image: NYU-Poly assistant professor of technology management and innovation Oded Nov will lead a team of researchers in the exploration of "silicon brains" -- large-scale online repositories of knowledge. He explains a chart representing the development of a Wikipedia article over time, with bars representing the type and magnitude of each contribution. view more
Credit: NYU-Poly
NEW YORK, May 10, 2013 – The National Academies Keck Futures Initiative announced it will fund research by a team led by Oded Nov, an assistant professor of technology management and innovation at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly), into what Nov calls "silicon brains" – large-scale knowledge repositories created online.
The prestigious Keck Futures Initiative is a program of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine with support from the W.M. Keck Foundation. The seed grants support bold and risky interdisciplinary research projects related to the informed brain in a digital world. This year, the 12 grants were selected from 43 proposals submitted by invited participants to the Futures Initiative.
Nov explains that human society is undergoing a major transformation, enabled by digital technology. He cites Wikipedia and open-source software as examples of large scale knowledge repositories generated collaboratively by people who contribute their expertise and energy to a common pool accessible to everybody – in other words, society-scale silicon-based "brains."
Inspired by similar efforts in the life sciences such as the Human Genome Project, Nov and his team are seeking to explore the patterns or building blocks through which individual human brains co-create these society-scale brains. Their project is titled "From Informed Human Brains to Society-Scale Silicon Brains: Uncovering the DNA of Social Knowledge." When their ambitious project is complete, for the first time in history, researchers studying on-line behavior will have the equivalent of a human-genome map: a detailed rendering of the sequences of human activities that underpin the creation of large bodies of knowledge. Nov predicts that his map will enable researchers to observe, understand and improve the process in novel ways.
Nov, whose work has long focused on social computing, holds degrees from Tel Aviv University, the London School of Economics and Cambridge University. His many honors include a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Google Focused Research Award and a Marie Curie Fellowship.
Collaborators on the project are Ofer Arazy, associate professor at the University of Alberta (Canada) Alberta School of Business Department of Accounting, Operations and Information Systems, and Narayan B. Mandayam, a Rutgers University professor of electrical engineering and the Peter D. Cherasia faculty scholar.
About Polytechnic Institute of New York University
The Polytechnic Institute of New York University (formerly the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and the Polytechnic University, now widely known as NYU-Poly) is an affiliated institute of New York University, soon to be its School of Engineering. NYU-Poly, founded in 1854, is the nation's second-oldest private engineering school. It is presently a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a 159-year tradition of invention, innovation and entrepreneurship. It remains on the cutting edge of technology, innovatively extending the benefits of science, engineering, management and liberal studies to critical real-world opportunities and challenges, especially those linked to urban systems, health and wellness, and the global information economy. In addition to its programs on the main campus in New York City at MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn, it offers programs around the globe remotely through NYUe-Poly. NYU-Poly is closely connected to engineering in NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai and to the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) also at MetroTech, while operating two incubators in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. For more information, visit http://www.poly.edu.