Original Abstract

Analogy — the ability to find and apply deep structural patterns across domains — has been fundamental to human innovation in science and technology. Today there is a growing opportunity to accelerate innovation by moving analogy out of a single person’s mind and distributing it across many information processors, both human and machine. Doing so has the potential to overcome cognitive fixation, scale to large idea repositories, and support complex problems with multiple constraints. Here we lay out a perspective on the future of scalable analogical innovation and first steps using crowds and artificial intelligence (AI) to augment creativity that quantitatively demonstrate the promise of the approach, as well as core challenges critical to realizing this vision

Research Findings

Published in August 2019 by Professor Joel Chan, Professor Aniket Kittur, and colleagues:

Scaling up analogical innovation with crowds and AI

Press

Disruptive ideas largely stem from two contrasting approaches, research shows

Chinarut's Intentions

• Translate the technical merits of this research into compelling applications able to attract funding & support aligned with the spirit of the work & the team
• Extend this research such that it contributes to the domains of dance (esp as it relates to personal development), wellness (esp around solution search), community building and life/career/societal transformation
• Choose new direction in life by allowing analogical innovation to point out directions inferred by domains outside their view

Possible Focus Areas

• Problem of synthesizing diverse lines of evidence --- e.g., primary and secondary research literature, wisdom and religious literature, personal experiences, ideas from others, personal experiments --- to empower individuals to take action towards well-being.
• Possibility of sharing partial starting points for synthesis in a social commons (perhaps a network of personal knowledge graphs or wikis, overlaid on top of various literatures).

Request for Collaboration & Synthesis

• welcome comments and/or support from research mentors/partners who feel naturally called to provide research/creative direction for this page
• would love to hear another process we can explore to determine if we are a good fit
  • process I operate under (since 2012) and willing to let go: Emergent Partnerships

Concepts in Chinarut's words