Category: Who’s Who

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Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: Louis von Ahn

Alpha A-D, Public Intelligence

Luis von Ahn is a young computer scientist working at the intersection of cryptography, artificial intelligence, and natural intelligence to address problems of profound theoretical and practical importance.  Focusing on the 9 billion hours a year that people play solitaire, he has conceptualized means of harnessing that “cognitive surplus” to accomplish important micro-tasks, such as labeling images.

Born in 1979 in Guatemala City, Guatemala he is an entrepreneur and an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University[2]. He is known as one of the pioneers of the idea of crowdsourcing. He is the founder of the company reCAPTCHA, which was sold to Google in 2009.[3] As a professor, his research includes CAPTCHAs and human computation[4], and has earned him international recognition and numerous honors. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a., the “genius grant”) in 2006,[5][6] the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship in 2009, a Sloan Fellowship in 2009, and a Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship in 2007. He has also been named one of the 50 Best Brains in Science by Discover Magazine, and has made it to many recognition lists that include Popular Science Magazine‘s Brilliant 10, Silicon.com's 50 Most Influential People in Technology, Technology Review‘s TR35: Young Innovators Under 35, and FastCompany‘s 100 Most Innovative People in Business.

Siglo Veintiuno, a leading newspaper in Guatemala, chose him as the person of the year in 2009. In 2011, Foreign Policy Magazine in Spanish named him the most influential intellectual of Latin America and Spain.[7]

Best of Web

Personal Blog

2006 Google Tech Tack on Human Computation

2011 Human Computation: Channeling Human Brainpower

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Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: Steven Howard Johnson

Alpha I-L, Public Intelligence
Steven Howard Johnson

Social Entrepreneur 1996 – Ongoing

Author, Integrity at Scale: Big Answers for America’s Challenges, book manuscript, presently available at www.IntegrityAtScaleBlog.com.  Today’s United States is not a competent nation.  Yesterday’s civic habits are insufficient for today’s major challenges.  America requires a redesign revolution and hasn’t the slightest idea how to begin.  Integrity at Scale lays out a path toward competence that is independent of political ideology.

Social Security Reform Websites.  Created two websites to help users understand Social Security’s long-range solvency challenges, www.sscommonsense.org and www.simcivic.org.  The second website featured a java-based solvency model.  These websites remain relevant and are retained for archival value.

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Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: Steven Kull

Alpha I-L, Public Intelligence
Steven Kull

Steven Kull, PhD is a political psychologist who studies world public opinion on international issues. He is the Director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and the Center on Policy Attitudes (COPA). He conducts ongoing surveys of the US public and plays a central role in the BBC World Service Poll of global opinion. His articles have appeared in Political Science Quarterly, Foreign Policy, Public Opinion Quarterly, Harpers, The Washington Post and other publications. He is the co-author with I.M. Destler of Misreading the Public: The Myth of a New Isolationism (1999). He regularly appears in the US and international media and gives briefings for the US Congress, the State Department, NATO, the UN and the EC. He is a faculty member of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Wikipedia (Steven Kull)
Center on Policy Attitudes
Program on International Policy Attitudes

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Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: Baruch Fischhoff

Alpha E-H, Public Intelligence
Baruch Fischhoff

BARUCH FISCHHOFF, Ph.D., is the Howard Heinz University Professor in the departments of Social and Decision Sciences and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, where he heads the Decision Sciences major. A graduate of the Detroit Public Schools, he holds a BS in mathematics and psychology from Wayne State University and an MA and PhD in psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and currently chairs the National Research Council Committee on Behavioral and Social Science Research to Improve Intelligence Analysis for National Security. He also chairs the Food and Drug Administration Risk Communication Advisory Committee. He is a member of the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Advisory Committee, the World Federation of Scientists Permanent Monitoring Panel on Terrorism, and the Department of State Global Expertise Program. He is past President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and of the Society for Risk Analysis, and recipient of its Distinguished Achievement Award. He was a member of the Eugene, Oregon Commission on the Rights of Women and the Environmental Protection Agency Science Advisory Board, where he chaired the Homeland Security Advisory Committee. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science (previously the American Psychological Society), the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Society for Risk Analysis. He has co-authored or edited six books, Acceptable Risk (1981), A Two-State Solution in the Middle East: Prospects and Possibilities (1993), Elicitation of Preferences (2000), Risk Communication: A Mental Models Approach (2002), Intelligence Analysis: Behavioral and Social Science Foundations (2011), and Risk: A Very Short Introduction.

Forthcoming Books at Amazon:

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Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: Paul Fernhout

Alpha E-H, Public Intelligence
Paul Fernhout

Paul Fernhout has been helping his wife (Cynthia Kurtz) develop Rakontu, a free and open source software communications and sensemaking tool for small purpose-driven communities that focuses on exchanging stories. He has hopes to expand Rakontu eventually into a broader Public Intelligence platform including a semantic desktop, simulations, narrative methods, visualization tools, and structured arguments. He has done some earlier work towards a FOSS social semantic desktop based on a triple store called “The Pointrel System“.

Building on something Albert Einstein said long ago about nuclear energy, he likes to remind people that in his opinion “The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity”.

Paul participated in Doug Engelbart's 2000 Unfinished Revolution II Colloquium hosted by Stanford University which discussed themes on public collaboration about solving pressing global issues in networked improvement communities, and he made several related email contributions.   He believes Public Intelligence could be a way to build on Doug Engelbart's early innovations to collectively figure out how to use advanced technologies of abundance for the betterment of global society. He calls for the public funding of such tools in an essay entitled “The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc.”  and also in an OpenPCAST suggestion to the US government on the same theme.  He has written several essays on post-scarcity abundance themes, including speculations on reforming Princeton University and reforming the CIA into post-scarcity institutions. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, he wrote a parable  about collective efforts by individually-weak abundance-minded actors in the presence of strong centralized scarcity-minded organizations, which he feels unfortunately has been all too prescient about the course of that war.

He is currently exploring the idea that there have always been at least five types of interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) with the balance between the five economies shifting due to cultural changes and technological changes.

Paul is a graduate of Princeton University (A.B. Psychology '85, same year as Michelle Obama), studied Ecology and Evolution at SUNY Stony Brook (M.A. Biology '93), and received a Navy Science Award for a robot he created for a high school science fair back before that was a common thing.

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Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: Cynthia Kurtz

Alpha I-L, Public Intelligence
Cynthia Kurtz

Cynthia Kurtz is an independent researcher, writer and software designer who consults in the field of organizational and community narrative for decision support, conflict resolution and collective sensemaking. Her free online book at workingwithstories.org helps people use narrative techniques to benefit their own communities and organizations. She is building open source software at rakontu.org to help small groups share and work with their stories to achieve common goals. Her blog is at storycoloredglasses.com. Cynthia's original background is in ethology and evolutionary biology.