*Please distribute to others who may be interested...* You are hereby invited to the next weekly seminar in our interdisciplinary series on Evolution, Complexity and Cognition <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108>(ECCO).
*Time*:* Friday, May 20th* 14:00-16:00 p.m (note: this year, all seminars take place on Fridays, 14-16 pm, unless announced otherwise) *Place*: Room B 0.036 (building B, level 0, close to the human sciences computer rooms), on the VUB Campus Etterbeek (Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels), in collaboration with MOSI. Coffee available. Free entrance: everybody welcome! * * ------------------------------ Crowd-sourcing *Corina Ciechanow* *Abstract * Crowd-sourcing is literally ‘outsourcing tasks to a crowd’. Although this could be done before, it is the widespread availability of high speed internet connectivity that has enabled us to reach millions of people, making crowd-sourcing a practical and economically attractive option. Anybody with an Internet connection can access a web-based crowd or community, and post a request to it. I will describe the characteristics of crowd-sourcing, its economical aspects, and present for discussion the impact Internet connectivity has in our society. What can the evolutionary approach teach us about our future? *The Speaker* Corina Ciechanow has a MS in Computer Science. Owner of Waterloo Hills, she is currently managing the project to renew the passenger information system in all train stations for the SNCB/NMBS. She has co-founded the Machine Learning research group at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina while working for UNDP, World Bank and other organizations to help economic development through IT. She writes about machine learning, data privacy and its impacts in our society at http://bitsofknowledge.waterloohills.com. ------------------------------ *Upcoming Seminars* *May 27* Mario Vaneechoutte <http://users.ugent.be/%7Emvaneech/Index.html>and Marc Verhaegen (University of Gent) Was Man more aquatic in the past? Fifty years after Alister Hardy's Waterside hypotheses of human evolution. *June 3 *Walter Dejonghe (University College of West-Flanders (Howest)) Experiences with stigmergic prototyping * June 10 *Francis Heylighen <http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html> (ECCO, VUB) Challenges, Agents and Coordination: how an action ontology can help us tackle both practical and foundational problems *June 17 *David R. Weinbaum (Weaver) <http://be.linkedin.com/in/weaver9> (ECCO, VUB) Complexity and the philosophy of becoming * June 24 *Viktoras Veitas<http://vveitas.blogspot.com/2011/05/who-is-that-guy-viktoras-veitas-anyway.html>(Economic Research Centre, Vilnius) * *Public policy design: formulating a mess. * July 1* Mixel Kiemen (ECCO, VUB) TBA * * More info about the ECCO seminar program: http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108
