Where to learn about 'Collective Intelligence'?

Question

Which are the good resources for research in Collective Intelligence ?.

I am a Software Developer,for a year now and I am basically working in Java and Flex platforms. I want to now apply for a PHD in 'Collective Intelligence', to make my application stronger I want to read thoroughly about it before applying.

I just need some good tutorials / blogs before dipping into the complexities.... Thanks!!

Answer 1

Indeed, Collective Intelligence is a very broad term. You might have to come down and pick an ideal one of choice. I have done some bit in Semantic Web which is a collective intelligence science. There are tonnes of materials available online. These are some of the informations which might help you out...

Some links: Semantic Web on Stack-overflow

Reference Docs

1. SPARQL - http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/ RDF -
2. http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax/ Semantic Web W3C -
3. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html An Introduction to Tim
4. Berners Lee’s Semantic Web -
5. http://www.techrepublic.com/article/an-introduction-to-tim-berners-lees-semantic-web/5552998

Development Tools

1. Jena - http://jena.apache.org/ Pellet: Another Own 2 Reasoner for
2. Java. This has better reviews than Jena.
3. Pellet Dev tool for Semantic Web

Answer 2

Although wikipedia never can be trusted, the articles wikipedia links to, often can. You should look at the wikipedia page about it, where the best of the links might be MIT Handbook of Collective Intelligence.

Its a huge topic, so i doubt you will get accepted wanting to write a PhD on 'Collective Intelligence' alone, but rather a subset of Collective Intelligence, like "What can Collective Intelligence tell us about and how has it changed the way ?"

Answer 3

The book Programming Collective Intelligence is a nice starting point. It introduces basic concepts across recommendation, supervised and unsupervised learning, also some additional decision making algorithms etc.

You'd need to find a specific area of interest, as Jan pointed out its a massive area. Check out the WWW Conference for a list of related papers.