and to change tasks. The talk will present and discuss the conceptual frameworks and systems that we have developed over the last decade to create effective socio-technical environments supporting distributed intelligence.

Gerhard Fischer (http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/) is a Professor of Computer Science, a Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science, and the Director of the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design (L3D) at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research is focused on new conceptual frameworks and new media for learning, working, and collaboration; human-computer interaction; cognitive science; distributed intelligence; social creativity; design; meta-design; domain-oriented design environments; and universal design (assistive technologies). Over the last twenty years, he has directed research projects and has published extensively in these areas. More information about the L3D Center can be found at: http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/.