Dong Wang, professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is the lead author of a book that offers a new perspective on human-centered AI design and human–AI collective intelligence. Social Intelligence: The New Frontier of Integrating Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence in Social Space , which was recently published by Springer Nature, is co-authored by Lanyu Shang of Loyola Marymount University and Yang Zhang of Miami University.
With the rapid advancement of AI and online collaboration platforms—such as social media and crowdsourcing—researchers are increasingly studying how artificial and human intelligence can be integrated. This new field, social intelligence, explores the collective intelligence from both humans and machines by understanding their complementary strengths and interactions.
In Social Intelligence , the authors present a set of novel human-centered AI techniques to address the challenges of social intelligence applications, including multimodal approaches, robust and generalizable frameworks, and socially empowered explainable AI designs. They present these applications in real-world scenarios, including social media misbehavior identification and mitigation, multimodal truth discovery, explainable AI and machine learning, disaster response and damage assessment, AI and crowdsourcing for education, and social sensing in smart city applications.
"Our book provides a roadmap for tackling some of the most urgent questions of our time—how to design AI systems that are not only powerful, but fair, explainable, and deeply human-centered," said Wang. "The future of intelligence is not human versus AI, but human with AI, working together to solve complex social challenges."
Wang's research includes social sensing, intelligence and computing, human-centered AI, and big data analytics. His work has been applied in a wide range of real-world applications such as social network analysis, crowdsourcing, disaster response, education, smart cities, synthetic biology, and environmental sustainability. Wang’s books include Social Edge Computing (Springer, 2023) and Social Sensing (Elsevier, 2015). He serves as the director of the Social Sensing & Intelligence Lab . Wang holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.