Pietro Michelucci founded and leads the Human Computation Institute, a multidisciplinary innovation center that develops scalable, crowd-powered systems to address “wicked” societal problems. He is also a visiting professor at Cornell University in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering.
He received a joint-PhD from Indiana University in cognitive science and mathematical psychology. He is interested in understanding how the complementary abilities of humans and machines could be used to build collective thinking systems that exhibit futuristic AI capabilities today – an emerging field called “human computation”. Toward this end, he has studied Organismic Computing and Massively Distributed Problem Solving.
Pietro is Editor-in-Chief of the 2013 Springer Handbook of Human Computation and also of the journal Human Computation. Prior to founding the institute, Pietro spent ten years developing and executing multi-team, high risk/reward Artificial Intelligence programs for the U.S. government. In 2014, he led a CRA-sponsored visioning activity at the Wilson Center, which produced a national roadmap for Human Computation research.
His work has been featured globally on PBS, BBC, Wired, Science Friday, Women’s Health, and he is frequently invited to speak at conferences and other events. He currently leads the Stall Catchers citizen science project – an online game that accelerates Alzheimer’s disease research. More recently he is investigating complexity science as a way to make problem solving systems behave more predictably and effectively in the real world, and applying that to a project called “CrowdMeter”, toward a sustainable “new normal” during COVID-19.
