Thread by @forum_isf

📚 Here, we go again 💪🏻
Good morning scholars,

It's another day of an interesting session on ISF, this morning.
As announced earlier, we'll be discussing how to successfully secure a very prestigious scholarship this morning - Masters in Collective Intelligence
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- the first of its kind in the world 🌎

Our amiable guest Professors are ready to take us through the journey.

If you're ready for the lecture, please like and retweet

Thanks.
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✨ The Agenda for the Lecture

1. Overview of Collective Intelligence

2. About the School of Collective Intelligence (programs, faculties...)

3. Masters in Collective Intelligence - the first of kind in the world 🌎

4. Application documents

4. Admissions

5. Benefits
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Professors, thank you so much for honoring our invitation this morning. We are very happy to have here. On behalf of all SCI ambassadors in this community and in particular over 15000 members on this network across our social media platforms, we say thank you dear mentors. 4/

In our local languages, we say Nagode (Hausa) , Daalu ( Igbo ), Eseun (Yoruba) all meaning Shukran in Moroccan Darija

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Professors, before I hand over you the microphone 🎤 🤣, it might interest you to know that, at ISF, we are also operating on the principle of Collective Intelligence.
@TheSchoolofCI 6/

@forum_isf is a non-profit social media platform where African Graduates meet and discuss how to secure a fully-funded Scholarship or funding for the study. Since her existence in October 2016 has assisted, guided, and provided guidance to thousands 7/

of African less-privileged brilliant students. Many members of this Group are studying their preferred course of study with a full/partial scholarship/ fellowship in their country of preferences. 8/

You might be wondering how when I said over 15000 scholars across Africa are currently following this session. This is made possible because of the virtue of Collective Intelligence - collective efforts of many individuals 9/

On this particular group you're (ISF 10), we have designated scholars transmitting all what is happening across our platforms. Power of collective intelligence playing out 10/

Also recently Prof, when we were advised by the CAC (a body in charge of regulating the formation and management of companies in Nigeria) to change the Group's name. We harness the "wisdom of the crowds" get many name suggestions. Profs, within the 12 hours of the contest, 11/

we received 45 entries with more than 60 suggestions. We closed the contest as soon as possible to avoid an"embarrassment of the riches" in the choice of good names.

We filtered the names received using a crowd-based filter - Bag of Lemons and Bag of Stars. 12/

So today , our community wants to know more about the School of Collective Intelligence, outstanding faculties in the school , about the programs offered in the School and in particular about the Scholarship opportunity available for the first kind of Master in the world 13/

Good morning @Lukgaf and hello to the community @forum_isf , Thanks for having us on your show! It's obvious you've been doing great collective intelligence work here - 15,000 people, that's alot. Congratulations. 14/

And it's really nice to see that you used the bag of lemons method already in the community to make decisions - this shows me that the ideas of the School are already starting to have an impact in the community connected to the school. So that's really great to see. 15/

This morning, I'm here with FatimaZzahra Benmarrakchi - Research and Education fellow in the school. 16/

I'll tell you a bit about myself before letting FatimaZzahra introduce herself. 17/

I'm the Scientific Director of the School of Collective Intelligence, and an assistant professor of cognitive science with the Universite Mohammed VI Polytechnique, which the school belongs to. You can see a bit about my work here: cathalcom.googlepages.com 18/

I'm from Ireland. After my BA and MA in philosophy in Ireland, I did a PhD in Philosophy in Toronto, Canada. My focus was on the ways in which ideas are created by groups, not individuals - my dissertation was called 'the public dimension of meaning'. 19/

In my dissertation I looked at the work of a psychologist called Michael Tomasello quite a bit - 20/

here he is:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_T…
And so I was pretty happy after my PhD when he hired me as a post-doctoral fellow and later research scientist to work in his group in Germany - at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig 21/

eva.mpg.de/psycho/index/
While in Germany, we developed studies to try to understand what is distinctive about human cognitiion - what distinguishes it from the way that great apes think. We did alot of studies with young children and great apes 22/

And the distinctive thing we kept finding is that what makes humans distinct is our ability to collaborate - to work collectively, to think collectively 23/

After Germany I worked at the Ecole Normale Superieure in France, and there I met some people who invited me to interview for a position at the new School of Collective Intelligence in Morocco 24/

This was a really close fit for me, since all my work up to that point had been about how humans work well together, and how we think in groups. So I joined the school, and later (this year) took over as Scientific Director. 25/

FatimaZzahra - would you like to tell us a bit about yourself? Sure, thanks Cathal. Hello everybody and thank you for giving us this opportunity to present our Masters program 26/

I will start by introducing myself, I'm FatimaEzzahra research and education fellow at the SCI -UM6P 27/

I have a background in Computer science and I have been always interested in cognitive science and how the human brain work
I did a phd in social computing
it's about the use of technology in education
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and how it can help learners especially young children in their learning
I worded with children with learning disabilities where I conducted many experiments that aim at understanding their difficulties 29/

the aim is to propose some alternative solutions that can help children to learn in different ways
by learning disabilities I mean specific learning disabilities such as dyslexia which is a learning disorders that lake learning to read hard and sometime impossible 30/

and of course there is many kind of learning disabilities
After my phd I worked as an associate researcher at UCD El Jadida Morocco. then I joined the SCI 31/

so, enough about us and let's present our SCI. So first I'd like to share with you a pdf of a presentation we sometimes make of the school - 32/

