“Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts…they lie unquestioned, uncombined.Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric…”Edna St Vincent Millay, From Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939)
The Deliberatorium is a technology designed to help large numbers of people, distributed in space and time, combine their insights to find well-founded solutions for such complex multi-stakeholder multi-disciplinary ("wicked") problems as sustainability, climate change policy, complex product design, and so on.
See this video for an overview of the concepts underlying the Deliberatorium. Also check out my blog entries on the limitations of idea sharing tools, and on the Deliberatorium and Open Source Democracy.
Follow this link to access the system itself.
Supporting Collaborative Deliberation Using a Large-Scale Argumentation System: The MIT Collaboratorium. Proceedings of: Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing; Conference on Online Deliberation (DIAC-2008/OD2008). 2008.
Harnessing Collective Intelligence to Address Global Climate Change. Innovations Journal, 2007. 2(3): p. 15-26.
See popular press articles in: Sloan Management Review, Nature, New York Times, MIT Technology Insider (page 11), Information Week, MIT Tech Talk, and The Independent (UK).
See this video for an introduction to the concepts underlying this work.
Using Iterative Narrowing to Enable Multi-Party Negotiations with Multiple Interdependent Issues Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. Honolulu, Hawaii. 2007.
Multi-issue Negotiation Protocol for Agents: Exploring Nonlinear Utility Spaces. Proceedings of the Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Hyderabad, India.2007.
Negotiating Complex Contracts Group Decision and Negotiation journal. Volume 12, Number 2, 2003.
Handling Emergent Resource Use Oscillations. IEEE Transactions on Systems Man and Cybernetics (TSMC) A. March 2005.
Using Domain-Independent Exception Handling Services to Enable Robust Open Multi-Agent Systems: The Case of Agent Death Journal for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. Volume 7, Number 1/2, 2003.
A Knowledge-Based Approach to Handling Exceptions in Workflow Systems. Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Work. Vol 9, No 3/4, August 2000.
Exception Handling in Agent Systems. Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Seattle, Washington, 1999.
Online and In Synch (an article, written by Jean Thilmany, featuring some of my work). ASME Mechanical Engineering magazine, June 2007, page 40 - 42.
A Coordination-Theoretic Approach to Understanding Process Differences. MIT Sloan Research Paper No. 4637-07. 2007.
A Handbook-Based Methodology for Redesigning Business Processes. Knowledge and Process Management Journal. 13(2): 108-119.
A Knowledge-Based Methodology for Designing Reliable Agent Systems Proceedings of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering IV. 2003.
The Process Recombinator: A Tool for Generating New Business Process Ideas. Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems. 1999.
A Systematic Repository of Knowledge About Handling Exceptions in Business Processes. ASES Working Report ASES-WP-2000-03. Center for Coordination Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA USA. 2000.
Tools for inventing organizations: Toward a handbook of organizational processes. Management Science. Volume 45, Number 3. 1998.
Negotiation Algorithms for Collaborative Design Settings. Proceedings of the 10th ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering Research and Applications (CERA-03). 2003. Madeira Island, Portugal.
The Dynamics of Collaborative Design: Insights From Complex Systems and Negotiation Research. Concurrent Engineering Research and Applications Journal. Volume 12, Number 3, 2003.
Towards a Systematic Repository of Knowledge About Managing Collaborative Design Conflicts. Proceedings of the International Conference on AI in Design. Boston, MA. 2000.
Capturing Geometry Rationale for Collaborative Design. Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (WET ICE '97). Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. June 18-20, 1997. IEEE Computer Society Press.
An Exception Handling Approach to Enhancing Consistency, Completeness and Correctness in Collaborative Requirements Capture. Journal of Concurrent Engineering Research and Applications. March 1997.
iDCSS: Integrating Workflow, Conflict and Rationale-Based Concurrent Engineering Coordination Technologies. Journal of Concurrent Engineering Research and Applications. Volume 3, Number 1, January 1995.
Capturing Design Rationale in Concurrent Engineering Teams. IEEE Computer. Volume 26, Number 1, pages 39-47, January, 1993.
Supporting Conflict Management in Cooperative Design Teams. Journal on Group Decision and Negotiation. Special Issue on the 1992 Distributed AI Workshop. Volume 2, Pps 259-278, 1993.
Supporting Conflict Resolution in Cooperative Design Systems. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. Special Issue on Distributed Artificial Intelligence. Volume 21, Number 6, December 1991.
Conflict Resolution in Cooperative Design. The International Journal For Artificial Intelligence in Engineering. Volume 4, Number 4, Pages 168-180, 1990.