Mycroft Cognitive Mediator: Enhancing Team Science:

An ISSIP Discovery Summit/OHSL Workshop at IBM Research – Almaden Dec 15-16

Team Science researchers and developers are working together to expand awareness of Team Science tool kits, and find practical measurable ways of boosting team performance.   Team Science tool kits and the Team Science community are focused on the next practices to accelerate discoveries and beneficial applications of new knowledge, especially in the areas of wellness, healthcare, biology, and biochemistry.

The National Research Council has a strong interest in enhancing the effectiveness of Team Science.

Team Science is in part inspired by the progress being made to build cognitive systems to transform industries and professions from  business perspective – such as the system demonstrated in this IBM TED Talk.

A growing number of people are having conversations about the progression from cognitive tool to assistant to collaborator to mediator to augment people’s performance in dealing with big data, big organizatons, and each other, including non-profit professional communities like the ISSIP (International Society of Service Innovation Professionals) COI (Community Of Interest) CSIG (Cognitive Systems Institute Group) promoting a service science perspective on the evolution of service systems and cognitive systems.

Related to this is the ISSIP COI CSIG weekly speakers series – and nearly all the talks are public, the CSIG (Cognitive Systems Institute Group) discussion, the ISSIP (International Society of Service Innovation Professionals) discussion, the NSF Smart Service Systems discussion and related programs,  the T Summit 2016 (an ISSIP co-sponsored conference at the National Academy of Sciences building).  A new development that might be synergistic with Mycroft_Cognitive_Mediator for Enhancing_Team_Science is Elon Musk’s OpenAI announcement.

Description of Desired Outcome:

Building cognitive assistants is challenging, complex work – but an ecosystem and new industry for building cognitive assistants is emerging, what IBM refers to as the era of cognitive computing to augment human capabilities and performance.   IBM, IBM Watson, IBM Research, IBM Global University Programs, and others are all driving awareness of this global business and societal transformation towards cognitive assistants for all occupations to boost creativity and productivity of individuals, teams, and organizations – opening an era of unprecedented innovations, including perhaps a cure for certain types of cancer, global access to education, and new means to tackle complex and urgent problems – such as the impacts of climate change.   To understand the opportunities and challenges, this combined ISSIP Discovery Summit/OHSL Workshop aims to bring together key people to share perspectives, and to identify as well as create online resources for those who would like to build cognitive assistants to help scientists (team scientists) accelerate discoveries and applications.  The discovery summit will benefit from insights and platform opportunities from IBM Cloud Bluemix, Watson Developer Cloud, and IBM Research upcoming innovations… ideally the design for a system that can evolve and become more intelligent, with open components and numerous startup opportunities and investment opportunities as well.   This discovery summit is aligned with IBM-co-sponsored ISSIP SIG CSIG – and we also draw heavily on this IBM TED talk for inspiration about what might be possible in the Team Science domain.

Co-Orgnizers Include:
Kara Hall (NCI/NIH)
Anil Srivastava (OHSL, ISSIP)
Paul Courtney (DFCI, OHSL)
Jim Spohrer (IBM, ISSIP)
Yassi Moghaddam (ISSIP Executive Director)

More to come.