Conversational Informatics and Human-CenteredWeb Intelligence

Conversation is the most natural communication means for people to communicate with each other. I believe that conversation plays a critical role in realizing a paradigm of human-centered web intelligence in which web intelligence engines are grounded on the human society. We are currently building a computational framework for circulating information in a conversational fashion, using information packages called conversation quanta that encapsulate conversational scenes. Technologies are being developed for acquiring conversation quanta on the spot, accumulating them in a visually recognizable form, and reusing them in a situated fashion. Conversational Informatics constitutes the theoretical foundation for measurement, analysis, and modeling of conversation. I will overview recent results in Conversational Informatics that will help achieve our vision. I will also discuss our approach in the context of Social Intelligence Design aimed at the understanding and augmentation of social intelligence for collective problem solving and learning.