Professor James Evans
The Department of Sociology
The University of Chicago

Professor James Evans is Professor of Sociology at The University of Chicago (UChicago). He is also the Faculty Director of Computational Social Science, and Director of Knowledge Lab at UChicago and the Santa Fe Institute.

Professor Evans’ research uses large-scale data, machine learning and generative models to understand how collectives think and what they know. This involves inquiry into the emergence of ideas, shared patterns of reasoning, and processes of attention, communication, agreement, and certainty. Thinking and knowing collectives like science, Wikipedia or the Web involve complex networks of diverse human and machine intelligences, collaborating and competing to achieve overlapping aims. His work connects the interaction of these agents with the knowledge they produce and its value for themselves and the system. He also works to design artificial collective intelligences that draw on discovered principles in areas ranging from science and technology to entrepreneurship and civic discourse.

Abstract

The wisdom of crowds hinges on the independence and diversity of their members’ information and approach. Professor James Evans will explore the wisdom of scientific crowds for discovery and invention, showing how findings established by more distinct methods and researchers are much more likely to replicate, how a population of diverse small teams advances science more rapidly than large ones, and how diverse prior experience are critical for punctuated advance. Artificial Intelligence has typically been designed to substitute for human expertise rather than complement it, limiting its capacity for human benefit. He will also demonstrate how incorporating the distribution of human expertise into AI models allows us to design diversity that complements and corrects for collective human bias, generating “alien” hypotheses unlikely to be imagined or pursued without intervention in materials discovery, drug development and COVID-19 vaccines. He will also discuss how to design diverse human and artificial intelligence collectives that can expand our imaginations and reach past our limits together.