OVERVIEW

The theme of this year's COINs seminar is "Psychohistory 2.0". Famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov described "psychohistory" as a science combining history, sociology, and statistics invented by fictional mathematician Hari Seldon to predict the future of large groups of people thousands of years ahead. In this seminar we will do the same, applying the breakthrough advances in AI and machine learning to predicting the future, based on "honest signals of communication" from online social media (Twitter/YouTube), E-Mail, and face-to-face interaction. The key requirement of Asimov's psychohistory was that the analyzed population would have to remain ignorant of the predictions of psychohistory. In Psychohistory 2.0 this is not true anymore, producers of fake news and foreign governments intervening through social media in foreign elections are very aware of their actions. We will also focus on this aspect, which we call "Social Quantum Physics".

This seminar shows how to measure and increase happiness, creativity, and performance through analyzing collective consciousness within organizations and on the Internet, using social media analysis. It combines latest insights from happiness research with social media monitoring, machine learning, and big data. You will learn about general principles of happiness in the context of positive psychology and behavioral economics. The seminar also introduces the concept of “coolhunting” in three information spheres, the crowd – mostly found on Twitter, the experts – found on blogs and Web sites, and the swarm – on Wikipedia and in online forums. It shows how to do “coolfarming”, tracking and supporting the creation of Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) by analyzing e-mail and other communication archives and providing a mirror of their communication patterns to users.

The goal is to improve communication, leading to better collaboration, leading to more innovation, helping you to understand how to lead a happier and more meaningful life.

After a 2-day introductory block course students will form teams with participants from different locations, selecting a topic and independently work as a COIN, solving a complex business problem as a virtual team, thus experiencing the joys and obstacles of multinational collaboration.

The degree of collaboration can be measured through seven honest signals of collaboration: strong leadership, balanced contribution, rotating leadership, responsiveness, honest sentiment, shared context, and social capital. The seminar explains how to implement these concepts using the software tool Condor and the Happimeter, developed by our team at MIT, U. Cologne, and U. Bamberg. Condor calculates the seven honest signals of collaboration, tracking the degree of collective consciousness face-to-face with the happimeter, on online social media such as Twitter, blogs, or Facebook, or corporate e-mail, calendar, and skype archives using dynamic semantic social network analysis and machine learning. The Happimeter is a smartwatch based sensor that measures emotions based on the body signals of the wearer.

The course is based on the two most recent books by Peter Gloor

• Swarm Leadership and the Collective Mind: Using Collaborative Innovation Networks to Build a Better Business , Emerald Publishing, London, 2017
• Sociometrics and Human Relationships: Analyzing Social Networks to Manage Brands, Predict Trends, and Improve Organizational Performance , Emerald Publishing, London 2017