Quo Vadis computer science: From Turing to personal computer, personal content and collective intelligence

Abstract

Since the first formal specifications of modern computing machinery as laid out by Alan Turing and his contemporary fellows, we have been witnessing, during the last three decades, an evolutionary path in computing towards more personalized and contextualized data and knowledge artifacts. Information sharing, co-ordination, co-operation and, to some extent, collaboration among machines has been envisioned for complex problem solving. A prominent example of this problem solving approach has been the Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) project as launched in Japan in the 1980s and based on the concept of calculation using massive parallelism in logic and hardware. Grid and Distributed Computing, also known as Future Generation Computer Systems, is another similar attempt to exploit massive parallelism in order to solve complex problems. In this article, we explore the notion of Collective Intelligence (CI) in the realm of the Social Web and its potential to become a new computing paradigm for creating solutions or strategies to tackle wicked problems where the synergistic interactions of a group of people with diverse cultural and professional backgrounds are requested.