So the first question you might have is 'what is collective intelligence' one way to think about it is as the ability of a group to outperform individuals - 33/

When we work together, we can solve problems more efficiently than when we work individually 34/

In some cases this can be proven mathematically - like Condorcet's Theorem which shows us that the opinino of a majority is statistically far more reliable than the opinino of potentially even the smartest person in the group 35/

The effects of CI can be in problem solving, decision making, learning, and many other cognitive tasks that we often think of as being tasks undertaken by individuals. At the School of CI - we study how this works! 36/

We design new computational tools to allow us to harness the power of groups online. We study how best to organize a company, for example, so that decisions are made most effectively in a way that takes advantage of the knowledge of everyone in the company 37/

Or we study how to reorganize a classroom to take advantage of the power of 'collaborative learning'.We also do alot of work with companies and NGOs outside the university - to bring collective inteligence as method to help solve on the ground challenges in Africa & Morocco. 38/

Just as an example, we're currently building a project that will allow farmers in rural communities to jointly solve challenges they face -We use AI along with crowd-sourcing technologies to allow rural communities to bring many proposals together, 39/

sort them into the best ideas, and make these ideas available to companies and government bodies working with these communities 40/

So you can see we're both doing research - trying to understand how CI works - and also doing applied work - bringing the CI methods and insights to solve concrete problems. It's exciting stuff! 41/

Collective Intelligence is a pretty new scientific field, so much like Computer Science in the 1970s, it brings together people from different areas 42/

In our faculty, we have computer scientists including FatimaZzahra, also Mark Klein, Emile Servan Schreiber 43/

We have cognitive scientists also - we study the mind and how it works -- including myself, Hugo Mercier @hugoreasoning , Brent Strickland @brentstrickla10 , and James Winters 44/

And we have data scientists and economists - Ikram Chairi and Florencia Devoto 45/

And our Executive Director, @lexpaulson Lex Paulson, works on democracy and how CI can bring about political change 46/

So with this interesting faculty, we have put together the world's first 'Master in Collective Intelligence'. 47/

In this two year Master (many of our students have full scholarships - more on that later), we teach our students computer science, cognitive science, data science, and organizational management 48/

All based on Collective Intelligence Methods. FatimaZzahra do you want to tell us something about the courses that students take 49/

So, students take courses in three different fields 1-Cognitive Science and Experimental Methods 2-Innovation and Entrepreneurship 3-Data science and Computer Science. And also they will take courses in Scientific English 50/

for the 3 fields here is a brief description
1-Students will learn how to use some methods of psychology to study human behavior in different situation
2Learn to manage the big data, a lot of information in real time
3students will learn how to make some stategic decisions 51/

As Prof Cathal said before, in our class we have students with different profile so for students with no computer profile we offer them a course in computer science 52/

where they learn the basics of computer science (e.g. coding) 53/

and these 3 fields are in the S1,S2 and S3. yes - they take courses in all three fields in each of the first three semesters. In S4 students will do an internship (6 months) 54/

The objective is to apply the acquired knowledge and skills that they learned in the 3 semesters.so the students are asked to work on projects related to Collective intelligence. 55/

Maybe Cathal you can add more infos about the Internship project? 56/

So we're just now setting our current class of Master students up with their first internships. There are actually two internships - a short six week period at the end of the first year, and a longer six month internship 57/

which is the last 'semester' (the second half of the second year).We think of these as 'scientific internships' - What we do is to find a research project that our professors are already working on, find a company that's interested in that research project 58/

And get the company to sponsor two master students to work withthe company to develop the project. For example, we have several projects on collaborative learning. 59/

So, we found a company that's very interested in creating collaborative learning methods and platforms for their workers who engage in training sessions. So we're teaming up with the company to create a platform for collaborative training online 60/

- Which will let participants in large remote learning courses (like MOOCs), join in small groups in a systematic way 61/

The two interns who are attached to this project will build the platform and develop the tools based on our research into what makes collaborative groups work best 62/

Another example is that we want to explore differences in how people think from one community to another - So we've teamed up with a company who are interested in understanding how to persuade people to adopt new farming methods, 63/

And two interns will work with the company and ourselves, in the field, running studies to understand how people think differently in different parts of Morocco or other countries (specifically Nigeria, in fact!) 64/

So by the end of the Master degree, students will have both a) spent 6 months working on an intensive research project, and b) spend the same six months working with a compny who may well then offer them a job. This provides a good pipeline into both research and employment 65/

Finally, let me tell you something about our scholaerships before we take questions . We have two sorts of scholarships - excellence and need-based 66/

This year almost our entire first year (13 students) received full scholarships; That includes tuition and housing/food, for the two years of the Master. So it's a great opportunity. You can apply online - our deadline is May 31st. 67/

(although - secret tip - we may be extending the deadline to the end of June... you heard it here first!). to apply please send your application via this link : my.um6p.ma 68/

And check out our website: sci.um6p.ma
Thanks - in the mean time let me add somethign about careers - People often ask what jobs this kind of Master leads to 69/